Dan DaranciangHostel
Grade: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Starring: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eythor Godjonsson
Directed by: Eli Roth
Now playing at: Esquire, West Olive
Eli Roth films, sadistic and gory, make for particularly good fun with college students in mind. After all, it is this demographic, the pleasure-seeking, middle-class university student, that receives the brunt of the punishment in Roth’s films. His previous offering, 2001’s “Cabin Fever,” saw five college students’ vacation to a secluded cabin result in an especially gruesome infectious disease, whose symptoms included bleeding to a degree most horror movies shy away from.
Roth’s latest, “Hostel,” is equally collegiate and far bloodier. Whereas his previous film focused on the bourgeois college student’s fear of the backcountry and all its dangers, “Hostel” hits the undergraduate student right where it hurts: the study abroad experience.
The film follows Americans Paxton (Jay Hernandez), Josh (Derek Richardson), and the Icelandic Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) as they travel the European continent, one by one planting the seeds to their eventual dismemberment. Their trouble begins in Amsterdam, when a stranger tells the three sex-craving boys about a hostel in Slovakia that features beautiful women who love foreign men. Horny, misogynistic and stupid, the boys travel to the town. After a first night that resembles the stranger’s description, things soon begin to fall apart for the tourists.
First Oli goes missing, and then Josh. When an increasingly unsettled Paxton goes looking for his friends, he is led to a distant abandoned building, where the truth of his colleagues’ fate becomes revealed. They, and now Paxton, have been slowly and creatively tortured by a local business that sells gullible tourists to sadistic buyers. The contract is simple: pay money and you will be provided with a live human body and countless instruments of torture.
The viewer will soon discover that the second half of the movie will succeed when it is bloodiest, not scariest. Indeed, the film offers few if any genuinely scary moments. Rather than make the audience jump in their seats as they watch Paxton make a daring escape from the torture corporation, Roth attempts a far more rewarding feat: he makes us cheer with every gratuitous and impossible act of violence. The main characters are not typical horror victims. Quite deliberately, Roth makes us hate his characters. He wants us to think their jokes are not funny, and that their idiocy is not pitiable but punishable. When they are punished – an estimated 150 gallons of fake blood were used in the making of the movie – the result is a catharsis exactly the opposite of what Aristotle had in mind. The demand is for more tragedy and more senseless (and quite humorless) torture of the “good guys,” not an end to their suffering.
The movie falls short of expectations only because it does not follow through on this quite reasonable demand. Except for two brief moments involving an eyeball and a pack of violent street urchins, the film’s last half hour disappoints. Whereas “Cabin Fever” excelled because of an ending that included the destruction of every character worth a drop of sympathy, “Hostel” becomes a victim of its desire to move into the mainstream. Its final scenes are predictable, and the viewer is left wanting.
For the college student, however – especially the one who has been abroad – “Hostel” will be a certain delight. How can art, after all, truly capture that unique sensation that occurs while abroad, where everyone is staring at you seemingly because they somehow want to kill you? In “Hostel,” the answer is simple. They do want to kill you.