Hostel (2006)
by Andrew Alexander Dowd
Hostel (2006)
by Ben Beard
What if there existed a place, in some dark, isolated corner of the world, in which ordinary people could fulfill their most depraved and sadistic fantasies? For the thrill-seeker who has done it all, this secret enterprise would provide the ultimate taboo rush: an opportunity to torture and kill a living, breathing human being, all for just a few thousand dollars. It's Murder Camp for rich sociopaths... and you're the night's entertainment, the cattle in a human slaughterhouse.
That's the ghoulish, scary-as-hell premise of Hostel, the sophomore effort of budding horror maestro Eli Roth. Forget flesh-eating zombies or malevolent ghosts: what's more frightening, in a disturbingly plausible kind of way, than the thought of being chained to a chair in a cold, dark dungeon by a torture-happy psychopath? Too bad Roth, whose previous effort was the lousy Cabin Fever, has absolutely no idea what to do with this chilling concept; he squanders it on a splatter fest as weightless and juvenile as it is gruesome. 
Alternating between asinine, sub-frat boy humor and nasty, excessive violence, the film might best be described as Eurotrip meets Saw. And believe it or not, that's even less entertaining than it sounds.
"You pay to walk into a room and do whatever you want to a person," Paxton (Jay Hernandez) says to Josh (Derek Richardson) with gleeful disbelief in the opening act of Hostel. Blissfully unaware of the foreboding irony of his statement, he's speaking of an Amsterdam brothel they've both stumbled into. As American college students on a backpacking tour of Europe, the two have crossed the pond for basically one reason: to sleep with as many uninhibited young women as possible. Their hedonistic quest eventually leads them to a Slovakian youth hostel brimming over with European babes ready to give it up to wayward American tourists. But it turns out this fantasy retreat is really just a front for the owners' true business, a very different kind of Flesh Market, one in which our "heroes" are the unsuspecting commodity.
As in last month's infinitely superior Wolf Creek (as well as, to a lesser extent, Cabin Fever), the first half of Hostel is all build-up. As Paxton and Josh ignore warning signs and drift towards the inevitable horrors that await them, we're meant to sense what they do not, an undercurrent of mounting tension and dread. But there's nothing ominous or suspenseful about these early scenes, which simply play like jokey, teen porno fantasy. We might as well be watching EuroGirls Gone Wild, with a couple of misogynistic xenophobes as our guides.
Of course, the tables are eventually turned on these clueless horndogs, at which point the film provides the grotesque carnage that the audience has paid to see. What's strange, though, is that, even at its most violent, Hostel fails to deliver much of a visceral rush. As unpleasant as they are, the torture sequences are actually far too brief to inspire the kind of suffocating terror that Roth is aiming for. Unlike, say, the twisted Audition, Hostel cuts away from the suffering of its victims, offering us a reprieve from the agony when it should be rubbing our noses in it. It might seem downright perverse to clamor for more sadism, but a movie like this works only if we the viewers feel directly plugged into the action, as if it were really us facing that maniac with a power drill. There's none of that you-are-there intensity to Hostel, which feels about as real as your average ultra violent video game.
Some critics have made the dubious suggestion that the film, in its depiction of shallow jerks getting their just deserves, works as cathartic spectacle, with the audience as complicit endorsers of the torment inflicted upon the leads. The flaw in this theory is that neither Paxton nor Josh are unlikable enough to inspire such abuse. They're just a pair of obnoxious, horny kids, stock characters basically unworthy of contempt or compassion. Their suffering isn't devastating, but it's not at all enjoyable either. Mostly it's just depressing and unpleasant.
Besides, such a theory suggests a level of sophistication wholly lacking in Roth's approach to the genre. It's been almost three years since he made Cabin Fever, yet he hasn't grown much as a filmmaker. He's still enamored with over-the-top gore, crude, adolescent humor, and characters so one-dimensionally stupid they might have come from an unfilmed Porky's sequel. He also maintains a taste for the absurd (exemplified here by a roving gang of street urchins straight out The Little Rascals) that conflicts entirely with any attempt made towards serious dramatic impact. And just as he presented the Southern locals in Cabin Fever as a cartoonish bunch of hicks, Roth paints the citizenry of Eastern Europe in broad, stereotypical strokes: the women are all promiscuous supermodels, while the men are ugly, fat, mean, American-hating brutes with bad teeth. Such cultural ignorance is much more disturbing than any of the messy butchery depicted throughout the film.
Late into Hostel, there's a brief appearance by Audition director Takashi Miike. It's an amusing and unsettling cameo, but also an unfortunate reminder of everything that is lacking in the movie. Had Miike directed the film, with his understanding of the power of tension and release, it might have been one hell of a ride. Or imagine if Quentin Tarintino, who produced and whose name is all over the ads, had put his stylistic prowess behind the project. Hell, even Rob Zombie could have made a better piece of sleazy, grindhouse entertainment. With Roth behind the wheel, Hostel isn't even good exploitation, probably because it ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions. It somehow goes both too far and not far enough. It's pointless, ugly, silly, and forgettable. But worst of all, it's just not particularly scary.
Andrew Dowd is a our Chicago staffer.
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Ruminations from a twisted mind.
