First off, let me recommend not
watching this if you plan to go backpacking and are prone to
paranoia/suspicious/a wimpy little baby.
Hostel is a gritty tale of how
dangerous backpacking can be.
The film follows three friends, Paxton,
Josh and Oli, on their travels backpacking around Europe. When they
get locked out of their hostel in Amsterdam because they missed
curfew they crash at a local dude's house who tells them of a hostel
in Slovakia where the women are into American men. Maybe the men will
be 'into' the women to, if you catch my drift, wink wink, nudge
nudge. On the train there, they meet a creepy German businessman who
is obviously part of the plot. When they get to the hotel and
check-in, they are told they only have semi-private rooms and will
have to share.
Enter dis-hearted looks all round.
This changes when they find out their
room-mates are semi-clothed girls who invite them to the spa. After a
night out with the girls, Oli disappears and Paxton and Josh are told
he has already checked out. When the same thing happens to Josh,
Paxton starts to get suspicious. When he finds out that they have
been taken to an abandoned building where people pay to torture and
kill travellers, he himself gets caught and 'put in the doctors
chair' so to speak. He eventually escapes when his 'doctor'
accidentally chops his own leg off with a chainsaw (who didn't see
that coming?)
Once again this is another film that
follows the horror/thriller line of 'friends go to a remote locale,
start to disappear one by one and only one of them gets out alive'.
I'm not really a fan when the same thing gets used over and over
again, but this time, I quite enjoyed it. Instead of college kids
going somewhere nobody their age would ever go (see Cabin in the Woods) and murdered by freaks, inbreds, zombies or whatever, being
tortured by normal* people is a refreshing take on the subject.
Refreshing may not be quite the right word to use here, but you know,
whatever. Also the word normal. The fact that this could (and
probably has) happen is the allure of the film. I always slight films
on their reality and authenticity, and even though there are things
that happen in Hostel that seem a little farfetched, I think that the
idea behind it was extremely solid. From the cops being paid off to
ignore what was happening to the gang of street kids, the whole flick
seemed believable and scarily possible.
As I wasn't watching something that
could blow me away in the action-packed way, I was close to being
blown away by the realness. Again, when I say realness, I'm talking
about the possibility of it happening opposed to the film itself
being true to life. That said, I was drawn in and at points, watching
with baited breath. The gore level was not up to Saw
standards, but you do see things cut off, hanging out and caved in,
so not one for the faint-hearted.
Oh yeah. Takashi Miike randomly appears in it too.
Not
something to watch as a random film, but a fine addition to a horror
library. - Three and a half fingers out of five
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