Roth doesn’t look away when characters are brutalized, and if you don’t have the stomach for watching a character try to cross the floor with nearly chopped-off ankles, this is not the movie for you.
It’s a torture show in underground basements, where the victims are handcuffed and bound in chairs forced to endure unspeakable torment. Roth just wants to provide sensations, and plenty of them. But the immoderate blood shedding of Audition or Oldboy felt like artistic provocation. It takes a turn toward the unapologetically violent, as mean and visceral as the limb-chopping finale of Audition (Takashi Miike has a memorable cameo as a persona of evil in Hostel) or the gory, Greek tragedy tongue slicing in Oldboy. What’s more interesting is that no matter how much you dislike Paxton and Josh at first glance, one is bound to empathize with them as Hostel draws on.
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His movie is deliberately free of subtext, and there’s no deep hidden critique of the free-spirited American abroad. I assume he simply thought Paxton and Josh were funny. I’m not sure how much thought Roth put into how we the audience should feel about the characters in Hostel. (Readers who plan to bear witness to the gut-wrenching horrors of Hostel are advised to stop reading here, since the movie takes a turn toward the mysterious after this night of partying.) When someone from the hostel goes missing, our dim-witted American heroes chalk it up to “things being different in a foreign country.” I wonder if the Jiminy Crickets in the audience will add “xenophobic” to their conscience thought-bubbles, since the villagers are presented as unsavory types, though one might argue the American characters are themselves xenophobic and get their just desserts for being vapid, racist, sexist, obnoxious pigs. It isn’t long before three heavily accented, slinky Slovakians lure our heroes out to an all-night club for some passionate sexual hijinks. Paxton, Josh, and Oli are told about a remote Slovakian hostel where the women go sexually wild for foreigners. Viewers who identify with the pigs, or simply loathe them, are asked to sit through a descent into unadulterated depravity-though you can’t say they didn’t “ask for it.” They wanted sin, right? Well, they get it in spades. When extreme, body-crunching violence is inflicted on these pigs, the playing field gets leveled. These men are pigs, but what makes Hostel both cathartic and unnerving is its presentation of such pigs being brought into a virtual slaughterhouse for our sadistic viewing pleasure. He has hit the nail on the head when it comes to describing the mindset of backpackers Paxton (confident Jay Hernandez) and Josh (self-effacing Derek Richardson), not to mention their “king of swing” Icelandic buddy Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), who loves dropping his pants at every opportunity and proclaiming he’s shaved his ass cheeks as well as his balls. Never one to pull punches when it comes to combating ignorance, Chaw is certainly on the right track. “It’s homophobic, misogynistic, and just as dangerous and juvenile as a fraternity hazing,” he claims. Film Freak Central’s Walter Chaw was revolted by the film’s pointlessness and artlessness. They’re just as horny, but they want thrills and they want them now, and it doesn’t matter how vapid or graphic or perverse, as long as it’s fast, cheap, and out of control.Īnyone who’s worked in an office where some dim-bulb jock type delights in emailing video clips of defecation fetishes or girls vomiting on each other will instantly recognize the two American yokels who traverse through Eastern Europe in Hostel searching for foreign chicks to satisfy their whims. But the times have changed, and our American backpackers in the 2000s, as evidenced by the two guys in Eli Roth’s Hostel, have become coarse and jaded. It was painful to watch one of them turn into a “human meatloaf” of the undead and the other to suffer tragically through a hellish lycanthropic curse. One felt instant sympathy for the two unlucky American backpackers in John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London because they were basically sweet, goofy guys with a cheerfully ironic sense of humor.
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