Ernest Alba's Blog

Review: Hostel

I felt ashamed sitting in the theater, watching Hostel. This is a purely exploitative thriller with no redeeming value whatsoever. I've never seen more sex and naked breasts in a movie theater than last night. And there was only sex and naked breasts in the first forty-five minutes! This movie is clearly made to entertain, and it nakedly shows that. No pun intended. And that is where the problem of Hostel lies. This movie has no meat on its bones, kind of like some of the poor victims in this movie. It has a premise: this torture chamber which unsuspecting victims are conned into entering. But it has no delivery; it can't! I'm thankful that the director and writer (same person, Eli Roth) knew when too much was too much. If he had shown too much violence, people would have walked out of the theater. I suspect the movie would have tanked. For example, one of the Americans is given a sleeping pill, and when he wakes up, he is strapped to a chair. We get the obligatory, "where am I? let me go!" demand/plea. We are, of course, right there with him, and we are bracing ourselves for what is going to happen next. Well, the torturer grabs a drill and starts drilling into the guy's legs. The guy hollers and begs for mercy. It's horrible. Then we see a toe being snapped between two pincers. More pleading and begging. Then..gasp! The torturer unshackles him, opens the door, and tells him he's free to leave. The guy can't believe it, but he ain't waiting around. He leaps up....and screams his lungs out. We get a beautiful shot of his ankles....they've been sliced open, so when he gets up, the skin, the muscle, the tendon spread apart. He falls to the floor. At this moment, the audience is thinking, my god, this is only the beginning of the movie, how much more of this can I endure? Roth is right there with us. He closes that scene and gives us time to breathe, by giving us a little detective story with the American guy's friend trying to find out what happened to him. When he finally shows up at the torture chamber, maybe twenty minutes later in the movie, we're ready for some more gore. But after seeing the "more," we realize that maybe we don't want to see that much more. Which is why the wonderful director that he is, he only shows us fleeting scenes of tortures. You can't really make out anything since it's so dark, but you get the gist. You see one person in a cage. You see someone else hanging from chains. You see someone being burned. But these, you only see for a second at the most because anything else and you'd want to leave. But see, that's the problem. We can only handle so much gore, so we can't spend much time in the torture chamber. And we don't. I bet only 25%-30% of the movie is actually in the torture rooms. And we're glad for that, but it makes the movie really insubstantial. In fact, it makes the very beginning of the movie embarassingly long. You get the feeling that the guy is trying to stretch out the running time of the movie by having all these seemingly unneccessary scenes in clubs, bars, and motel rooms. And just to keep you in your seat while you wade through that stuff, there's always some naked girl in the background. This movie is really short and very simple. Not nearly as intelligent or scary as Saw and Saw II. It's something you might want to rent some time, or see in Corsicana for two bucks. I wouldn't waste four.