Embarrassing for everyone involved

Rating: 1/10 (12 February 2006)

Eli Roth called this film his "masterpiece"... A "dark, disturbing, gritty" take on modern horror. Unfortunately, he somehow forgot he was making a horror movie and instead made a movie that is more like Road Trip meets an action movie with some dark horror synthesizers and a little gore thrown in.
Strangely, this movie is paced almost identically as Wolf Creek (which came out about 2 weeks before this). The first 40 minutes, pretty much nothing happens. Okay, there is tons of nudity and drugs, but all that got old. I think Roth watched a few too many 80's B-horror movies and was like "OH! There are boobs in these!! Well, let me put six times that amount in my film!!" However, he forgot that, in most of these films, the nudity added to the adolescent feel and humor of the movie. In this case, this is one of the biggest problems with Hostel: Hostel is NOT funny. It is NOT scary. It is NOT gory. It is NOT well-paced. It is pretty much NOTHING.
Anyway, after the first 40 minutes, there are a few lame gore set pieces thrown in, and the movie turns into a ridiculous action movie after a few minutes. This got annoying pretty quickly, as action movies are known for totally unbelievable character situations and elements of revenge. Well, you get all that here, and it's all pretty lame.
Roth seems intent on making a masterpiece by design; by taking his influences and somehow raping them and turning them into a mess of alienation. By having so much language spoken in this film without any subtitles whatsoever, the viewer quickly becomes angry. That was probably Roth's point. And by promising this gritty, dark horror film and instead delivering a druggy sex action movie with a couple lame gore pieces, the horror fan quickly learns to despise the film.
Hostel isn't a bad film. In fact, it's very entertaining. The first time through, the revenge elements and the kid street gang and random stuff like that is actually pretty interesting to watch. But upon repeated viewings, you realize this film is actually pretty stupid. Roth seems like the type of guy who I would love to talk about horror films with, but he seems completely incapable of realizing his vision. People can blame the studios messing with his film or the MPAA or whatever, but it seems that Roth basically screwed up his own movie by having such stupid pacing. The first 40 minutes of a film not devoted to any horror whatsoever would usually typically mean that we have plenty of time to get to know the characters. In the least, something major could have happened that would have been important later. Nope. You could have taken the first 40 minutes, chopped it into 2 minutes and you would have had the same film. Pretty much a waste of celluloid.
Sadly enough, this is probably one of the best nu-horror films out there. And it's about a hundred times better than Cabin Fever. So, yeah, Roth has failed to impress me yet again, but he's getting better, and at least he is trying to do something different... even if he is failing at it. Sometimes, failures can be just as interesting as successes.