Review #118: Hostel (2005)

Cast/Notable Credits:
Eli Roth (Director): Hostel 2, Cabin Fever (2002)

Jay Hernandez (Paxton): Hostel 2, Crazy/Beautiful (2001), Joy Ride, Friday Night Lights (2004), Quarantine (2008)

Barbara Nedeljakova (Natalya): Hostel 2

Derek Richardson (Josh): Hostel 2, Reeker (2005), Dumb & Dumberer (2003)

Trailer:


Plot:

Three backpackers (Paxton, Josh and Oli) traveling in Amsterdam learn about a Slovak hostel filled with young, sexy, hot and horny women. Like all good men, they ditch their plans and head for Slovakia. Two of them are American and the third is Icelandic. I'll let you decide who is who based on the names. Hint: Oli isn't a traditional American name.

Once at the Slovakia hostel, the three get paired up with smokin' hot female roommates, who invite them out on a night on the town...aka drinking, drugs, and sex...and then things go south. The hot women eventually seduce them...not what I'm mean by going south...drug them...getting there...and bring them to a secluded factory where they are tortured and killed for the enjoyment of high rollin' wealthy businessmen who have paid lots of money in advance to kill someone. That's the "going south" part.

Villain:

Or shall I say, "Villains." Okay, there was no real "boogeyman" of the film itself, unless the consider the wealthy, "I got money to burn in my pocket" businessmen of the world. Wow. It's chilling typing those words. Wealthy businessmen. That's really, really scary.

So wealthy businessmen come to the place to fulfill their deepest and darkest fantasies of killing captured victims. If you're pissed off at your secretary, now you can just come to Slovakia and kill someone to take off that edge. Gives a new meaning to the words Black Friday.

The biggest villain is the company that sets up the arrangement, Elite Hunting. They hire hot, scantily clad women who seduce and have sex with the men while secretly drugging them and sending them to their demise. F*ck. I'm screwed. Scratch Slovakia off my "hot vacation spot" list.

Also there was a gang of kids called the "Bubble Gum Gang". A bunch of filthy 8 to 10 year olds protecting the streets and scaring the soon to be victims. Ooh. Terrifying. A gang of fourth graders frontin' the streets in the small village of Slovakia. Give 'em bubble gum and then they're happy. Not a terrifying bunch here.

Cast:

The cast circled around two American back packers, an Icelandic backpacker and two Asian girls. BHA! Jay Hernandez (Paxton) was the only cast member with any real credentials or experience. The rest of the cast was pretty much a bunch of no bodies. Hernandez (Pictured left) gave a pretty good performance as the lead character. At first he was just another American frat boy wanting to drink, smoke, do drugs and get laid. Later on he proved himself a little wiser and stealthier in appearance.

Josh's character was pretty lame. He was also b*tchin' and moanin' about something. He was a real party poop er. Just have fun and f*ck hot girls already!

SFX/Gore:

To say the least, this film was bloody as hell. Really. The film makers used over 150 gallons of blood on the film...which was three times the amount used on Cabin Fever. I think that qualifies a little bit as bloody.

On to the deaths themselves...torture porn! Cheer if you're into that. The victims are brutally tortured before their final demise. There were about a dozen deaths themselves, but only a handful actually seen on screen. Death by blood loss, by decapitation, stab wounds, dissecting, gun shot and also death by a big steel mother f*cker train. I guess you can say the film tries different methods of killing their victims.

TNA:

This category was...off the charts! Hell ya! I lost track of all the twin knockers, hot chicks, and sex acts in the film. The majority of them took place in the film's first 28 minutes. Even the lead female star, Barbara Nedeljakova (Pictured left) helped give us some fleshy fun bags!

There was double digit hot chicks, and boobies covering the screen along with three sex acts. If that wasn't enough, we get some of that famed Amsterdam night life with prostitution, and a little BSDM action. A man's total dream...Paradise City. Isn't that a name of a G N' R song? How 'bout...Heaven's a Place on Earth?

Concept:

Torture porn. The new millennium's way of horror movies. SAW started it shortly before, and Hostel raised the bar to new heights. Instead of just killing somebody, now we can experience a whole new way of fear as we see the victims cut up, sliced up, diced up, and poked in any way imaginable. Who cares about little plot line things such as suspense?

Now fear is brought to us by seeing the real thing frame by frame and piece by piece. Blood and more buckets of blood. Yippie. I prefer the old creepy methods like suspense, darkness, eeriness, illusions that classic horror movies implied instead.

T.Gun Factor:

I admit, I was really diggin' the film for the first half hour or so. That probably has something to do with all the TNA on the screen, but what can I say? I'm a gratuitous booby shot man.

Is that a crime?

No.

It's a disease.

Yep. I'm an addict. I feel better now that it's off my chest. I'm a booby addict. Porn addict. Sex addict. And I've been sober now for about twenty minutes.

Are you an addict? If so join me in by participating in the Steps to recovery. (Christian based philosophy for recovery)

The Twelve Steps of Sexaholics Anonymous

1. We admitted that we were powerless over lust -- that our lives had become unmanageable. Check. I'm powerless over the lust of women's breasts.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Would that Power be...The Force? Because if it is, there is a "dark side" to it.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. I turn my life and will over to the care of God every time I play the Power Ball.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Yep. I'm a sick bastard.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Is sex wrong? I'm a little puzzled here. Without procreation...then there would be no human race.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. But I like some of those defects.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. And give us LONG comings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Wait a second. I didn't hurt or harmed anyone. This sounds a lot like rape.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Computer - I'm sorry.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. Wasn't this number 4?

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Huh...what does that mean?

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to sexaholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. What ever happened to Step 1: Admit your a sexaholic?

Some how, I don't think I'm gonna recover. Just a guess.

Well now, outside of the first half hour, Hostel didn't really satisfy my horror needs. Yes, there was blood and deaths in the film afterwards, but after the first exposure to it, the magic rubbed off.

It probably has something to do with the fact that I like a "true" villain. You know a bad guy you can root for. Some one willing to be scarred, tormented, or deformed and seek out revenge on unsuspecting hot teenagers and twenty somethings.

Or maybe it has something to do with the whole torture idea. My take: You can only play with your food for so long before the enjoyment is gone.

Misc. Movie Trivia:
- Film opened on January 6, 2006 and made $47 million at the Box Office ($19.5 million opening weekend)
- Is ranked #1 on Bravo's "100 Scariest Movie Moments" list
- Billed as "inspired on true events", Eli Roth claimed that he read that poor Thailand families had sold off members to organize crime so they could kill them for $10,000