Hostel
The highjack
review
Well,
seeing as that our dear Mel has some computer issues it would seem that you
poor sods are stuck with me on this fine evening. But don't worry, I won´t talk
about were-turkeys or flesh eating strippers this time, instead, we’ll be
looking at everything that is wrong with modern horror movies in this little
mess called Hostel, directed by one of my least favorite director and professional
butcher of anything resembling cinema, Eli Roth.
This train
wreck of a story follows a unlikable and underdeveloped characters and their quest
that defines any Eli Roth’s character’s motivation: get drunk and screw around.
This time this group of idiots tours through Europe and end up in the Czech
Republic where they quickly find a hostel to spend the night with a few babes. Bad
move on their part as it turns out that an elitist organization of ‘hunters’,
led by a bunch of middle-aged rich white guys, have made it their home turf to kidnap,
torture and kill tourists for the thrills and giggles. And the story pretty
much goes exactly where you expect it to go, they all get kidnaped and tortured
one by one in a cheap effort to gross the viewer out with effects so cheap and
bland they’ll test your limits until you’ll do the sensible thing and turn this
mess off.
So yes,
if it wasn’t obvious, I’m really not a fan of Roth’s directing. Now as an
actor, he’s alright, but as a director? It’s painful.
It’s not
just that he is a racist, homophobic and juvenile farce of a guy, it’s also
that nearly every single one of his movie manages to piss me off in some way. But
the Hostel series, somehow is his crowning achievement in establishing his
place as one of the worse horror movie director in my opinion. To deconstruct
everything that is wrong with this movie would be like trying to explain why you
shouldn’t watch Water Power while eating, there’s too much sh8t to make any
sense of it.
But let’s
start with the most obvious question one can ask when looking at any movie:
what’s the point?
A few
guys get kidnapped, tortured and killed and that’s about all the plot you’ll
get. How can anyone enjoy this? who was the demographic for this, people who
get off on it? Well, I’m pretty sure they’ll find it lackluster as the effects
are pretty bad, even though most of them were practical. So I ask again, who
was this movie supposed to please?
In a few
interviews, Roth tries to talks about the impact of gore movies such as “blood
sucking freaks” and even a few scenes in the very first “Alien” movie, and how
it affected him. It’s pretty obvious that somehow, in his warped mind, he’s
trying to make a movie that honors the gory days of such classics as Evil Dead,
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dead-Alive. Unfortunately, Roth doesn’t seem to
understand exactly why people liked these movies, and now we have one of his
many pathetic attempts to re-create the feeling we had when Ash found himself covered
from tip to toe in blood while the walls were giving him one of the worse
interpretation of a bukake I’ve ever seen.
It’s not
because there’s blood and guts on the screen that we’ll turn into whimpering
little girls, the gore has to accompany the horror, not the other way around. If
you don’t have a story and just the gore and you play it like a serious thing,
you just end up with this, Torture porn
So the
gore is overdone and just seems like mindless violence just for the sake of
gore, the story is pretty much non-existent and the characters are all twats,
what else could go wrong? Try insulting an entire country.
Yes, it
seems dear ol’ Eli somehow finally managed to piss off an entire country by
insulting them of being a bunch of human-trafficking, torturing assh8les. You can
begin to guess the response of the Czech officials after this movie was
released and they saw how their people were depicted. And I’m not saying that
The Czech Republic is perfect, I’ve been there multiple times for extended
periods of time so I know it’s not all rainbows and sunshine, but this movie
gives eastern Europe such a bad rep, that I actually know some people who actively
refuse to go anywhere near it.
Quinten Tarantino,
one of my favorite movie director of all times, was quoted saying that Eli Roth
was the future of horror movies, and I’m afraid he might be right. With the advance
of the Saw franchise and even movies like A Serbian film and The Human Centipede,
it seems that there is an audience for pure shock and the grotesque. All I hope
is that’s it just a curiosity that will soon leave our minds, but if not, then
Eli Roth would indeed be the new face of this revolution with awful stories,
hateful characters and cheap gore. But if my advice still counts for anything, avoid
this movie like the plague, it’ll do nothing but pissing you off and waste your
time.
Personal
Rating: 2/10
Critical
rating: 4,5/10
Things I’ve
learned from Hostel:
- The
creepy train guy from Euro Trip just got a whole lot more menacing.
- pasting
the name of Tarantino on any movie is sure to give it some appeal, no matter
how misplaced it can be.
- I was rather dissapointed by the lack of pancakes induced rampages in this movie.
- This
movie is still somehow better than the sequels…be afraid people.
- Toilet
revenge…just toilet revenge…
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