Hostel-2006
Director Eli Roth
Starring Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson
Top 250 Films #220
Top 40 Horror Films #33
Scott’s Review #951
Reviewed October 24, 2019
Grade: A-
During the early 2000’s, the traditional horror genre catapulted into a sub-genre commonly referred to as “torture porn,” led by the Saw franchise, debuting in 2004.
Hostel (2006) takes note and creates a terrifying production that holds up arguably the best in the bunch.
With Quentin Tarantino serving as producer and Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, 2002) in the writer-director chair, one knows something memorable is in store.
The film is hardly everyone’s cup of tea but a delight for horror fanatics.
American college students Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) travel across Europe in search of adventure and dalliances.
They are advised to visit Slovakia, where they are told the women are beautiful, picking up a new Icelandic acquaintance, Oli, along the way.
They encounter a strange Dutch businessman, a pack of rebellious street kids, two Asian girls, and two gorgeous European women, Natalya and Svetlana, as they travel.
When Oli disappears, and the girls drug Paxton and Josh, events turn gruesome as the young men find themselves in a horrific, remote dungeon facility where tourists are accosted and sold to willing buyers who brutalize and experiment on the victims.
Paxton must find a way to escape his peril and try to save the others before it is too late.
Hostel portrays the loneliness and insecurity of traveling abroad, with confusion and disorientation as common experiences that anyone who has traveled to a foreign country can relate to.
The country of Slovakia (as an aside, the film was shot in the Czech Republic) looks eerie and desolate, with a quiet, cold tone.
As the group is preyed upon by a mysterious organization that tortures and kills kidnapped tourists, the thought and realism this conjures up adds to the fright.
In a unique measure, Roth turns the traditional gender stereotypes upside down. Based on an unbalanced scale, females are killed much more often in horror films than males are.
A refreshing point is that the three principles are males, not females, and we wonder which ones will “get theirs” and how.
Similarities abound with Halloween (1978), when the trio was female, and audiences watched their daytime adventures while salivating at the thought of the antics that would transpire when darkness finally fell.
Hostel kicks into high gear during the final thirty minutes, once the bloodletting begins. The dark and dingy dungeon is laden with corpses, severed limbs, and blood.
A melancholy scene occurs when one character, alive yet pretending to be dead, is affixed in a position where he must stare into the dead eyes of his friend.
In another scene, one character must cut off the other’s dangling eyeball so they can escape the dungeon.
The scenes have equal power in different ways.
A slight irritant to Hostel is the prevalence of homophobia throughout the film. When the guys get into a scuffle with a long-haired bar patron and use a homophobic slur or a scene in which Paxton states “that’s so gay” as a negative, it seems unnecessary.
Is this to make the main characters less sympathetic, or to make the viewer hope they suffer a horrible fate? Or is Roth just known for homophobia?
In 2006, the LGBT community was becoming prominent in the film, so the inclusion is off-putting and out of line.
Hostel (2006) remains a superlative horror film that is a shock-fest and is still one of the best of its decade.
The gruesome scenes still resonate well, and watching the film more than a decade later, it feels as fresh as when it was released, with only the homophobic slurs needing to be removed.
Tarantino’s influence is always a fine element, and his stamp is all over the film.
Followed by two sub-par sequels that tread the same blueprint of European travels gone deadly.
