More misanthropic endeavors in this brutal, relentlessly dull gore-fest

Rating: 3/10 (11 July 2007)

With the current stock of the torture-horror genre skyrocketing, it's brazen rise has given room for plenty of gleeful youth hipsters to stage their own relentless battle of who can shock you more. This week's so-called bad boy is the well-educated director Eli Roth, equal part frat-boy and film-geek, who follows up his clever if messy (in every sense of the word) "Cabin Fever" with the far more polished and grisly "Hostel", the latest excuse for mixing grim, one-dimensional scorn for the human race and tasteless violence to the most lurid degree possible.
This unfortunate outing focuses on tourists in Europe, two college-age Americans, Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) and one party-hungry Icelander Ollie (Eythor Gordsoon), as they look for ways to quench their typically hedonistic and lecherous appetites across the continent. While the somewhat timid, nerdy Josh would clearly like to be somewhere else, Paxton lets his bad manners roam free as he seems to enjoy causing endless raucous and spout juvenile bits of casual bigotry at the locals; he plays the Ugly American stereotype in capital letters. After missing curfew at their hotel after a fruitless venture into the Amsterdam nightlife, they are lured into the pad of a mysterious young man who promotes a Bratislava hostel he ensures (with a digital camera of naked photographs to prove it) that will undoubtedly give everything their lustful hearts desire.
And like all idiots in a horror movie, they head to this eastern-Europe slum (where apparently the dingy haunted houses and a group of bubble-gum hoodlums who seem like the Slovakian Children of the Corn apparently do nothing to warn them of the hell to come) and find exactly what they came for. Unfortunately, it comes with a fatal price, and if they do improbably escape, it surely won't be in one piece.
Plenty of the requisite gory violence involving various mutilations and ankle-splicing ensues, but that becomes far less shocking than the film's deplorable misanthropism that pervasively roams across the screen. One point Roth wants to justify the torture the main characters go through (apparently being a chauvinistic brat means you should get hacked to pieces), and then we're supposed to care about one of them in the final act as the film switches tones to an "Escape from Alcatraz"-style action movie. While also parading endless Xenaphobia (practically every European with more than one line is a strange sadist who wants to torture a tourist or assist in setting up a tourist to get tortured) and disturbingly puerile misogyny (with endlessly raunchy depictions of female carnality as well as taking glee in watching two evil prostitutes and a disfigured female tourist become village roadkill), "Hostel" presents just another snidely bleak view of human nature without any logic or texture to justify it's already dubious argument. And when looking at it squarely as a horror movie, it's just dull and repetitive in following it's rather formulaic routine.
With "Cabin Fever", Eli Roth did show some strong intuition to the horror genre with it's cleverly derivative teen-slasher-flick/zombie-paranoia storyline and it's vividly icky-sticky visual effects, even if it was completely unoriginal. As is "Hostel", which borrows the look and basic plot structure of a 70's exploitation gore-fest while lifting many of it's most violent scenes from the current, equally bloody Asian new wave (it's no surprise Takashii Miike, one of that genre's poster-boy, makes a cameo midway through). Even though those films also existed mostly for staging violence from every possible angle, they knew exactly what they wanted to achieve and never tried to over-reach their boundaries, creating lean and remarkably effective scarefests. Sadistic, sure, but they cut right to the bone whereas "Hostel" has many rusty tools that it has no idea how to use. Elaborate gore and torture certainly has usurped the boogeyman-in-the-closet theme as the chief scare tactic in film, but the latter would have shown a more effective path that the cold, confused and entirely unsuccessful "Hostel" doesn't have the common sense to follow.