Hostel -- Review

Rating: 4/10 (15 March 2009)

The infamous "Hostel" is about two teenagers (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) and their Icelandic companion (Eythor Gunjonsson) traveling across Europe in search of women for the most basic reason: sexual intercourse, of course. They end up in Slovakia where they get exactly want they want. However, they soon discover that the endless sex is too good to be true, because the girls intend to lure them into a particular nasty trap that makes all three men into torture slaves for this underground "Hound" network.
Now some reviewers have given this film very high ratings; others have called it utter trash. The truth lies somewhere in between. The first half of the film was actually very good. Director Eli Roth (who also wrote the screenplay) succeeds in building up the suspense and you get a strange feeling that things are not what they seem. Aside from that, the viewer beholds some lovely cinematography of Slovakia.
But once the dark secret of the film is revealed, the film descends into the familiar monster fest of blood, gore and body parts. Now some people like that, but frankly I don't. This is one of those movies that uses torture, blood and gore not to advance the film's plot in a meaningful way (much like Eastern Promises did), but simply to entertain viewers by shocking them. These horror tactics have gone on for more than three decades now, perhaps the most infamous example being Caligula. But frankly it takes more than cutting off fingers or pulling an eye from its socket to create a good film. In other words, the problem is that the plot exists for the sole purpose of serving the film director's sadistic fantasies. It would have been much better (especially if much of the gore and blood was edited out) if the sadistic scenes actually advanced the plot (as they did in Hitchcock's Psycho, in The Godfather parts 1 and 2, Scarface, or Dressed to Kill). Instead, what the viewer gets is a pile of sadistic trash. Aside from that, the film is very offensive to Slovaks and Slovakia in general.