Hostel
Eli Roth's sophomore project is a vast improvement on Cabin Fever , yet shares a lot of the same problems, including facetious sub-plots and an overtly colourful list of kooky minor characters. In Cabin Fever we had the hilariously awful country hicks chucked into a film that obviously didn't think a disgusting flesh-eating virus was enough. Here, on top of the main threat of being captured and tortured to death by paying businessmen out to indulge in the ultimate taboo experience, we have several half-naked femme fatales waiting to slip a mickey to any foreigner they can find, and a street gang of little rascals that are impoverished to the point of being deadly. Of course, like Cabin Fever , all these threats converge, their fates meeting in a very goofy slapstick passage towards the end. When Roth gets the balls to stick with his main idea/story/themes and not get tempted to hedge his bets with double-threats, he just might make a really good fucking horror flick.
People are comparing Hostel to Wolf Creek , grouping them in fact, as harbingers of a new genre: ‘gore-porn', but they have more in common than just the potential to make you squirm in your seat looking at the floor. Just like we spent the first half of Wolf Creek exploring outback Australia with our protagonists before they met with murderous Mick, in Hostel we gallivant around Europe for a while with two American boys, and a horny Icelandic mate they've met along their travels, as they look for every opportunity to delve into decadence.
If you watched the goofy T‘n'A comedy Eurotrip after watching this, you would swear it was spoofing complete scenes of Hostel 's European adventures – and you might be right were it not for the fact that Eurotrip was released a year before Hostel was even made. Tits and sex and creepy and quirky Europeans abound in both. There's actually a scene in Eurotrip on a train where a creepy European man tries to crack onto one of the boys that is echoed almost exactly in Hostel . I guess it was Roth's aim to go down that path, lull you into thinking you were watching a typical Hollywood teen movie, before turning the tables and unleashing the horror.
There's a line of academic thinking going around about how Hostel is at its core a statement about rampant American consumerism and American ignorance and arrogance. Basically, that America is bad, bad, bad. I think that the film taps into a general kind of theme about Americans abroad – just watch any episode of the entertaining Amazing Race to see dumb-ass Yanks shouting at each other, getting annoyed with people who don't speak English and won't take American currency, all the while sprinting past spectacularly beautiful worldly wonders without even glancing up, all in the pursuit for a million dollar bounty – but I don't know how much deeper I would be looking here. Roth claims the idea came from a Taiwanese website he found that actually offered you the chance to pay to shoot someone in the head, and true or not, he certainly has expanded on the idea nicely.
As for this film being gore-porn, maybe it's just that after all the talk I was expecting to really have my horror threshold tested, but there wasn't all that much to complain about/revel in/puke at. Then again, I wasn't fazed by the torture stuff in Wolf Creek either and that turned some people I know into quivering wrecks, so who knows, years of seeing people sliced and diced in gloriously B-grade schlock for my viewing pleasure might have dulled my senses. That, or I'm a psychopath myself. The worst it gets, as far as gore, is actually kind of comical. If you find the image of someone having to sever off someone's eye that's dripping out of their socket kind of comical. I was also actually disappointed that the image on the poster/DVD cover - a man getting a drill down his throat – was never delivered on. I'm not making the case against me not being a psychopath any better, am I?