Hostel

Eli Roth's first feature film, Cabin Fever (2002), wasn't great, but it was a good genre movie. I have friends who like it and some who hate it, but I feel it was a promising debut. The story centers around a little cabin where several college friends have decided to vacation and happen to find a flesh-eating virus. Roth shows that he knows horror and interestingly plays on some genre cliches.

Later I found out that he had worked with David Lynch on Mulholland Drive (2001) and on Lynch's expansive website. He's a big fan of Takashi Miike, the Japanese director responsible for some of the wildest and most disturbing films of the last six or seven years including Ichi:The Killer (2001), Audition (1999), and Visitor Q (2001). In fact, Roth is so into Miike's pictures, that he has had him make a cameo in Hostel (2005). This alone, I almost hate to admit, was a selling point for me.

Maybe I'll learn one day.

Other than having relatively unknown stars, a few good gross-outs, and one swell story twist, Hostel is completely disappointing. It centers around a trio of backpackers (two American, one Icelandic) in Europe. Their main goals are to find drugs and sex. They find both and end up involved in two different body trades. One, of course, has been said to be the oldest profession. The other, like the first, also involves two people alone in a room together, except this version involves one person screaming a lot and another person making said screaming happen with various implements like scalpels, hammers, and even chainsaws.

The dialogue can be pretty terrible. The main characters speak in "dudefuck" language, a kind of "cool" movie frat lingo that makes you wonder if anyone can write dialogue anymore: "Hey dude, what the fuck?" or "Fuck yeah, dude!" In other words, these guys are obnoxious and it is just plain difficult to relate or sympathize with them at all.

The movie moves through three different modes: the college "dude" mode, the horror film that I came to see, and finally it devolves into a messy combination of Death Wish (1974) and Hitchcockian pictures of international intrigue. I think the movie loses any punch it could have had by moving through these genres. It certainly suffers from the Hollywood notion that all ends must be neatly tied-up, a notion that curiously neither Lynch nor Miike acknowledge with their own films.
--Stephen McClurg