Film Review: Hostel (2006) C

Date Viewed: 5/24/06
Venue: DVD

If nothing else, Hostel is the last film you’d want to see if you’re the parent of a college-aged kid who wants to go backpacking in Europe. Call it Bad Eurotrip.

Hostel is the tale of a pair of American college kids who’re partying their way across Europe, moving from hostel to hostel in their efforts to get wasted and score chicks. It all goes wrong when they wind up in a posh Slovakian hostel, only to soon be drugged, kidnapped, and sent off to an elaborate international torture chamber. Oh, and since and it’s a horror movie, they have to hook up with some Eurohotties before being drugged, just so we the viewer get to see some boobies.

The film does generate a great deal of tension and suspense once in the torture chamber; however, the time prior to that just kind of spins it’s cinematic wheels. There is an overall sense of foreboding to these early scenes (and that’s probably only because I KNEW I was watching a horror film and that something bad invariably had to happen), but that’s it. And unfortunately, we don’t get to the torturing until the final third of the film.

The first hour of so involves our intrepid backpackers as they smoke weed, go clubbing, and hook up. There are suspenseful moments thrown in here and there as the kids eventually go missing one by one, leaving those remaining to search for them. Strangely, the film turns into a missing persons detective story. Wait a minute…isn’t this a horror movie?

Now without going into detail, the torture chamber parts of the film are extremely and satisfyingly graphic, albeit for the most part brief and consisting of quick cuts. The torturers are well cast and appropriately creepy. The art direction, think blood-stained rusty nails, is also spot-on here. But to be honest, I wanted more. Call me a sick bastard, but I wanted to see more torture, too much of it happens after we’ve cut away. It’s simply not brutal enough to warrant that first hour of setup.

Hostel isn’t a bad flick. It’s not a particularly good one either. The performances are alright, nothing special, but not awful, either. The torture scenes are scary and effective, but the big problem here is we waste too much time mired in a mediocre detective story when we should be scared out of our wits.