Much like “Blade: Trinity” and “Batman Begins,” it has a great premise that just falls apart almost immediately. This movie shouldn’t do what it does. Blow.
"Hostel" Review
Jay Hernandez- Paxton
Derek Richardson- Josh
Eythor Gudjonsson- Oli
Jan Vlasak- The Dutch Businessman
Barbara Nedejakova- Natalya
Jana Kaderabkova- Svetlana
Lubomir Silhavecky- Alex
Rick Hoffman- The American Businessman
Directed by Eli Roth
Screenplay by Eli Roth
Distributed by Lions Gate Films and Screen Gems
Rated R for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language, and drug use
Runtime- 95 minutes
Website: http://www.hostelfilm.com/
Eli Roth's second movie, "Hostel," has all of the necessary ingredients to make a great gore horror thriller. It's got the gore (decapitated heads, sawed off fingers, dangling eyes, blood caked on the walls, twisting off body parts, and disgusting "pakashunk" noises), the horror (toothless eastern European cab drivers who can't speak English, faux gay grabby old men on trains who eat raw meat in salad who also cut peoples' Achilles tendons and power drill your kneecaps, a roving band of thuggish kids who want candy and gum or they'll steal your cell phone and beat the crap out of you, porno watching black clad hulking bald Slavic thugs who hang out with wacko Japanese movie directors and macho degenerate American businessmen looking for new ways to inflict suffering on people who pay taxes) and thrills (car chases, gunplay, and boobies). The problem here is none of these ingredients mix all that well together. Instead of a great, or even a good movie, what we end up with is a icky mishmash that makes you feel uneasy and squeamish, not because of the said terrible things depicted onscreen, but in how bungled it all feels. This movie doesn't rock at all.
The movie proper starts out with a man whistling in a dimly lit room while washing dirt and grime off of a wall. It's creepy, kind of funny in a sick way, and completely inappropriate. This opening sequence kills all of the movie's potential suspense and gives the audience just enough information to basically figure out the essential story before the actual story gets a chance to get going. It would have made a great preview snippet or "come see it a second time" TV commercial, but it just ruins the movie as the starting point. It doesn't work. It's annoying. The scene then shifts to the revered anything goes utopia of Amsterdam, where we meet two young American males, Paxton and Josh (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) and their Icelandic drifter pal Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) looking for some good drugs and good sex (well, great sex, but they'd probably settle for several instances of good sex over and over again). They hang out in cannabis bars, hip and edgy dance clubs (one place where Josh commits an apparent faux pas by wearing a fanny pack around babes. What a hilarious nerd) and visit "red light district" hooker places where leather clad dominatrixes can tie you to the bed and punch you in the face or pink feather boa wearing long legged boobarific prostitutes can hooma hamma you in a water bed, your choice. This all gets boring fast for the trio. They want more. They want better. They ask fellow hostel mate and ardent pipe user Alex (Lubomir Silhavecky) what he knows and where they can go for "more" and "better." Alex tells them about a hostel in a town called Bratslavia (or it's a country called Bratislava. This reviewer is confused about that) that's filled with beautiful horny women with no desirable men around (they all supposedly died in a war) who will do anything, especially to hot foreigners.
Sounds great.
So Paxton, Josh, and Oli hop the train and skedaddle to Bratslavia. While on the train they meet a businessman (the eventually sadistic but all around creepy anyway Jan Vlasak) who is traveling for some reason. The trio doesn't like Jan, and after "innocently" touching Josh's legs they throw Jan out of their car. The trio eventually arrives at Bratslavia, they go to the hostel where all of the beautiful women are and they watch Quentin Tarantino movies without subtitles (which annoys Paxton), and then the sex and fun soon begins again. Paxton and Josh latch onto Natalyana and Svetlana (Barbara Nedeljakova and Jana Kaderabkova), two local beauties who they have some serious sex with (Oli runs off somewhere with an Asian stunner). Suddenly, weird and subtle things start to happen. Oli goes missing and Paxton and Josh can't find him. They run into a band of street kids and then Jan shows up again. Some slow motion stuff happens, it goes dark, and then for everyone things go downhill. Into the basement. Where it's really, really dark.
Again, too bad none of it works.
