Three buddies (Americans Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson, and Icelandic Eythor Gudjonsson) venture through Europe and are told of a hostel near Bratislava, Slovakia that will provide them with lots of drugs and sexy, easy women keen to please foreigners. They indeed hook up with some sexy honeys, but before long, what started as a beautiful wet dream come true, turns into a horrifying, torturous nightmare, as the guys are hunted down and tortured for much of the remainder of the film.
Grisly 2005 Eli Roth film has a potentially interesting idea (and a few nice jabs at idiotic Americans travelling overseas) but squanders it by focusing on the wrong side of it (i.e. The ‘villains’ are far more interesting than the heroes/victims), with even less charismatic characters than the ones who helped sink Roth’s earlier “Cabin Fever”. Also, the film opens with about forty minutes devoted to sex-comedy antics that are neither titillating or funny.
Rick Hoffman’s hilarious and frightening cameo near the end is the only lively moment in this otherwise monotonous and frightfully dull (but not entirely brain-dead on a thematic level) film. I must admit that torture movies have never really been my thing anyway (they’re not my idea of ‘fun’ and neither are films set in the very un-scenic Slovakia), though this isn’t exactly the most gruesome one, but it’s pretty nasty, and it’s just not very well-told or interesting (outside of an obscure “Wicker Man” audio cue, there wasn’t much ‘enjoyment’ and a severe lack of humour).
A shame, at any rate, because there’s a miniscule amount of promise here. Screenplay by the director, who really doesn’t know a helluva lot about giving the audience characters for them to latch on to (not necessarily likeable ones, but at least give us some who are charismatic or 3-D. Character development shouldn’t even be used in a sentence describing anything in “Hostel” but it is important for a good motion picture, especially in the horror genre), a very crucial aspect of any good horror film.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Dull torture movie that might’ve worked better if the story was restructured to focus on the other side of the equation. As is, it’s a long, grubby slog through the underbelly of Eastern Europe.
