Review: Hostel (2006)
What’s it saying about American films, that sex: the pursuit, the promise of it, and ultimately the fulfillment of the act itself, is scarier than the violence that said sex inevitably conjures? Being kidnapped, tied up and, of course, etc. (there’s no horror film without the et cetera.) can’t hold a candle to the weird, creepy act of copulation in American horror films. If you haven’t seen Hostel, and I’m going to eventually, with only some reservation, recommend that you do, to reveal further, the et cettera, would kill the fun, would deflate what’s best about the film: a long, seductive, nearly forty minute slow burn that constitutes much more restraint in the realm of the American horror film than you are accustomed to.
Films that revel in large scenes of explicit, uninteruppted torture, your “Saw” movies, your “Wolf Creeks” and so forth, have been labeled as “torture porn” by better writers than myself. It’s glib, its one of those things a writer says hoping to be the first to have said it, but it fits something as mindless as the Saw series (which are basically the David Fincher movie “Seven” crossed with a game show of your choice, Wheel of Fortune perhaps, only in this case you would spin a wheel once to choose a body part, and again to specify which ironic instrument of torture be used to remove said body part). At this juncture, though he may eventually compell me to eat my words, I think its unfair to lump Eli Roth, director of Cabin Fever, and Hostel, in that group just yet. He’s a little too enthralled with crappy 1980s conventions that don’t work (cartoonish violence, intentionally un-PC jokes that aren’t funny anyway) but he has ambition, and when his indulgences are in check, something close to real style.
“Hostel” concerns three backpackers in Europe on a quest for great pot and even greater pussy. They are young, they are about to go to college and/or write the great American novel, and they, like everyone, want that last great drug binge/lay before they settle back in to more socially acceptable lives. Roth gets this right, he understands the conventions of a slasher film enough to know that at least a third of the slasher film’s running time is devoted to screwing with you, but he has the talent, and the sense, to make the opening act play like more than just marking time. The kids’ dialogue is right, they drop the f-word with a cadence that’s familiar to anyone who’s been to a kegger til five in the morning, and they aren’t burdened with leaden expository passages. Roth knows you know this part of the story already, so he slims it down, tweaks, and gives you something just a little bit off from your preconceptions of a film presented by Quentin Tarantino with a bloody chair on its poster.
The problem is, just as you drop your guard with “Hostel”, and begin to engage in the pleasures of the film’s dank, eerie atomsphere and cheerfully amoral, xenophobic characters (ripe for a lesson delivered via power drill), the film becomes exactly what it just covinced you it wasn’t: over the top, and eventually quite stupid. “Hostel” has cooked up a theme, the continual anxiety between the U.S. and every other country who resents our egotistical entitlement, that is worthy of a great, timely horror film. But Roth, backs off and slacks off, and provides the usual slasher jollies, better directed than most (its still leagues over the Saws and Wolf Creeks of the world) but still the same-o, same-o.
“Hostel” is not as violent as Roth is hoping you think it is, but I think it’s still probably too violent. I say this not as a concerned parent, but as someone who feels the forboding Roth works up in the first half (he even manages a visual cue or two from “Don’t Look Now”) should not, on any grounds be compromised. The tonal inconsistency of “Hostel” is epitomized in a scene an hour and change into the picture when the lead character (the one who hasn’t succumbed to the film’s evils) meets one of the predators face to face, and the predator, mistaking the hero as one of his own, begins to work himself up, to rant, about the pleasures of his circumstance. Roth has a great idea here, but unfortunately he makes the obvious choice, to portray the bad guy as a complete loony. A scarier possibility, and one that can be seen in the 1988 film “The Vanishing”, would have been a character pushed by a malignant curiosity, a nice guy rotting from within. The fact that this rot is acknowledged at all in “Hostel” marks it as a cut above the usual business, but Roth spoiled me, made me greedy for the possibility of a slasher film that actually cuts socially as well as literally.
-Bowen
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