Jay Hernandez does a good enough job as the square jawed jock hero guy. He can be a jerk, and he can be funny. He manages to exude a confidence that, despite all of the bad stuff, makes you think he can survive this. And he does get to participate in a pretty dang cool comeuppance. And he can barf pretty well with a ball gag over his mouth. Derek Richardson's Josh is the most sympathetic character in the story. He's an aspiring writer of sorts (unlike Hernandez's lawyer wannabe) and much more sensitive that Paxton. Sure, he wants to bag some babes, he's just not confident this cross Europe backpacking trip is the best way to do it. He provides a great foil for the other trio members. And he also gets a pretty good barf scene.
Eythor Gudjonsson's Oli, the self professed king of swing and frequent personal butt cheek and testicle shaver, is the "funny" in the movie. He's quite the goof. He has wild sex in a bar bathroom (he takes pictures of it with his cell phone), he can sing in Russian, he can be profane, and he has no problem dropping his pants and showing everyone the face he drew on his recently shaved butt cheeks. He unfortunately (and this isn't his fault) takes part in a sequence that absolutely kills whatever second wind the story built up after the disastrous opening sequence, but, again, it's not his fault, he's only doing his job.
Barbara Nedeljakova and Jana Kaderabkova are good, hot, and decadent. They're excellent henchwomen (which is what they'll probably have in the near lucrative future) and just disgusting enough to elicit a rowdy "booyah!" from the audience when they get what's coming to them (it's good stuff). A side note here, but why are Eastern European women in movies always either super hot lingerie models or toothless three hundred pound sandbags wearing dirty gray sweaters? Is there a "medium" female look in Eastern Europe?
Rick Hoffman shows up as a lunatic American businessman. His performance is interesting, somewhat memorable, but he comes out of nowhere and then doesn't hang around long enough. It would be interesting if they took Rick's character and somehow teamed it up with Oli and made a movie about them owning a Chinese take out restaurant or something. It'd probably do well.
Jan Vlasak's character is the most problematic and probably one of the major reasons the movie fails. We're not really sure who or what he is. He's either the ringleader of the utterly offensive financial endeavor known as torturing people in an abandoned factory and then having a fat bald guy chop up and burn the evidence, or just a client. This reviewer would say that he's one of the principle founders of the exclusive sickie establishment, but he's not sure. Who and what he is, in some kind of detail, would help make the story a tad more meaningful.
The torture scenes are cringe inducing, violent, and certainly a highlight, but this reviewer wonders if, for this story, they should have been more out in the open. The audience should be able to see more. Perhaps the various torture rooms should have been clean, white, almost sterile, instead of the admittedly creepy half darkness we get. While what we do see is horrific, it just isn't horrific enough. It's established right at the awful beginning that this isn't a suspense story, we're not going to be guessing "what next?" as the story goes on. There is decent enough character development to where we kind of like Paxton, Josh, and Oli enough to care about what will happen to them. When the bad stuff does happen we should see all of it. The often quoted "It's always better to not see the monster" doesn't apply here. This should be John Carpenter's "The Thing" remake. Showing the monster, in full detail, is necessary.
Eli Roth is an interesting director, and this movie is an interesting second movie choice. He can do comedy, and he can do horror. But it just doesn't work here. Again, it's only his second movie, and directors and artists are always bound to fail a few times, but he should do a movie that's just straight through one thing, like an action movie. Or an episodic TV show. As this reviewer noted in his review for the awful "Doom," sometimes a movie needs to be as simple as possible to be ultimately worthwhile. If there's going to be a scene shift, it has to be handled well. It can't ruin the movie. Or the scene shift has to come out of nowhere (especially in a horror thriller like this. Shock and despair need to be ever present). And it has to be handled well. Handled well. That's all anyone ever really asks for.
It's too bad "Hostel" isn't better. It should be. It's screaming that it wants to be. It just can't. It's sad. Go see it if you want.
The 411: Young, horny American men and their Icelandic buddy go backpacking in Europe, do some drugs, some sex, some stupid stuff, then get butchered by weird beard Eastern Europeans who really need the money. They don’t have Communism anymore, okay? The movie sounds great. Sounds. It ain’t great. It’s muddled. It’s sad. It really can’t be recommended.
