Hostel (2005)

Recently I picked up Hostel at my local movie store and decided to give it a try. I finished watching it and had very mixed feelings. First off, this film is not nearly as gory and disgusting as advertised. It is although, very graphic, and NOT for the squeamish, I just expected more out of it. The pop-up scares aren't effective and the first half of the movie is all soft-core porn. So what makes this movie a decent horror movie? The physiological scares. That is what got to me. The overwhelming feeling of being tied and up and tortured to death. Having no escape. For that was very effective and stomach curdling. The sex and nudity was all not needed, but for people looking for that kind of stuff, it's all here. The acting was pretty good. No bad performances. Hostel is a kind of movie where you'll either love it or hate it. But overall, an OK horror film. Not my favorite, but not terrible.

Fmovies: This movie really could have been so much more. The idea would have been much better off with someone who actually wanted to make a decent movie, instead of a porno gorefest. The first half of the movie consists almost entirely of sex, talk of sex, drugs, and talk of drugs. Instead of, hey, maybe develop the characters a little so the audience might care about them and make their plights a little more tense, the filmmakers decided to have a lot of party scenes and annoying main characters acting like idiots until, uh oh, we didn't plan on being tortured, oops! The sad thing is, there are hints of something more intelligent beneath the surface, but the surface is piled so high with garbage that it's lost. For example, while at a sex club (wow, original!) one of the characters mentions something along the lines of "paying to do anything you want to a person," of course he means sexually, but we know the basic plot of the movie involves the same concept with death and torture instead of sex. One of the characters is supposed to seem like a nice guy, but still never really develops enough for us to care. The main character has absolutely no depth other than a childhood story and his shallow interaction with his friend. The last half or so of the movie actually starts to gain momentum, and the first half not been an entire waste of film, I could have walked away with more than a feeling that I'd just watched 15 minutes of an okay movie, and an hour and fifteen minutes of porn and senseless gore. Sadly enough, the idea of this movie was put into the wrong hands. A little less than halfway through, my friend turned to me and said, "Maybe I picked up the wrong movie..." to which I replied, "Yeah, I think you got Eurotrip by accident." I am baffled as to why they decided to write the first half like they did. I guess I was hoping for something deeper. Don't watch this expecting anything special, be ready for lots of nudity and lots of incredibly disturbing gore mixed randomly, the two not even seeming to fit like they would in a slasher flick.

The plot, in short: Three backpackers, two Americans and one Icelander, does Europe by train with two major goals: To get high and nail as many women as possible... In Amsterdam they accidentally learn of a hostel in Bratislava, Slovakia where sex-mad women thirst for men in general, and American men i particular. They of course decide to go there and at first it seems the rumors were true. But they soon learn that the hostel is nothing more than a front for a bizarre club, where people can pay a huge fee to get to perform unspeakable acts...

My 2 cents: The director and writer Eli Roths biggest accomplishment before Hostel is Cabin Fever (2002) - weather or not that is something good is a matter of personal judgment. That he got two Evil Dead'ers (Scott Spiegel and FX-genius Gregory Nicotero) interested in his script is not at all surprising. But how he got Quentin Tarantino to executive produce (and thereby act as "posterboy" for his flick) is, to me, a total and utter mystery.

Hostel has potential, I'm not going to take that away from it. The thought that a place exists where rich people pay money to torture and kill other people is interesting. And a story about a kidnapped person who finds himself locked in that very place, waiting for his assassin, should make for a great film! The film is wonderfully lit, specifically in the torture chamber-scenes. And the set-dressing in those scenes are marvelous. It really feels like Roth found these places - and just shot them as the were. But the lighting, set-dressing and potentially-rich story, unfortunately, ends the positive things I have to say about Hostel.

