Hostel (2006)
Cast: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Jan Vlasek, Barbara Nedeljakova
Director: Eli Roth
Synopsis: Randy Americans seeking massive shagfest head off for Central Europe
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

Hopes of actually meeting Quentin Tarantino and his new buddy Eli Roth were dashed in early October last year when plans to head out to the Sitges Festival where QT was to be presenting Roth’s latest horror opus Hostel were decimated by the horrifyingly real events of the Kashmir Earthquake.  All plans scuttled and a return to face the real life horrors far more urgent business than attending a flash festival with flash geezers showing their flash new movies. 

Hostel was screened at Sitges and subsequently opened in the US to top the box office and make a fat profit for Lions Gate – the distributors of the movie.  Eli Roth arrived on the horror scene a couple of years ago being trumpeted as the next great thing to happen to horror since the Ring inspired eastern wave that we’ve been treading through for the last ten years or thereabouts. 

Cabin Fever, Roth’s debut effort caused quite a stir at film festivals and was suddenly and unexpectedly quite the attention gatherer a couple of years ago despite the fact that it really fell way below its reputation that was built largely on the fact that Roth had recently worked with the great David Lynch and in fact there was a buzz that Roth’s work even contained some of Lynch’s genius.  How utterly misleading that turned out to be.  However disappointment and over hype aside, Cabin Fever in hindsight appears like a mammoth classic when comparisons are drawn to his latest effort Hostel. 

The movie opens rather like yet another American Pie spin-off with randy American tourists invading Europe for chicks, drugs and more chicks………..they meet some vermin who informs them that in war torn Slovakia there are hardly any men left as they’ve mostly been ravaged by the war (which war may that be one wonders………maybe the First World War or then perhaps the Second?  Or maybe it is referring to the Balkan war which actually never even remotely touched Slovakia.  Mr Roth’s grasp of history is truly remarkable as well as insulting.  Nonetheless, let us assume that it was just another in-joke rather than a colossally stupid blunder.  So the randy American tourists and their retarded Icelandic jerk of a friend land up in Slovakia and within minutes check into an astoundingly plush Hostel full of lusting beauties frolicking around as though AIDS never happened and bedding down with it appears any one who has a functioning set of reproductive organs. 

The American lads and their jerk of a friend hit the jackpot and the audience is rewarded with much heaving, thrusting, tits and ass………this goes on for the first 40 minutes or so when slowly but surely, things start to go awry.  First up, the Icelandic retard goes missing (small mercy) and slowly but surely we get to find out exactly where and how these vanished souls are ending up.  The rest of the film is a lot of gratuitous if not particularly realistic gore and an extended escape cum chase scene that is far from exhilarating. 

The film arrives at its brutal climax rather abruptly and the experience which could be easily classified as short, ugly and brutish is finally over and this member of the audience emerged utterly unmoved, uninvolved, un-phased and just a little irritated at having paid a fair sum of money to watch an amateurish in-joke pretending to be a horror movie.  If this is the way horror movies are heading – we are in for testing times ahead.  Hostel makes the recently released Hills Have Eyes remake appear like a near masterpiece – and that is a pretty horrifying thought.