Movie Review: Hostel
Starring: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson
Directed by: Eli Roth

Quentin Tarantino lent his notoriety to this film project early on, so that, in the end, this film was “presented by” Mr. Tarantino. Needless to say, the director of such modern classics such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill vols. 1 & 2 ended up lending huge amounts of credit to this film, which would have otherwise been largely overlooked.
Tarantino regarded this as the scariest movie of the last decade, and considering the volume of work that has been added to the genre of horror in the past few years, you have to at least award high marks for effort.

Eli Roth, director of 2002’s cult classic Cabin Fever, returns to his stomping grounds for another go around of visceral gore.
Reports of this film were as contrasting as possible, with audiences either loving the film, or absolutely hating it. But the one thing everyone agreed on: this film probed such deep depths of depravity previously unthought of by the human mind. Well goodness, that almost sounds good enough to eat, doesn’t it?

I would normally never have seen this movie. I’m just not one much for blood and gore, let alone horror films (although well-handled films can become film classics. Example: Silence of the Lambs; modern day example: Saw,) but my dear friend Lala has a real love for horror films, and her anticipation over seeing this film was high, so I decided to indulge her.

The Premise: Young, loud-mouthed American college students backpack their way across Europe, and head to a tiny Slovakian village in search of untapped female resources, only to find themselves one-by-one being snatched away in the night to face a gruesome death. We all have the pleasure of watching. Or covering your eyes, if you prefer.

This film is so unashamedly pointed towards the very youngest demographic allowed, (the 18-year old high schooler and any 14-year olds who manage to sneak in.) The language is so ridiculously foul, the behavior of the supposed college students is so disgusting that it fulfills every young teenager’s fantasies about what it must be like to be in college. Aside from the ridiculous behavior of our hapless Americans, there is enough gratuitous nudity during the first half of the film whose sole purpose in the film is to draw in the hormone-driven male audience.

The further we get into this film, the more Lala and I realize that this film has less and less appearances of being a horror film, and would seem to qualify more and more for the status of a cult film.

The acting is so poor, the dialogue scenes, (when the film is forced to endure through one) is so canned and predictable that it would seem less likely that the script had been written, but rather borrowed from a second-rate soft-core adult filim.
But we all know that is why we’re watching the movie.

We came for the gore. We came for the guts! The glory?

As it turns out, we get a few moments of truly effective gore, (achilles-slicing, anyone?) but otherwise the film’s scenes of “horror” are full of blood-filled rubber dolls being punctured with any number of pointy objects including (but not limited to) scissors, garden trowel and a power drill. (My personal favorite.)

This film rather quickly becomes so ridiculous that we learn to dismiss the notion of implausibility. The only mental exercise I enjoyed during this film was trying to sort out the one plot element that proved interesting and actually helped boost the quality of the film.

One of the disappointing technical features of this film was the cinematography. In horror/suspense/thriller films over the past ten years, the art of cinematography has been elevated to the level of screenwriting. Combined with good editing, the style in which a film is shot will do a great deal of the filmmakers’ work for them, putting the audience on edge, relaxing us, terrifying us, etc. all with use of color scheme, exposure, camera angles, etc. Hostel disappoints in this department because the entire film is shot in what appears to be basic film stock. Steadicam or dolly cams are used, giving a very stable, steady sense to the camera movement, and colors are very near to true-to-life. In a word: the camera work is boring, and it does nothing to make its audience feel nervous at all about what is happening. Only in the dungeon sequences do we see any sort of interesting lighting effects happening, but by now, the work is merely copying an earlier film.

This film will not go down on any list of great horror films. At least it’d better not.
Expect this to show during Halloween season on AMC’s Creature Feature or some other horror marathon. It will surely develop a cult following, and in that arena, it deserves attention, but the praises lauded to this movie by critics I find completely unwarranted and ridiculous since I laughed more than I screamed during this movie.

The Grade: D (Camp-factor keeps Hostel from falling through the floor.)