Hostel (2006) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Hostel is Eli Roth's highly anticipated follow-up to his phenomenally successful Cabin Fever. It is a spin on one of the traditional set-ups for horror films: Americans are in Eastern Europe to pick up chicks, and seem to be having phenomenal success until it all turns ugly. Really ugly. In this variation on the theme, the Eastern European beauties are used to lure various unsuspecting tourists into situations where they can be drugged, kidnapped, and used as unwilling victims in an evil scheme similar to snuff films. Various rich people pay the Slovakian entrepreneurs vast sums of money to set up whichever demented acts they would like to commit upon untraceable victims. That consists mostly of being able to inflict pain and death upon fellow human beings.

Your basic family film! Severed limbs, eyes dangling from their sockets, oozing viscera, drills with bloody bits, tables full of arcane blades -  the full package of explicit gore in the Herschell Gordon Lewis tradition. Just think of it as 2000 Maniacs for the new millennium, with Eastern Europe playing the part of the Confederacy.

Although it is at heart an exploitation film, it is also a film with a serious point to make about exploitation in general. The American students who go to Eastern Europe, intending to wave a few dollars around and exploit the locals, find that somebody else has paid the locals a lot more for the privilege of exploiting American students! The American backpacker characters don't give any thought to the poor victims of the pay-to-play industry when they are the ones paying, early in the film. It is only later, when they find that they are in the middle of the food chain rather than at the top, and that those with more money can exploit them as easily as they exploited the anonymous prostitutes in Amsterdam, that they gain any sensitivity or insight. By then, of course, it is a bit late for their epiphany to have any value.

The trailers bill the movie as "inspired by true events." Well, sorta. Here's the scoop. Director Eli Roth says that he found a Thai website that advertised "murder vacations," in which tourists had the chance to torture and kill someone for $10,000. Roth showed the site to Quentin Tarantino, whereupon the two developed the idea for this film. Tarantino and Roth told an Icelandic interviewer that they do not know whether the offer was genuine. Hey, if it accomplishes nothing else, Hostel may permanently scare off some viewers from the notion of heading to Budapest or Bangkok to sample forbidden pleasures. Stick with the museums and old cathedrals, kids.

As you can guess from the plot description, audiences and critics were sharply divided into those cultists who found it an effective genre film and those more mainstream viewers who found it generally repulsive. It must have had some fairly broad appeal because it opened in the number one box office spot in the very first weekend of 2006, and pulled in $47 million altogether. It also pulled in positive reviews from such white bread publications as Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, and Variety, none of which can be accused of being targeted at Fangoria readers. I joined a lot of those other people with mainstream sensibilities who found themselves engrossed in the story and admiring the atmosphere achieved by the film. I wouldn't say I liked it, but I sure got more involved in it than I expected, given that I would have read the description and passed on it if watching it were not in my job description. After all, Hostel just isn't my kind of film. It is dark-hearted, mean-spirited, and gory. Indeed I suppose that Eli Roth is never really going to make the kind of film that appeals to me, but nobody said all films have to be for me. In fact very few films are made for us old geezers. To a great extent, film is a medium for the young to talk to the young, and while I wish the kids could find healthier things to talk about, I have to concede that there are lots of people who love creepy films like this, and Roth has both the talent and the inclination to make such exploitation movies the way they are supposed to be made: with imagination, solid storytelling, sound technical skills, and transgressive amounts of violence and sex. And you know what?  I ended up thinking it was a pretty cool, albeit unpleasant, movie. The story moves along smoothly. It's dripping with atmosphere. Best of all, it has plenty o' naked chicks! It's not my kind of movie, but maybe it's yours.