Hostel

My wife and I saw Hostel this afternoon, and I figured I'd post a review.

I've been looking forward to Hostel for many many many months now after hearing that the film was in it's first stages of production. I like Eli Roth as a guy, and as a director. I thought that Cabin Fever was decent, but I knew he could make a much better movie. Hostel is that movie.

The movie starts with three guys. Two are American and one is from either Norway or Iceland...I don't remember which. They are in Amsterdam, having the time of their lives with weed and chicks. While there, they meet a strange guy named Alexi who tells them of a hostel, in another war-torn country, where the chicks are hot and will do ANYTHING for a man.

They travel to the hostel, and everything is just fine for the first half of the film. They're getting laid and high, and everything is going good until their European buddy disappears. From this point on, Roth throws us face first into hell. Soon, the friends are stuck in a building where rich bastards pay to torture other people.

I consider myself a hardened genre fan. I've seen hundreds of horror films, yet Hostel got to me a bit. Roth leaves many of the torture scenes to the imagination, but shows us things that I would have never imagined. I even started to get sick at some of the scenes in the film. This, in my opinion, is a fantastic feat and one that Hostel should be comended for.

I try to keep my language on this board tame, but this is the only way I can describe the film:

It is a f**ked up film.

I loved most every second of the film. Eli could have made the ending a bit more tight, and I had one other problem with the film. When the film starts, during the credits, we are shown the torture chambers and the various instruments of pain being washed. Then the film jumps into super-happy-teen-sex-drug-movie mode. If the film had started happy, without any look at what happens next, it would be a much more powerful film in my opinion.

Overall, Eli does an amazing job directing. I think what I love best about the movie is that it doesn't seem "American" in the least. It feels like something we would have gotten from Italy in the 70s or something we'd have gotten from the likes of Miike in the 90s. Speaking of Miike, he makes a great cameo in the film.

Hostel made me sick, and had me entertained and stressed throughout it's hour and thirty minute run time. The last time I felt so strongly about a horror film was Haute Tension. I have to say that, this will probably be my favorite horror film of 2006. I applaud Eli Roth and his crew for making an amazing horror film.

9.5/10

Note - Sorry about making another thread about Hostel. Didn't see the eariler thread...