Hostel (2005) Reviews

• bad things happen to bad people

  ufemizm2006-01-07

  I saw Hostel tonight with a crowd that was very receptive to the experience. Mine was more hostile. The film opens like a teen sex comedy. We are meant to identify with three young guys, who's idea of fun is getting high and having sex with prostitutes. This first section is littered with naked women, in what might just be the least sexy presentation of naked women anywhere. One can sense director Eli Roth and his cronies giving each other high fives off-camera, much like the silhouetted threesome early on in the film, as they pay surgically enhanced women to take their clothes off. The three men find themselves in Slovakia, and in what is referred to as an art show or an exhibit. Rich men have paid Russian gangsters to torture and ultimately murder a human being, our heroes? subjects? One by one, the men are tortured and killed in escalating graphic manners. The final man escapes, is involved in a car chase, and ultimately becomes what he was trying to escape. This is, at its black heart, a very dumb movie. Probably, the most clever thing in the film, is the very weak parallel drawn between the legalized red light district in Amsterdam, and the illicit torture rooms in Slovakia. Everything else is just baloney. We don't really care about the three men, so the tortures that they endure aren't really effective at eliciting any sympathy, it's more that we're glad it's not happening to us. The motivations for the men that torture is never made clear, it's more a general sociopathic disconnect that's vaguely hinted at. It's also worthwhile noting that the one character that seems to be gay is singled out as the worst of the torturers, further contributing to the filmic stereotype of homosexual as homicidal. One should also note the historical context of the film. This is an American movie, about torturing people, made at a time when America, right or wrong, is receiving flak for torturing prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, and makes no mention of the current world situation. It's also worth noting that the audience I watched this picture with cheered and applauded at each new horror. It all seemed so Circus Maximus.

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• Unrealistic and not scary.

  requiem28722006-01-06

  I didn't like Hostel. The premise is frightening. The idea of being drugged, kidnapped, tortured, and killed by people who are paying to do it, is a great concept for a film. It's just too bad that the movie couldn't decide what it wanted to be. It starts off like "Eurotrip" or any number of cheesy teen sex comedies. Lots of fake boobs and characters acting idiotic, in a fake atmosphere. Scenes in dance clubs that don't look realistic. You know, the types of places where people are dancing to loud music, but somehow can talk to each other in a normal tone of voice and everything is brightly lit so you can see all the movie extras pretending to dance in the background. Just like all the clubs, I've ever been to, right? Anyway, this goes on and on until the bloodshed starts, giving us absolutely no reason to feel anything for the main characters. Then it turns into the horror film it should be. The scenes of torture are effective and psychologically scary if you imagine yourself in the situation, but in the context of the rest of this movie it just becomes ineffective. Then the end of the movie turns into an unrealistic revenge fantasy that's played out, for the most part, for laughs. Kids payed in bubble gum help the good guy get away by smashing the bad guys heads in with rocks as they chew away and blow bubbles. The two girls and guy who set them up are easily killed when they luckily appear in front of the getaway car. The man that killed his friends just happens to be on the train on the way home so he can kill him and somehow not get blood on himself, then continue on his way. So is the movie supposed to be realistic, scary, or funny? It's falls short of any of these things. Eli Roth needs to pick one and do it. The music is terrible. Not in the fact that the music itself isn't good, but for the fact that, A: it doesn't fit the movie, and B: There's way to much of it. There's a scene where the Characters are merely walking across a courtyard, and the music sounds like it should be a fight scene in Harry Potter. Completely out of place and distracting, further telling you this is just a movie no need to feel anything for the characters or get scared. You can do a good compare and contrast between this movie and "Wolf Creek" which came out a couple weeks ago. Everything that is wrong with "Hostel", was done right in "Wolf Creek". Both movies are about young travelers getting into horrifying situations, however in "Wolf Creek" the characters actually act like normal human beings therefore you feel disgusted when they get tortured and killed. It's genuinely frightening and realistic, and by all means not "fun" to watch. It makes you feel horrible inside. It's REALISTIC HORROR. To make a stupid analogy. If "Hostel" and "Wolf Creek" were movies about Viet Nam, "Wolf Creek" would be "Platoon", and "Hostel" would be "Rambo: First Blood Part Two". (Note how neither would be "Full Metal Jacket" cause it's to good to be used in this analogy). I gave "Hostel" a 3 out of 10 for a frightening concept, and the puke was a nice touch. . . If you're about to get tortured and killed chances are you're gonna puke. . . Realism, Eli. More realism please.

