Hostel

Starring Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eythor Gudjonsson, Barbara Nedeljakova and Jana Kaderabkova

Written by and directed by Eli Roth

Prior to actually seeing Roth's would-be slasher opus, I had been rooting for him. I'm a fan of self-made writer-directors who actually get up off their asses and try to actually become filmmakers rather than hitting the bong again and just daydreaming about it, like I did. Of course, Roth did come from enough money that he was able to afford NYU film school, but so what? Lots of dipshits graduate from NYU film school, and most never make back Daddy's tuition investment. Roth kept at it— groveling for shit PA jobs, kissing David Lynch's ass, polishing Quentin Tarantino's knob, and generally suffering for his art until he finally convinced enough suckers— er, I mean investors— to cough up a share of the $1.5 million budget for his first feature. Said feature wowed 'em at the Toronto film festival. Lions Gate picked it up. A few critics and the fat toad Harry Knowles raved about it, and viola! Instant film career.

Roth's stated intention was to resurrect the hard-R slasher film genre of the 1980's, to once again fill the screen with gore and gratuitous boob shots and chopped–up dead teenagers. That's a noble cause if I ever heard one, and one long overdue in this tragic era of PG-13 bloodless horror films full of wafer-thin wannabe-Streeps like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Neve Campbell who think they're too high and mighty to show us their tits. But Cabin Fever was an amateurish travesty. The script was birdcage liner. The actors were airheads, doorknobs and buffoons. Roth's direction made Herk Harvey look like Orson Welles. I laughed my way through it and then wrote off Roth for good.

But I'll be damned if Hostel doesn't reveal that, with his second feature, Roth has grown exponentially as a horror maestro. He's still no Carpenter or Romero, but Hostel is a real movie. It has balls. It evinces a demented but purposeful guiding intelligence, and it has the courage of its deeply twisted convictions. I didn't hate it. I'd even go so far as to say I kind of liked it.

The story goes that Roth told Tarantino a possibly apocryphal story about some secret facility somewhere in the post-Warsaw Pact Balkans where rich sociopaths can pay to experience murder by shooting poor peasants who have opted to trade their lives for a nice windfall for their families. In other words, it’s Death Insurance. With Tarantino’s backing, Roth expanded this tale into the story of two Amsterdam-bound college roommates (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) and their Icelandic sidekick (Eythor Gudjonsson, who's actually from Iceland) who hear tell of a Slovakian town where all the men have been killed off in ethnic violence, leaving behind a bevy of horny man-hungry babes who will fuck you blind, then pull some crazy lesbian shit and let you snort lines of coke off their asses, all in exchange for a couple of Miller Lites. Tired of watching American tourists cough up their lungs in Amsterdam pot bars, the three young men hop the next train for Slovakia.

I can't give away more of the plot without spoiling your fun. At first, the town seems to fulfill the boys' every fantasy. And then it doesn't. What follows is a good hour's worth of some of the most disturbing, degrading and depressing scenes of simulated torture this side of Abu Grhaib. Knives, scalpels, garden sheers, hatchets, mallets, power drills and blowtorches are taken to quivering human flesh. Severed body parts spill from the screen in a satanic cornucopia. The film is the farthest thing from a PG-13 snooze-fest that you can stomach and still keep down your popcorn. It wallows in good old-fashioned latex prosthetics and splashes around in Karo corn syrup mixed with red food coloring. It drains the last ounces of hope and optimism from your soul. It does provide catharsis of sorts, but it’s the hollow, hopeless catharsis of the cow who escapes the slaughterhouse and then wonders what the hell is left for him that’s better than becoming hamburger.

What’s impressive here is that Roth avoids the common horror-film mistake of trading in torture and murder for 90 minutes and then trying to pussy out with some bullshit twist ending or cheap rim-shot to let you know it was all just a sick joke. There’s a lot of frat-boy humor, don’t get me wrong. But the trials of these characters linger. Their choices really do become matters of life and death. The film is structured as the classic hero’s journey into the Underworld, and it doesn’t skirt or avoid the consequences of the hero’s hubris. It also exploits the classic slasher film convention, established most famously in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, of the city-dweller’s primal fear of inbred murderous hillbillies— only this time the yokels speak with Transylvanian accents.

Does Roth still have some growing up to do? Most assuredly. He’s not the subtlest of filmmakers. Large portions of this picture still look like amateur hour, and the acting is only marginally better than that of the stiffs who mugged their way through Cabin Fever. The script also resorts to woeful contrivance in the third act just to milk a few cheers from the audience. You can often sense the adolescent mind at work.

But most encouragingly, Hostel sticks to its admittedly nihilistic world-view all the way to the bitter end. Within the conventions of the genre, the film is more daring and inventive than anything Rob Zombie has been able to conjure from his bag of tricks— a shocking turn of events when you consider how hopeless Roth looked after his first film. If intelligent but morally depraved and hideously disgusting slasher flicks are your cuppa tea, then knock yourself out. It’s a lot more fun than Memoirs of a Geisha, I can tell you that.

February 3, 2006
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