Hostel

Hostel, despite its aesthetically pleasing and interesting posters, is a pathetically joyless film, not for its gore and nudity or its psychological effect on people - it's joyless because even the filmmakers don't seem to be having much fun. Touted along with recent films like Wolf Creek and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes as the 'new generation' of horror, it promises to bring uncompromising violence and unflinching terror back to the horror movie, which, for the first half of the decade, has been languishing in PG-13 rip-offs of gore-less Japanese horror movies.

Now violence? It most certainly has. But is it really uncompromising? Eli Roth, a self-proclaimed gorehound, seems bent on making an independent horror movie......Hollywood style. Hostel suffers from the worst traits of a Hollywood horror movie and an independent horror movie. He delivers scene after scene of blandly sanitized violence the Hollywood way (start of violence, cut to character screaming, aftermath of violence). And then, proudly proclaiming his Troma/70's-horror influence, he gives us a script as lamely conceived and plainly stupid as a frat boy could write. He sets his movie in a spastic fantasy of Eastern Europe, where quaint architecture, boobs, and plot devices galore reside along with torture chambers (both real and fake). He hardly even bothers to conceal the plot's badness, triumphantly and idiotically parading them as if they're emblematic of his B-grade pulpy horror roots.

It wouldn't even be that offensive had he really gone all out bloodletting with glee. There is no macabre sense of fun, not even a sense of sickness and perversity in the violent scenes, which, along with the whole movie, are just awfully boring and routine. Not even a hilariously inept cameo by Takashi Miike and a trying-too-hard-to-be-over-the-top-psychotic Rick Hoffman could save it from being anything but another bland Hollywood product - the movie is as fake and gaudy as those torture exhibits shown in the movie.


I haven't seen the rest of the 'new generation,' so there might still be hope yet. But if this new generation that everyone speaks of turns out to be like Hostel - a sad and limp attemp at returning to 70's edgy gore without any of the edge that made it shocking - and Hollywood sees this as a good trend to follow, then horror movie fans are in for a rough time. I must say, though, that at least Alexandre Aja (who did the remake of The Hills Have Eyes)'s High Tension a few years back, despite its plot contrivances, had ridiculous fun trying to put the audience through psychological torture, stacking up the suspense in the murder sequences and grossing us out with over-the-top violence that doesn't have any pussy cutaways. Hostel, on the other hand, writes one offensive character after another, doesn't make us the least bit interested in what happens to them, and then expects us to squirm in our seats with its wimpy torture scenes. Yes, Hostel is torture in the other sense, it's tortuous that a frat boy director this stupid and half-hearted believes the audiences to be as stupid as him. And it's even more tortuous, proven by the box office receipts, that the audiences really are.