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• Serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

  Charlotte_Kaye2006-07-09

  It's not scary. It's not funny. It's not stylish. It's not suspenseful, exciting, thrilling or chilling in any way. It's not intelligent enough to even be viewed as some warped social commentary. It's not ambitious enough to do anything other than present gratuitous T&A and gore in the dullest manner imaginable. Hell, it's not even entertaining. What it really is is an exercise in being completely and utterly pointless aside from presenting violent scenarios and nude women in third world countries with unlikely silicone enhanced bodies. The "plot" involves a trio of students (two Americans and a foreigner) vacationing in Eastern Europe who eventually stumble upon a pay-to-slay type business that specializes in making your sickest dreams come true (i.e. customers paying a high price to get to slaughter a real live person). And I am using the world "eventually" because it takes around an hour for this movie to get to the real horror content. First we have to sit through an excruciating hour dedicated to the juvenile frat boy antics of characters who stay wasted on booze and drugs and pay hookers for sex. A whole hour of this crap. Our "heroes" are stupid, irritating, immature, one-dimensional and thoroughly unlikable. By the time their lives are in danger, you could care less what happens to them. I know I didn't. I was actually rooting for the generic, anonymous bad guys to tell you the truth. To make matters worse, this film has a tacked on ending that tries to let the sole survivor enact his vengeance. These scenes are absolutely ludicrous and riddled with coincidence. Certain characters just happen to be at a certain place at the right time. Hey, there's three of them now crossing the street right in front of me just as I'm trying to escape the town! Well what do you know? How bout I run 'em all over! There's another one who happens to be on the same train as me as I'm leaving the country! Well I'll follow him into the bathroom... etc. etc. etc. The end. This movie is absolute garbage from start to finish. It's nothing new or interesting. There is some gore, but it's pretty much what's expected and nothing too shocking for anyone who has already sat through films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Dawn of the Dead. Director Eli Roth may be 35 years old, but his brain functions at the level of someone 20 years his junior based on his juvenile screenplay and uninspired direction. Roth himself later claimed he made this film "to show Americans' ignorance of the world around them" and in the process only ended up showing his own ignorance when it comes to film- making. Absolutely the pits!

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• Hostel is hands down the worst movie of 2005!

