Hostel

Title: Hostel
Director: Eli Roth
Cast: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Lenka Vlasakova
Year: 2005
MPAA: Rated R for brutal violence, sexual situations, drug use, language
Date of Review: April 27, 2006

"...paying to go into a room so you can do whatever you want to someone isn't exactly a turn on."

These words are spoken by the character of Josh, played by Derek Richardson, in Eli Roth's controversial horror shocker Hostel. This also pretty well sums up the movie, as it is spoken during a scene in a brothel, but is quite obviously a double entendre, referring also to the film's plot line about rich people paying incredibly large sums of money for the chance to torture and kill an innocent traveller. While the film's premise is written quite intelligently, comparing the business of prostitution to the (supposedly) real-life horrors of underground murder-for-profit establishments, its amateurish direction never allows it to escape the lackluster mood of a typical Hollywood teen slasher.

Hostel stars Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson as two college-age Americans backpacking across Europe, with the unspoken goal of having sex with anyone they can. When they reach Amsterdam, a drug dealer tells them of a heavenly hostel in Eastern Europe, in which all the women are beautiful and wanting American men. So, of course, the two randy Americans make their way there and have a jolly good time, until one of them goes missing. Here the story takes off, and leads the two characters through a grisly journey, in which they discover how deeply rooted this business of torture is in the culture of this small Eastern European town.

The film's story is told in two distinct parts, which basically divide the film in half. The first half of the film is entirely sexual in nature. The audience is shown many crude images of sex, nudity and perversion. The second half is occupied by gore, violence, and sadomasochistic behaviour. It is in these two halves that the audience will find the film's deepest messages. The audience is shown nearly 45 minutes of sex - some may feel uncomfortable, while some (probably in the younger crowd) will enjoy the gratuitous female nudity. The film then jolts its viewers into a nightmarish world of grisly sadomasochism. It is the discrepancy between these two worlds that provides the film's social commentary. We are made to feel incredibly uncomfortable with the film's gruesome violence...yet violence is something that can be seen everywhere in society, from entertainment and the media to "real life". Yet the sex near the beginning of the film is what our society says we should be ashamed of - the simple act of procreation and physical love is no longer taboo in Hostel. The film doesn't attempt to make any judgements as to whether these views are right or wrong, but simply asks the audience to think about it for themselves.

The greatest problem with this is that the film is quite obviously intended for a teenage audience, regardless of its R rating. It has the feel of your typical shock horror film that relies on beautiful women and fast paced, quickly cut violence to keep the audience in their seats. This is a real shame, since there is a very smart film underneath all this, but it has been marketed to the wrong crowd - and, dare I say, directed by the wrong person. Had Quentin Tarantino's influence in the film been a directorial position rather than that of a producer, the film could have been so much more.

While Hostel is not the masterful horror film that it was built up to be for so many months before its release, it does manage to crawl slightly ahead of recent horrors such as House of Wax and Boogeyman, where the scares are not in the scripts, but rather in imagining how they were ever possibly made. Eli Roth shows promise as a writer, but his direction is terribly unoriginal. Had Hostel been handled more maturely, and relied more on the story and its comparison of violence and sex, it could have been the groundbreaking horror that it was made out to be. As it is, Hostel is simply another gorefest, which doesn't really do anything better than many movies before it have.

5/10