I recently came around to watch Hostel, the movie which had had enjoyed quite a box office success and which many claimed was the most gory, horrible, sickening movie they’d ever seen. Oh well.
Unfortunately, the movie is just one big, stinking mess. The script is ridiculous, with plot holes as wide as the Panama canal, the execution is laughable (so where’s it supposed to be set? Slovakia? What are the German signs, wrongly written as well, doing there then?), the special effects are downright amateurish, and the whole thing is about as grizzly and shocking as a daytime TV talk show. Actually, less than that.
Although, the one thing that I found most laughable was not in the actual film, but in one of the featurettes on the DVD. In the Making Of, Eli Roth, writer and director of this – as Ignatius J. Reilly would call it – abortion, explains to one of the actresses that the reason for him to make this film was an article he read on an alleged club in Thailand where rich businessmen could buy people to shoot. And he then went on to reason that his initial plan to research this matter and shoot a documentary would have been impossible and far too dangerous (“We wouldn’t find anyone who’d actually been involved” or “You could get shot”), so instead he and his studio decided on doing what? Shooting a half-baked (s)exploitation movie instead.
Well, I can’t commend him more on that heroic decision to make people aware of the bad, bad things going on in the world today. Especially since he managed to cram about 200 naked boobies into the first 45 minutes of the movie. If that doesn’t help to shake people up, what will?
Finally, even the alleged sickness of the movie wasn’t all that. Any movie by, say, Takashi Miike has more shock value than Roth’s stupid piece of pseudo-political nonsense.
The fact that there’s a second part in the works is really just sad. From the production company’s blurb:
In HOSTEL: PART II, three young Americans studying in Rome set off for a weekend trip when they run into a beautiful model from one of their art classes. Also on her way to an exotic destination, the gorgeous European invites the coeds to come along, assuring them they will be able to relax and rejuvenate.
Will the girls find the oasis they are looking for? Or are they poised to become victims for hire, pawns in the fantasies of the sick and privileged from around the world who secretly travel here to savor more grisly pursuits?
Well, let me guess. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the oasis. Otherwise it’d be exactly like the first part. And nobody would be so stupid as to repeat the exact same storyline of the first part in a sequel, right? RIGHT?