  mockdonkey2006-04-16

  This movie is just plain awful. The violence, sex, and language is gratuitous. The characters are flat, the story banal, the acting stiff, the music contrived, and to top this all off, it's one of the most shallow movie I've ever seen. Creative writing professor Jack Harrel, in his essay "What Violence in Literature Must Teach Us," defines violence as gratuitous when it is "free, unearned, or unjustified."According to Harrell, for violence to be warranted in a piece (whether or not it's in the horror genre), we must care for the characters, the violence must occur for a reason, and the violence must come at some cost. Hostel meets none of these guidelines. First of all, the main characters are unworthy of any of our sympathy. Backpacking through Europe, the three, all male main characters' main interest throughout the film is getting laid and smoking pot. That's their entire motivation. Isn't the feeling of horror generated from the viewer worrying about a character getting hurt or killed? How is this suspenseful feeling supposed to happen when the characters are constantly saying crude things like "you're so gay" and "pu**y" and taking pictures on their phone of their sexual exploits in a bar bathroom stall, and screaming when a male character puts his hand on their leg? The only thing this does for me is offend. Why does the violence occur? Apparently for a fee one can have the thrill of killing someone in whatever means they wish. Unfortunately this has absolutely nothing to do with the "story" (I use this term *very* loosely here). All of a sudden the main characters start disappearing from the "story" and start entering some kind of green lit "killing room" where they get tortured to death by some demonic person who has a short cameo earlier in the film. This is not a reason. When we find out later how this killing is sort of like an attraction for rich adrenalin junkies, the only thing one can possibly feel is apathy. Apathy for the story. All *this* just for *that*!!! What cost does the violence come at in Hostel? None. The people who get killed are worthless to us and the people who are doing the killing are worthless to us. We care not when some of the people who are doing the killing get killed because we are not sure if they are the ones in charge. There is absolutely no moral bone to chew on here. Lastly I'd like to talk about one thing in particular that really upset me about this film. Towards the end of Hostel a woman kills herself after looking at the reflection of her newly disfigured face. This is probably the most gratuitous and shallow point of the movie. It's also supposed to be its most dramatic point. First of all this character is only known to us as an Asain women who's friend also goes missing and doesn't want to party. That's it. When the main character rescues her from the hands of the killer due to her screaming, which reminds him of when he let a little boy drown a few years ago, we are surprised to find her in the "green killing room". Her eyeball is dangling out of her socket at this point. Our "hero" decides to finish the job and cut the "tenticles" that keep it attached. As to the importance of this I can not figure. But when she takes a look at her reflection and then throws herself in front of a train in very dramatic fashion I become upset. Think of how many people in the world are "disfigured." Apparently life is not worth living unless your beautiful. That is the only message this movie could possibly have. How horrible.

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• Moral Choices and the Dark Side of Humanity

  BigMez2005-12-20

  I just got back from an L.A. screening of Hostel. I haven't seen an effective horror film like this in a long time. My stomach was still knotted up after we left the screening. The last time I felt like that was when I saw ALIENS for the first time about 19 years ago. Since then, no other horror film has ever made me feel like that. I certainly didn't expect it from this one. As much as I loved Cabin Fever, I'm not blind to the shortcomings of its script. As such,I was expecting more of the same from Hostel - dark humor, gore, and a sense of dread. I'm happy to see that director Eli Roth has taken a big step forward in becoming a better storyteller and filmmaker. Admittedly my heart sank when the film began. The scenes introducing the main characters were blandly shot and edited. All I could think was, 'Oh no. Roth succumbed to some unseen studio pressure to make a normal-looking horror flick'. The style was typical of the what you'd see in crap like I know what you did last summer. But in very subtle ways, the blandness gets washed away and as our heroes enter the threshold of Hell, the style of the film changes as well. This, I learned during the Q&A afterwards with Roth, was intentional. If you've read some of the other reviews posted here from people who saw it at the Toronto Film Festival, you get the general idea of the story. Contrary to what you might've heard, this is not a 90 minute film on torture. The torture scenes are brief and to the point. Roth doesn't wallow in pointless gore. And this is where I think it shows how he's improved as a filmmaker. He's more interested in scenes and ideas that move the story forward. Yes, there is plenty of gore, but it's relevant to the story and doesn't exist just for it's own sake. One of the aspects of this film that made it so powerful was how Roth created a sense of helpless and inevitability. He provides the dark setup, throws in a sympathetic character, and begins twisting the screws and ratcheting up the suspense. This isn't a movie where you turn off your brain to enjoy it. On the contrary. The more you think about it, the more horrifying it becomes. You begin putting yourself into the character's situation and wondering what you'd do. When you realize that there is no hope for the character, no way to escape, no 'buddy' who's gonna turn up at the last minute to save the hero, and not a shred of humanity or compassion to the antagonists, real fear begins to set in. Another great element in the script is how the 'survivor' makes moral choices that define their character. Instead of being merely reactive like the characters in Cabin Fever, the survivor makes several decisions which change the course of the story. It's a sign of well thought-out script and a filmmaker who cares about the fate of his characters. For horror fans, this is an absolute must-see. It's so refreshing to see a horror movie that actually makes you feel uncomfortable and one in which you have no idea what's going to happen next. As for the gore, I was surprised by what they got away with. Although there were no credits at the end of the film, the cut I saw was rated R by the MPAA and according to Roth, he didn't cut anything out.

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