I am not a big fan of the horror genre because most of its movies are kind of dumb, but I think Hostel is one of the best. This movie is a morality play about behavior and consequences taken to the extreme. It’s completely original, well-planned, and genuinely creepy. I did not find it scary, but this is not the kind of move that uses a lot of cheap thrills to make you jump.

This movie begins with a couple of young Americans partying in Amsterdam with an Icelandic man they’d just recently met. They came there to smoke a lot of weed and sex up the locals, but are disappointed by how many other Americans they keep running into. They eventually meet a young man who tells them about a hostel in Slovakia that is teeming with beautiful women. The young man explains that because of all the past wars, Slovakia hardly has any men left, and the girls are feeling anxious. He also adds that an American accent is like a sexual magnet. The three guys then catch a train the next day to visit the hostel.

Once they reach the Slovakian hostel, everything was just as the guy had promised. Beautiful women everywhere with lots of great food and drinks, but the surrounding area seemed desolate and creepy. Sort of like a gingerbread house in the middle of a scary forest. After the first night, their Icelandic friend disappears. The two Americans were worried about him, but decide that they really did not know him that well and he probably just ran off. A couple nights later, one of the Americans disappears. This leaves it all up to the final guy to figure out what is going on, and what he discovers is a total nightmare.

According to all I’ve read and heard about this movie, writer/director Eli Roth got the idea for this when he heard about a Thai website that offered clients the chance to murder someone for a very high fee. About ten years ago, I had a history professor discuss this same thing. The idea is that in these very poor and overpopulated cultures, if you have enough money, there are people that will arrange for you to kill someone and then walk away. It’s like a form of prostitution. While there is no real proof of anything like this really going on in the world, I would not be the slightest bit surprised if it was taking place in some form or another.

Part of what made this movie work was the excellent cast of unknowns. Jay Hernandez plays the lead who must figure out what has happened. He’s previously appeared in such movies as Friday Night Lights and Ladder 49 and I thought he was an excellent and charismatic actor. Derek Richardson, who you may recognize as playing a young Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumberer, turns in a great performance as the reluctant guy who goes along with the whole party and sex atmosphere. The best role was played by German actor Jan Vlasak. His cold and calm demeanor made him one of the best horror movie villains I’ve seen in a while. Lots of beautiful women also fill up the screen, but they are unknown to American audiences. I hope this movie will give them some attention because their looks combined with their accents were killer. Future Bond girls, perhaps?

I had no desire to see this movie in the theaters, mainly because I was so unimpressed by writer/director Eli Roth’s debut movie Cabin Fever. With this film, he really blew me away by his attention to detail and overall originality. I think this guy is definitely someone to keep an eye on, especially now that he has befriended Quentin Tarantino. Roth has several future projects in the works, including the big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s latest novel called Cell.

Roth and crew did a great job with designing this film. It begins with everything bright and colorful and happy, then gets darker and darker. By the end, even people’s make-up reflects the truth in their characters. Surround sound effects are put to very good use throughout the movie. There was only one flaw in the whole movie, and that was the use of ‘deux ex machina’ to quickly resolve what happens to some of the bad guys. While it is nice to see everyone gets what’s coming to them, too quick of a resolution can be disappointing.

I really enjoyed Hostel for its originality, writing, direction, acting, and overall look. It is a violent and profane movie full of gore and nudity, so I would not recommend it to the faint of heart. It used to be that movies like this were of the generic straight-to-video kind, but this film had a solid break into the mainstream. The DVD has quite a few extras, including a nice production diary on how they made the film.


Recommended: Yes