Two wide-eyed American students, back-packing across Europe, are looking for fun with sex and drugs and Europop. Their young men’s appetites take them to Slovakia where they discover that, not only are all the women beautiful but they all fancy young wide-eyed American students. Unfortunately a night of passion usually ends in the chamber of horrors.
They say:
“Hostel is a long, long way from being a great horror movie…but while it’s clear we’re not in the hands of a craftsman, we are at the mercy of someone who knows his horror – which buttons to press and when.” Totalfilm.
“The last twenty minutes of Hostel are a real head trip – brace yourselves for an ending as smutty, vicious and hysteric as anything mainstream horror has ever produced.” Infilm
We say:
Hostel, the worst advert for Eastern European hospitality since Count Dracula started home visits, is yet another tale of young Americans, over-sexed and over here on a European back-packing holiday. It should have been enough to go “crazy” in a cannabis café or to have sex with the prostitute with “the finest tits in Amsterdam.”
Sadly for them they are tempted to Slovakia by stories of even better tits and as much sex as they want. We are in the world of soft porn where the women find their bras so uncomfortable they can’t wait to get them off. Of course, director Eli Roth knows that we know our genres too and this is just a game just as we know that young people enjoying lots of sex in horror movies usually end up getting hacked to pieces.
The opening sequence helpfully tells the squeamish that this might not be a movie for them. Deep down in a murky dungeon, gory entrails are being washed over a blood-spattered floor and a man is seen carrying some heavy-duty industrial shears. It gets a whole lot worse; the level of sadism is genuinely unsettling and, to Roth’s credit, cunningly incriminates the audience that had previously been titillated by the pornography.
What did your mammy say about not playing with scissors or about sleeping with unsuitable girls? She might have been right.
Cert 18
Starring:
Jay Hernandez
Derek Richardson
Eythor Gudjonsson
Director:
Eli Roth
Running time:
95mm