I love a good horror movie, but this wasn’t one. I was hesitant to rent it because all I had heard while it was in theaters was how terrifyingly real the graphic violence was. The fact that I could only rent an ‘unrated’ version made me more leery. With horror films, ‘unrated’ could mean even more bloody and chunky. But in the end, it was all fluff.
While the concept of luring American tourists to isolated cities where people will pay large sums of money to kill them is pretty unique, the characters being lured to their death got no sympathy from me. It’s a pair of American college boys and a guy they picked up along the way traveling through Europe with one thing on their minds- SEX. They’re told of a Slovakian town where the women are fast, loose and go crazy for foreigners. Naturally, these bumpkins head off into parts unknown.
In a horror movie, it helps to have characters you can sympathize with. Instead, I actually felt that the main characters deserved what they got. I’m not prudish or anything, but if you go wandering around in strange places looking for sex, you deserve to get chopped up. Now, there were some innocent victims, but that doesn’t matter. The ‘heroes’ of the show are sex-obsessed idiots.
The movie also paints a bleak picture of Slovakia- making it seem like Central European countries are all 30 years behind us in technology and have rampant crime problems. This depiction is completely false. Director Eli Roth claims he did this on purpose to show audiences the ignorance that Americans have of Central and Eastern Europe.
Newsflash: if you’re trying to educate your audience as to what stereotypes are wrong, don’t flood your movie with them.
The gore is also completely wrong here, which is a major no-no where I’m concerned. I demand authentic looking gore. This film gets at least a D in its false depiction of chainsaw trauma and bloodletting. It left me wondering why audiences were raving about this film.
Trusts the critics on this one- Hostel isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
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