Hostel (2005)

Rating: 6/10 (3 May 2009)

Some films of the horror genre defy explanation. Just about everything Eli Roth has made fits that bill. After making 2002's remarkably well-paced and watchable, yet sloppy and ridiculous Cabin Fever, which like all other Lions Gate films wasn't released until years after it was finished, Roth decided he wanted to make a horror film as shocking as his new idol- Takashi Miike's films Audition and Ichi the Killer were over in Asia. What Roth ends up doing is making a suspenseful but shockingly anti-human film that was seen by the world as just more torture film fodder. Any great message Roth had was lost on the general public, which either avoided Hostel because they felt it was only gratuitous graphic violence, or flocked to it because they just wanted to see people being tortured. The film was hugely controversial, therefore it raked in mountains of dough for everyone involved (controversy had previously made huge box office hits out of 2004's The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11) and made Eli Roth a pop culture icon, where previously he'd just been a beefy punk with his infectious fanboy attitude all over Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments special. Following Hostel's success, he even took his starry-eyed defiance on Fox News, challenging business correspondent Neil Cavuto. Which only made him look more callous and gave Fox another Jewish face on young Hollywood and what is widely considered their snotty sense of superiority.
Which is what makes Hostel's anti-humanity all the more shocking. Eli Roth is not a bad guy. Rather, he's a surprisingly intelligent writer and director who understands a lot. But when it comes to his own films, he's always more thoughtful about how to market a movie than what actually goes into it. Cabin Fever was marketed as a disturbing, extreme gorefest, and it's not. If anything it was a forgettably pedestrian film made from a story with potential that turned into a David Lynch-ian series of tableaux that all failed to hit that much-desired nerve. Roth is so concerned with the appearances of his films before people see them, the films suffer incredibly. He also hangs elements on his films, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, that are supposed to make people think they are deeper than they really are. In Cabin Fever, it was the perception by backwoods America of anything the 'city folk' did as being "not Christian," and therefore the locals can just shoot anyone they want to and not get in trouble for it. I think Larry Fessenden's Wendigo was trying to make a similar point years before Cabin Fever was released - though in all fairness, Roth had finished writing Fever in the mid-1990's. The point being, Fessenden did it with much more grace and intelligence than the well-meaning but bumbling Roth.
And that brings us back to Hostel. Which, by all signs, is nothing more than traditional teen horror or teen sex comedy taken to the modern equivalent of a concentration camp. Or, a cruder version of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Now, when I say that- please don't imagine the American Pie crew or Harold and Kumar hanging out there, cracking jokes, and having kooky misadventures before finally being sprung and learning a valuable lesson about friendship and common, everyday morality. Believe it or not, Hostel does have a serious side. It's just hard to see it through the haze of plastic, sexy teen / early 20's characters with their trendy one-liners and dated slang, shallow pursuits of casual sex with nameless foreign women, selfish drinking and drug binges, brainless usage of homophobic slurs, and unnatural attachments to their cellphones- which should just be grafted onto their hands to save the time of having to whip them out of their pockets, as well as less chance of having them be stolen by impoverished punk gangs of local street children.
It's hard to see any point to Hostel at all. Especially when the director then makes a sequel a year later which is virtually the same thing, only with women and more obvious misogynistic elements. In the first film, with men being the target of most of the film's pretty graphic violence and murder, people saw the film as being a portrait of the effects of the shameful behavior of America's military under command of George W. Bush on international attitudes of American men. Knowing Roth, the film was probably nothing more than a style exercise in gritty exploitation, just to have people mindlessly being tortured in the name of Roth's favorite cinematic past-time, watching "f***ed up s**t." With that kind of ambition, it's no wonder people find Hostel a brainless experience. I initially bought into the film as a hard-hitting piece of horror, for my own personal reasons.
In fact, I still do see the film as a simple morality tale. Featuring young Americans who could easily be any of the random numbs on the E! Channel's Wild On television series, or the background drunkards in the Girls Gone Wild videos, doing whatever they want to, showing an apathetic streak toward everyone but themselves and a hateful attitude toward anything considered "gay." Take these fools and drop them in the middle of a country they know nothing about, where people are being murdered and pleasure-seeking tourists disappear into thin air. It's like young Americans are being bred like pigs for the slaughter. If it isn't overseas, it's right in our own country. Though not as extreme an example, America is overpopulated, people are breeding too much, our resources are drying up very slowly, with fears of terrorist attacks and disease pandemics flying fast and furious- it's truly like there is no hope for a real future. Tobe Hooper's first season Masters of Horror's entry, Dance of the Dead, glides over similar terrain. And would probably have been more effective that Hostel, all things considered, had that piece not been as afraid of the graphic violence Hostel bathed in.