It is frustrating to see a story that could have been so exciting and horrific get so utterly fumbled up! The movie is an hour and a half long, and takes a whopping 50 minutes to get to the place that is supposed to be the scene of terror and creepiness. The nearly hour-long "intro" is spent observing the backpackers while they party, get high and watch naked ladies in Amsterdams Red Light-district. When the story finally starts to focus on whatever is wrong with the Slovakian hostel it points everything out to such an extensive degree that it feels like Roth wants to put a stupid-hat on every member in the audience. I sat, in vain, and waited for him to take the lid off, go "ta-daa!" and show me something intelligent that I had missed. But it never happens and when the lid, towards the end, slowly slides off on its own accord it turns out that the ones you suspected were bad guys were in fact...bad guys. The ones you suspected were dead...were dead. And the entire movie ends the way you suspected it would all along.

Jay Hernandez (Paxton) and Derek Richardson (Josh) doesn't do to shabby in the two leads. But Roth has stayed true to Hollywood formula and chosen picturesque before personality, and the bigger part has unfortunately been given to Hernandez - instead of Richardson who I thought were more likable, and more interesting to watch.

Spanish director Koldo Serra made El tren de la bruja in 2003. A short-film about a man who agrees to partake in an experiment and suddenly finds himself strapped to a chair in a dark room. He hears metal objects being handled and someone pacing back and forth in the room. When the light is turned on it dawns on him that he will probably be tortured to death. Serras short-film is fifteen minutes long. It was filmed in two days and is scary as hell! Hostel is both longer and has, as it first seems, more story t

Hostel fmovies. 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.

Hostel was one of those films described as "torture porn" and, with my low tolerance for gore, I decided to give it a miss at the cinemas and dismiss it if anyone brought it up. However as it came on TV a month or so ago I decided that maybe I was being unfair by not giving it a try. It did sit on my HDD for a month though as somehow I never was in the mood until I forced myself to watch it. It does what you expect it to do and there should be no surprise that it is very gory throughout. What surprised me was how gripped I was by it as I squirmed in my seat and had the emotional "flight" response while sitting there. In that sense the film works because for all but the most hardened viewer it will have you feeling ill and get your heart beating. However while it did achieve this, it did it by simply going direct for being as sadistic and graphic as it possibly could.

In a way there is a "build-up" to the main gory bits but this is less of a decision so much as a necessary evil of having any sort of story. The first thirty minute or so are essentially the guys getting honey-trapped into this Eastern-European world of heartless torture and then from there we have gore for varying reasons (and here the makers give us nudity to prevent the male target audience getting bored). You never really care about the characters or the story because the tension is not about "what is happening next" as it is about the act you are watching. It is a cynical horror movie in this way as it has a very simple atmosphere and a very simple target or gore. While you are watching it the sheer cruel horror of it might stop you thinking but ultimately it is a soulless affair that reminds me of the viral "2 girls 1 cup" video. You see both are the type of thing you want to watch but also don't want to see, both also are entirely about seeing horrible things from the remote safety of your home and of course both generally get a "hands over eyes, open-mouth but yet unable to look away" response from viewers. This is all Hostel is going for and this is why I have real reservations recommending it because as a "film" it is pretty poor.

Those that love gore will love it though because in this area it excels. The effects are horrifically realistic and are delivered in clear, cruel shots. The actors do a great job of convincing in their pain, horror and fear and this is part of the gore voyeur aspect of the film. As characters though they are poor and can do nothing with the script other than be young and geeky/sexy/beefy/stoned* (delete as appropriate). Hoffman's portrayal of power is the only exception because, while a bit whacked out, he perfectly captures the sheer indifference to live that real evil has. Roth's direction doesn't show much in the way of subtlety but he knows what his audience want and how to give it to them. The lack of anything beyond this in his delivery or script can be easily seen in the way that the film doesn't even try to do something with the fact that we are getting entertainment from watching people torture/kill others for their entertainment. Normally in this sort of thing there would at least be some reference to this conflict but here Roth is part of his audience and sees nothing wrong at all with what he is doing – which is a problem for me, not that he needs to be "ashamed" but just that a film should not just be a load of filmed gore with no heart or reason to care.

Hostel is a gory horror movie that is enti