Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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35 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Just plain poor, 7 Jun 2007
Despite being advertised by the Daily Mirror as "...The Goriest, Sickest, Bloodiest Movie You'll Ever, Ever See," Hostel is a dirt poor attempt at a horror and a big let down considering. The best way to describe the movie is unimaginative, unoriginal, and a waste of ninety minutes of your precious life. Presented by Quentin Tarantino the writer and director of the masterpieces Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2, Hostel seems to be less like a work of genius and more like a seventies Vipco's Vaults Of Horror release - i.e. a rubbish film and generally just an excuse to milk money out of us. (My apologises to any Vipco's fans for using this metaphor but I believe it is necessary in this case.) Despite it eighteen classification and hype about being `graphic and deeply disturbing,' I found Hostel unusually tame, especially compared to other films of the same genre such as Slither, 2001 Maniacs, and Saw. The film follows two American backpackers through Europe who find themselves soon to be victims of a murder for profit company. That last sentence is pretty much the entire film explained. I am a fan of anything remotely horror, but when a main character gets killed in Hostel you just don't care. Why? because they are two dimensional emotionless wrecks. A few people seemed to have somehow found Hostel slightly more `bearable' than me. Personally I have no idea how, and I would quite like to meet such a person to find out how. Considering how many preowned DVD's of Hostel are avivable and how fast the price plummeted after its release, I doubt the average viewer would like the film. So, in summary don't waste you time and money on it.
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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I hate it when people review movies without understanding them..., 10 Aug 2006
My wife and I watched this film together and we both quite enjoyed it. It wasn't a fantastic movie, though it was original enough (by modern standards - it certainly borrows heavily from a number of much older movies, including Cannibal Holocaust and The House on the Edge of the Park) to keep us watching avidly until the end. When I read through the reviews on this page though, I can't help put think that some people just don't get it.
It's true that the movie burgeons on soft porn in its first half (again, borrowing from older, ostensibly horror movies), so if this is likely to bother any 'geek horror boys' or 'horror non-fans ("...though I quite like those funny Scream films..."', be warned - this will annoy you.
The second half does contain some breathtaking, though not sustained, moments of depravity, so the same caveat applies.
Nobody seems to have noticed the obvious message, though. True: in plot and scripting terms, this is a fairly shallow movie. The underlying message is fairly shallow too, though, which is why I'm surprised that no other reviewer has managed to pick up on it. It's shallow, but it is interesting - it's about where we draw the line.
Early on, we see our main characters visit an Amsterdam brothel. It is beautifully lit and decorated in a modern and tasteful style. Later in the film we see the warehouse where sick men pay to mutilate, torture and kill young, visiting backpackers. The striking thing is that this building is so architecturally similar to the brothel that we saw nearly an hour earlier. It is almost a hellish vision of the earlier, heavenly den of iniquity.
The message is clear: if it is morally acceptable to pay for sex, to decriminalise prostitution and to regulate its presence, how far can we stretch this logic? If a man can pay for sex with a woman who would, in truth, rather not sleep with him, what else is it acceptable to offer for sale?
So, we are welcomed to a world where there are no moral qualms about selling sex and, bubbling beneath the surface, there is a lucrative market in selling foreigners to men with much darker desires. And thrown in for free, we have a loose plot and a truckload of gore and depravity; maybe not compared with the classic horrors of yesteryear, but certainly next to almost any other horror released in the last decade.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not a masterpiece by any stretch, but nonetheless, an inventive and original idea., 30 Jan 2008
The central concept of Hostel (2005) is a familiar one, with the stranger in a strange-land motif having been used in a number of great, similarly-minded horror films of the last thirty-years, most notably in John Landis's classic black comedy, An American Werewolf in London (1981), and again, more recently, in films such as Wolf Creek (2005) and Them (2006), The concept is one that lends itself to ideas of paranoia, unease, uncertainty and helplessness, as we realise that there is no one to turn to and no one to trust.
The film isn't entirely successful, with the usual drawbacks of director Eli Roth's particular style resulting in the usual attempts at crude frat-boy type humour, wanton aggression, vicious violence, and knowing nods towards sexism, misogyny and perhaps even xenophobia; all getting in the way of the more important factors like tension, terror and real, believable characters. Like his mentor Quentin Tarantino, you get the sense that Roth has clearly seen a lot of films and can borrow, reference and pastiche with the best of them, but unlike Tarantino, you also get the sense that he doesn't really love films, but rather, is in awe of the violence that they present to him. His first film, Cabin Fever (2003) attempted to revive the splatter film genre with a combination of Romero's zombie horror and Raimi's kids in a cabin theatrics, with knowing references to films such as Sleepaway Camp, Dawn of the Dead, The Crazies, Deliverance, Sothern Comfort, Evil Dead and The Last House on the Left. Sadly, for all the clever references, buckets of gore and sporadic bursts of T&A, the film was completely devoid of all sense of character or empathy; giving us a film that failed to create any kind of emotional resonance with the audience or anything that made an impression after the final credits had rolled.
However, Roth has certainly rectified some of these problems with Hostel; which overcomes the complete lack of anything approaching real character and his shallow attempts to pay lip service to more talented filmmakers, such as Tarantino and Takashi Miike (who's work Roth seems to completely misinterpret on almost every level), by at least having an interesting concept, an air of dramatic mystery and some truly imaginative death sequences. The most successful scenes are obviously those closer to the end of the film, in which we have an attempt to escape; resulting in a pretty fraught chase sequence, and finally we actually start to feel something for the characters. Some would say that it's too little too late, but I feel it ends the film on a high note and proves that Roth just might be able to reign in his more adolescent tendencies to one day produce a truly great film.
Another thing I liked about it was the scenes that hinted at a central mystery or conspiracy, in particular when two of the central characters search the small Eastern European village for their missing friend; which for me, conjured images of Dario Argento's early works such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat O' Nine Tails (1971) and Deep Red (1975), as well as that kind of uncertain, mysterious, slightly menacing atmosphere from Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973). It also goes back to the idea presented in the aforementioned An American Werewolf in London, and its less successful Parisian set sequel (1997), with the travelling companions straying off the beaten track and being punished for it; again, bringing to mind films like Deliverance and Sothern Comfort as well.
I suppose you could argue that some of Roth's more immature touches make it impossible to feel anything for these characters, mostly as a result of them being somewhat under-written and underdeveloped. It's never quite as bad as Hostel Part II (2007), which is really about nothing, other than upping the ante on gratuitous gore; with the deaths and the suffering of that particular film used only as a means of titillating the blood lust of teenage boys. Not that I have anything against violence in cinema you understand, but certainly the old adage that a little goes a long way is undoubtedly true. For me, the most memorable scenes of violence are the ones that hold the most dramatic weight; the ones that feel real and very much believable, where we can feel for the characters in that situation and apply our own various psychological fears and anxieties alongside it; something that Hostel manages to pull off with those frantic final moments.
Admittedly, there is plenty here that audiences might find disgusting, or maybe even offensive, but there is also a decent story that manages to pull you in, despite the overall lack of style and the childishness of some of Roth's lurid scenarios. Unlike its shallow, unimaginative sequel, Hostel offers more than mindless entertainment for a post-pub Friday night in, with some genuinely inventive moments of violence and that great 20 minutes towards the end, which points the way forward to the kind of high tension Roth should be going for. Not a masterpiece by any stretch, but regardless, an inventive and original idea that holds our attention for the duration of the film.
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