Grime, filth, excrement and rubble. Dark stains on the windows. A metal tray of scissors, scalpels, drills, screws, and knives. Something dripping dark liquid on the floor. A man dressed in a plastic slicker over red scrubs. And he's standing there, ready to do you harm. Peel back the medical mask and you see a normal man, the only distinguishing feature being the saw in his hand. What cruelties lurk beneath seemingly innocuous faces? What demented fantasies roil in the guts of the rich, the old, the poor? In the heads of your neighbors, your parents, your siblings, your friends? What endless tortures play out in the dreams of children?
Eli Roth's oddball new film splits from the camp humor of Cabin Fever to explore the limits of human desire. How far are people willing to go for pleasure? In Roth's depraved universe, the boundaries are endless. People thirst for experience. And given the chance, almost anyone will rape, kill, torture and maim, just to see what it feels like. It's a sick view of human nature, and it serves as the ballast for one of the most extreme American films in years. The fact that anyone would want to see a film that centers around a torture hotel says something about movies and moviegoers. I just don't know what.
The film begins by following three friends - Americans Paxton and Josh and Icelander Oli - backpacking through Europe. While Josh is getting over his ex-girlfriend, Paxton and Oli are looking for as much sex with as many people as they can manage during their trip. After visiting a brothel in Amsterdam, the three adventurers meet a kid who shows them photos of the hottest women they've seen. For all the women you can handle, he tells them, go to a particular hostel in Slovakia. Without pause, Josh, Paxton, and Oli catch the next train.
Up to this point, it could be National Lampoon's latest teen product, replete with frat boy antics and insipid dialogue. But on the train, the film starts to change. They meet an odd middle-aged man who eats with his hands. "We've lost our connection to our food," he tells them. "I respect that something gave it's life so that I might live." He touches Josh's thigh and they scare him away. But they will see him again.
In Slovakia, they find the hostel in question and are boarded with two scantily clad women. The partying continues until, one morning, Oli is gone. Paxton and Josh try to find him, but he is missing. By the time they think they've found him in a torture museum, it's obvious that something sick is going on.
Meanwhile, the seduction continues. Back with the girls from their hostel, Paxton and Josh go out for another night of drinking. At some point, Josh leaves the party, feeling sick and disoriented. He wakes up in a torture chamber, hands and feet chained, the dark room slicked red with blood. In the tit for tat world of horror-movie morality, each of the three young men will pay for their excessive carnality. Connecting sexual pleasure with inflicting pain places Roth in the libertine's corner, sitting next to the reeking fat of Marquis De Sade. And here, somewhere around the 40-minute mark, the mutilation begins. The smorgasbord of sex and perversion is cast aside, replaced with something far worse.
Roth claims the film is based on actual events, of a website in Thailand that will let you kill someone for 10,000 dollars. Taking this simple premise, Roth presents his take on the human animal. Post-modern man is bored, relieved of the strictures of tradition, religion, and ethics. Seeking pleasure, 21st Century man finds enjoyment only outside the rational. This is Nietzsche gone horribly awry. Or, perhaps, carried to its natural conclusion. The global village could just as easily be a global chattel house. Maybe distractions are all we have.
Other filmmakers have tread this ground before. Most of them are Japanese or Korean. In fact, Takashi Miike (who has a cameo in the movie) has built a career around this sort of thing, displaying the terrifying inner perversions of smiling people. But we are in an especially hard era of filmmaking. Chan-wook Park, Quentin Tarantino, David Cronenberg, Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noe - cinema the world over seems spiraling into ultra-violent excess. Our best filmmakers are obsessed with pain.
Maybe art does imitate life after all.
Roth builds his films around the tropes of the horror genre. Instead of an emaciated dog running by, it's a well groomed poodle. His demented sense of playfulness combined with his filmmaking moxie results in disturbing film, a movie that on one level is supremely self-conscious while at the same time remains gleefully ignorant. He's a post-modern filmmaker - the beginning of the film looks intentionally cheap and bad. Roth can orchestrate a horror sequence with ultimate panache, but seems lost when simply following a regular conversation. Roth should be given the benefit of the doubt. He's playing with the form in a not very gentle manner. Who cares, he's saying, about shallow human interactions? He finds profundity in people stripped of all inhibitions.
Horror movies ask big questions. They detail the fringes of human behavior. They probe the nauseating obsessions of human existence. Horror films poke their fingers against exposed nerves - Is there a God? Do we have free will? What is human nature? To what degree is man ruled by his baser instincts? Then there's the extra layer of audience participation as well. How often does the viewer want something bad to happen to the characters onscreen? How often does the viewer get a thrill out of the carnage? And what does it mean that so many moviegoers enjoy watching the simulated suffering of others?
Hostel is a celebration of gratuity. But there's a moral buried in the buckets of blood, mucus, and viscera. Roth is asking: how much can we stomach? How much can movie audiences tolerate? What does is say about us that we pay to watch artificial suffering?
Best not to examine too closely. Eli Roth is having a good time - a peculiar good time, yes, but still he's enjoying himself - and the audience should try, too. Because Roth isn't going anywhere. He will forever make horror films and probably burn out at a young age. He loves them too much to ever do anything else.
I wonder, however, how he will top this. The only thing left is some sort of interactive game, where the audience tears and scrapes at the figures running in terror on the screen.
Ben Beard is a critic based in the Midwest.
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