Hostel

Rating

Director

Eli Roth

Screenplay

Eli Roth

Length

94 min.

Starring

Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eythor Gudjonsson, Barbara Nedeljakova, Jan Vlasak, Jana Kaderabkova, Jennifer Lim, Keiko Seiko, Lubomir Bukovy, Jana Havlickova, Rick Hoffman, Petr Janis

MPAA Rating

R (For violence, gore, nudity, sex, profanity)

Review

What has always made horror a stable genre is its ability to deliver a horrendous villain whose motives are so sinister that you can’t help but hate them. Films like Saw,however, take great pains to deliver moral quandaries. Hostel, though an interesting story, buries the moral imperative and opts to make a realistic experience with a clear delineation between good and evil.

It begins as such tales often do as two friends backpack across Europe, winding up in the hotbed of youth experiences, Amsterdam. Paxton (Jay Hernandez) takes great efforts to set Josh (Derek Richardson) up with a girl despite his meager protests. They are accompanied by well-traveled Icelander Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) whose limited ability with English makes him the desultory comic relief.

They uncover word that a hostel in a small Slovakian town may provide their best experience, so they take a train there only to discover that the beautiful town holds a dark secret. Hostel goes to great pains to mask its villains, though from the preview, you’re able to pick up certain hints it drops along the way. By the time Oli disappears (only to resurface later), you’ve got a pretty firm grasp on who the scoundrels are. But the films major twist is yet to come.

While the idea of a pay-for-torture service for the wealthy isn’t an entirely new concept, it’s handled with grim effectiveness by Cabin Fever writer and director Eli Roth. We know by film’s end that the concept is perfectly possible but the reality of the capture and torture is what keeps the film alive.

When Paxton is finally captured, the scenes of his incarceration and the beginnings of his torture are as realistic as any fan of the genre could hope. It’s not until his inevitable escape that the film drags into slash-and-chase territory. He discovers his dead friends and even tries to rescue a young Asian torturee but by this point, all the typical slasher elements have surfaced and the film has nowhere to go but down the dark path of predictability.

Hernandez and Richardson provide sufficiently angst-ridden performances. Richardson’s character revelation at the one-third mark isn’t entirely surprising but its emotional weight is meaningless by the time his doom arrives. Hernandez presents Paxton as a typical college guy who is both headstrong and compassionate. Although these kinds of films always feature a character worthy of cheering on, Hernandez makes Paxton as flesh-and-blood as possible. Even when he’s begging for his life, we can feel his inner turmoil and fear. Its palpable and realistic and just the jolt the film needs to avoid being relegated to the forgettable morass of genre pics.

Hostel begs for its viewers to put themselves in the places of these characters. It hopes that we’ll identify enough with their situation that we not only become invested in their survival but we will begin to speculate what we would do in such a dire situation. Though it isn’t difficult for any male teen or college student in the last 10 to 20 years to see himself in such characters, women and older viewers won’t generally be able to relate and may easily be turned off by its isolationism. Horror has always been a male-targeted genre.

Even with films like The Grudge and The Ring presenting strong female characters who fight against horrific evil, horror will likely always carry a masculine-dominant gene. Perhaps Roth’s planned sequel, which will follow three women on a likely similar trajectory, can illuminate along-abandoned, and quickly ballooning demographic for the genre. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Review Written

September 13, 2006