Never been big on gore unless it has to do with zombies, but I decided to see Hostel anyway as part of a self-assignment. Honestly, after all that I don’t see why people like these kinds of movies.

Hostel starts out like every college fratboy’s dream movie: a trio of bros go backpacking around Europe, smoke some dope, try to hook up, and eventually find their way to a hostel in – surprise, surprise – some tiny nowhere town in the middle of Slavokia (why does this sound so typical?). You can probably guess what happens from there as it’s a no-brainer: some people die, one survives and fights against all odds to survive and tell the tale. Texas Chainsaw Massacre anyone?

On one hand I find it hilarious how Hostel is essentially made up of two things: gratuitous nudity and mostly-implied violence. On the other, neither can make up for the predictable plot, lack of actual scary moments, and borderline ridiculous situation. Honestly, I think The Dentist had a better story, one where you at least were able to get into the head of a psychopathic killer and see what makes him tick. In Hostel, you get a Rick Hoffman (who?) monologue that makes a last-minute attempt to explain just what the hell is going on here. Pretty lame, Mr. Roth.

As far as horror films go, Hostel is fairly tame. It’s all cringe moments, with the majority of them not even being shown in the unrated version. Sure, you see some blood and a few fingers and eyeballs, but you never really see all that much to tell the truth.

There are much better horror films out there, and probably a few that fall under the distinct “gore” sub-genre – the first Saw is a good example (can’t say much for the ass-load of sequels though). Unless you like watching people get dismembered (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?), don’t bother with this one.

Gruesome. I am not into the whole slasher film thing. I generally have no interest in watching people have their finger cut off, but this movie surprised me. I did not expect much. It starts out with lots of naked girls and devolves into tons of dead bodies and torture. The concept is brilliant and I do not want to spoil it. In the end, there are no morals. No lesson. The victim becomes the victor and leaves you walking away gratified. I was thoroughly entertained. I have to repeat, though, I expected this movie to be terrible.

This was a review from another Hostel listing.

This movie is for people who really have no clue about this genre of film. If someone never seen something like this before, I could understand their excitement. The first half of the movie was a total bore. The second half took quite some effort to stay awake. The gore in this film was poorly done just like the script. Come on that eye scene? Sad! Why did Quentin Taratino want any part of this???? I would be ashamed to slap my name on this film.

Posted in my blog too:

I’m clearly warped. I didn’t expect to enjoy Eli Roth’s Hostel; part of my refusal to see it when it first came out was the fact that international debates on torture were going on at the time, and to derive entertainment from what is essentially snuff-porn seemed politically reprehensible, and still does. But I did like Roth’s previous film, Cabin Fever, and so, still coming down from a Descent / horror-movie fix, I thought I’d check it out.

You probably already know what it’s about: Three louts, boozing and whoring throughout Europe, fall prey to an urban legend come true, all set in an Eastern Europe veering close to parody (bad disco, rows of drab cars, a bombed-out urban landscape, cops with comb-overs and leather-jacketed heavies straight from central casting). The film itself is an homage to the stylized sadism of ‘70s and ‘80s giallo, and the nastiness of recent Japanese gore cinema (notably the work of Takashi Miike, who graces Hostel with a cameo, but also Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap).

It’s horror, all right, but there’s a way in which you can read the film as a comedy. (Like Miike’s Audition, the film starts out as a different movie altogether - in this case, Eurotrip, which I never saw, but can only imagine what it’s like - and then detours shockingly into genuine, unblinking violence.) A triphoppy version of “Willow’s Song” playing while the protagonists are having sex? Funny! The running gag about the street kids who kick ass and chew bubblegum? Even funnier! The two best scenes - the ones where I’m embarrassed to say I laughed out loud - are delivered with perfect comic timing, complete with a pause and an even funnier follow-up. You can think of the infamous eyeball scene as formally similar to, say, the moment before Rob Schneider is forced to do something nasty, which is pretty much every movie he stars in.

Perhaps Hostel works best not as a horror film, or a suspense thriller, but as a gratuitously vile, extremely dark comedy about - I’m totally serious here - the nature of extralegal commodities and the circulation of global capital. The lads, clearly firm believers in the myth of the free market, liberally and unthinkingly invest their American dollars in increasingly illicit activities, and are promptly pimpslapped hard by the invisible hand. The joke, of course, is that in real life, torture is already outsourced, and that’s no laughing matter.

I thought that the plot they advertised was only shown in the last twenty minutes of the movie. Even then, I was completely and totally beyond disappointed by that point. Most of the movie was fairly pointless and completely uninteresting. The only pleasureable part of the film, when I actually had a reaction to something, was when he ran over the pair of whores.

In short, I thought it was a pathetic excuse for a film and I think it was truly one of the worst things I ever paid to see and if I wanted to watch a pathetic excuse for a soft porn movie I could have just flipped on Cinemax.