Hostel (2005)

"I don't want to drink. I want to look at art!", 19 April 2006

I'll skip to normal intro and jump right into this one. It's been awhile since I was this disappointed in a film. Eli Roth had an opportunity to make a classic with Hostel, but as far as I'm concerned, he failed miserably. Before I get to where Roth went wrong, I'll start with what he got right. The scenes of torture at the factory are as grueling and intense as I've seen. These scenes have an incredibly dark tone and feel to them. Many of these moments are difficult to watch. I was squirming in my seat on more than one occasion. These 30 or so minutes are top notch stuff.

Unfortunately, there's another hour of this movie that is so poorly written with so many moments that I can only describe as dumb that I did not enjoy Hostel as a whole. Let's start with the three main characters traveling around Europe looking for sex. They're about as shallow a group as you'll find. There's nothing presented about any of the three that led me to care in the least whether they lived or died. There was no emotional attachment. It was like watching a sophomoric Spring Break movie set in Europe. And when our hero goes out of his way to describe the young girl he watched die, it was so out of character (as if he had any character) that I just knew Roth was beating me in the head to set me up for something yet to come.

Or take the whole getaway at the end of the movie. Are we supposed to believe that our hero just happens to pick the one car with the keys in the ignition and a bag of gum and candy on the floor? Sorry, I'm not buying it. And how convenient that the three people who were responsible for luring our hero and his friend into the factory should step out in front of his getaway car. Again, Roth might be selling, but I'm not buying. Finally, our hero trades the convenient bag of candy to the gang of pint-size street thugs in exchange for their help in stopping the bad guys. Oh boy! It's one of the dumbest moments I've seen in a movie in a long time. A lot of people will look at a moment like this and see Roth's attempt to inject humor into Hostel. I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. Either your movie is a gruesome, gut-wrenching affair or it's a teenybopper film on the same level as Scream. A change from something like the Guinea Pig series to National Lampoon is startling, forced, and poorly handled.

You don't have to look very hard to find other problems with Hostel's script. For example, how does our hero manage to kill several people and drag around a girl missing part of her face without getting a noticeable and suspicious amount of blood on the perfectly fitting suit he so conveniently found? And wasn't it a great coincidence that our hero should happen to wind up on the same train with the "main" killer who so conveniently goes into a deserted bathroom? There are other examples, but you get the idea. It's insulting and, as I've said repeatedly, dumb.

Finally (I say finally because I could ramble on forever), I've got to agree with the critics of Hostel who are upset with Roth's portrayal of the Slovakian people. Yes, bad things can happen anywhere. I'm not saying that Slovakia is exempt from barbarous murder, but Roth would have us believe that most everyone in the town was complicit with what was going on. Apparently we're supposed to believe that a few dollars is all it takes to get a whole town to accept murder as their primary source of income. Wasn't there one decent person in town to speak up about what appears to have been going on for what appears to have been a considerable period of time? And don't you think the travel agents and guidebooks would steer travelers away from this town after the first couple of people went missing? As dumb as this movie is, I wonder how dumb Roth thinks his audience is.

4/10