Europe as a sick playground

Rating: 1/10 (13 January 2006)

The premise of Ira Roth's "Hostel" is the European vacation of two All-American college boys, whom we meet in Amsterdam, where they get high but not happy. Paxton (Jay Hernandez), is a law school grad with no qualms about paying for whatever the market offers, which in Amsterdam covers a lot. He tries to cheer up his friend Josh (Derek Richardson), an aspiring author, by telling him that "life experience" is grist for the writer's mill. Josh wants badly to hook up with exotic women, but his sensibilities won't permit him to patronize the world's oldest profession, unlike his coarser compadre. His frustration fuels the "ugly American" ethos of entitlement that he brings to the party, and hamstrings his chick cruising moves.
Enter Alex, who gives the Americans, and an Icelandic traveling companion, one of those tips that must be urban legend by now: a hostel full of loose ladies that's not on any map, in a country squirming with lonely beautiful women, in love with the American accent. Our pleasure seekers don't care if Alex is a pimp, and they certainly don't suspect whom he's pimping out. They leave for Bratislava, in a Slovakia which, according to Alex, is bereft of men because of "the war." Just exactly which war, is something our boys might well have asked, before crossing a continent in search of hot babes. As it is, Roth disembarks them at Poricany, a town in the middle of the Czech Republic, near Prague not Bratislava, where our college educated youth fall victim to their own blinkered view of the world. Seeking frivolity in cold-blooded foreign streets, they end up being exploited to an unimaginable extreme and on a level that is unbelievable even in today's real world of sex tourism, pirates and child predators.
The mentality that wrongful deeds committed in another land somehow don't count, can flow from the mindset, common among some Americans, that other countries do not deserve equal status with our own. The "what happens in Bratislava, stays in Bratislava" view of the world is at the heart of the horror here, and to its credit, the film shows this to be a Weltanschauung shared by rogues from a number of nations.
Today, with our leaders supporting the spread of freedom and democracy throughout the world, the hedonistic abuse represented by sex tourism is downright un-American. Paxton doesn't care about anything except making memories to sustain him through the upcoming busy months of cramming for the bar exam. Perhaps the global perception that such selfish attitudes are especially emblematic of Americans is why, in "Hostel," the disturbed torturers pay more to vivisect bearers of our passport than any other group on the albeit limited menu.
When the boys finally enter the hostel midway through the film, a small TV in the lobby is showing an overdubbed version of "Hostel" producer Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." The claustrophobic tension in that film added excruciating horror to the anticipated violence. In "Hostel," much of the violence is so non sequitur that you never quite believe in these silly butchers or their patient cadre of chauffeurs. The upshot is much less horror, more disgust and, one can only hope, no arousal.
When a victim does cry out "Why?" he might be speaking for the audience: Why make this movie? And when the pay-as-you-torture psychos pause to bare their souls to bound and bleeding victims, these scenes visit real torture upon moviegoers in the painful forms of pathetic acting and pitiful dialog.
Here, sadists have ceded their place to wealthy psychopaths, especially German-speaking men, who pay to "get their medieval freak on," that is, if one can get medieval, by definition, with a chainsaw or acetylene torch. During an uninspired escape attempt sequence, Paxton is cornered by an American businessman (Rick Hoffman), whose years of global sex tourism have left him unsatisfied and obviously insane. He is now ready to graduate to torture and murder for his sexual gratification.
Perhaps there is an audience of Americans willing to exchange their ignorance of Europe for the misshapen image that risks becoming the pop culture residue of this movie: a Sybaris for bored backpackers, where women resemble lingerie models, preschoolers gang bang mercilessly, and where the occasional ex-Nazi still hobbles about his same unspeakable errands, more circumspect in his depravity than forty-odd years ago.
To judge by "Hostel," there is certainly a surfeit of silicone in Slovakia. We are shown plenty of gratuitous female nudity, but only between rounds of bloodletting: Tarantino carefully segregates titillation from torture.
Dressed in the anonymous business suit and tie preferred by the weekend torturers, Paxton attempts to practice a bit of "Old Testament Law," before returning to civilization secure in the knowledge that he can "out-Herod Herod." Throughout this film "Josh" never quite appreciates the jokes; while "Pax" never finds the peace that comes from exorcising one's own demons---he just cuts his vacation short, so to speak.
In the final credits, thanks are given to, among others, Chloe and Major League Baseball! These entities deserve harsh censure if they paid for product placement. One star, hacked to bits.