Not your average flick!

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2006)

First of all let me start off by saying they promoted this movie in Australia as another Tarantino flick which put me in the mood for something completely different to a non-humor horror flick.
After the credits where read I realized that he was just an executive producer and Eli Roth was the director. I blame myself for not looking into it more being a movie buff and all.
I'm not a great horror movie fan as most horror flicks don't really work, as one person mention I haven't been scared since Alien was made. Gore doesn't really work unless you feel like the characters this doesn't mean that you need to be like them but know someone who is similar which worked in Hostel.
Many would have complained about the soft porn and I agree but it was to put you in the picture of young boys who will be easily seduced by the thought of easy sex in Europe and the people who live in Europe where taking advantage of this by showing them what they wanted to see.
One of the Hero's was clearly a mummies boy and frankly I was glad died the hardest he was homophobic, and he was making a point that he was a prude and yet he wanted the cheap sex and arrogance of being an American. He was perhaps a sterotype American and to the non-American's of the world they could identify that type of character, I was sort of scared that he would be the sole survivor as in other movies of a similar nature but I was glad it was not the case.
The horror was perhaps too strong for many but I agree it wasn't labored on and when you look around at horror films I found it hard to find anything that was scary enough to make me move and yes this film scared me and moved me so the goal was achieved.
I think that the last "victim" had a great twist and instead of all the movies where he manages to escape and the police save the day it was good to see someone getting revenge for a change, most movies are fairly predictable I guess this wasn't one of them.
As art which it should be seen as, I liked it overall perhaps I wasn't in the mood for this type as they promoted it as something it wasn't. Eli Roth picked good cast of not so well known actors and it was good to see ladies where not just the pretty bodies but had an important role to play.
To a point too much sex strong gore but if they didn't do it the movie wouldn't have worked, the eye scene was fantastic. I'm not a great Hollywood fan as I guess you could see with my comments, if you tried to tone this movie down wouldn't be even a decent bad movie, but if they did tone it down it would really just allow others to bag it as another boring Hollywood movie.