PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 1/6/06)

Along with last year's faux-snuff quartet High Tension, The Devil's Rejects, Saw II and Wolf Creek, the entertainingly unhinged Hostel reeks of kneeling reverence to the grisliest of psychotronica while simultaneously striving to out-gore and out-shock its predecessors. Writer-director Eli Roth, whose semi-comical Cabin Fever showed promise for future humor/horror hybrids, instead front-loads all the laughter here so that he can go balls-to-the-wall excessive once the action crawls for its life along dingy abattoir floors stacked with organs, limbs and esoteric torture-ware.

Hostel contemporizes the archetypal pot-smoking, promiscuous teens into a backpacking fraternity of three (party boy Jay Hernandez, reluctant hornball Derek Richardson, Icelandic womanizer Eythor Gudjonsson), whose shared character development involves trying to bang as many hot Eastern European chicks as their cameraphone memory will hold. Some will see the first reel's red-light district decadence and wanton nudity as misogynistic. And though it most certainly is, the truly perverse glee comes from how that purposefully demonizes our heroes as not just debaucherous but bigoted and misanthropic. All the better to justify their preordained drillings. When the three are lured into visiting a hostel in Slovakia, an orgiastic oasis where women far outnumber men due to past wars, their single-minded dreams have seemingly come true. That's until they discover themselves victims of a regional conspiracy: rich businessmen can pay to torture and kill in the privacy of their own dungeon, and guess whose nubile lovers are in on this barbaric scam?

The glaring issue with these new-wave slasher filmmakers is that they almost always back-burner their suspense to concentrate wholly on the "serious" art of disgusting documentary-like realism. Unforunately, the more convincing their brutality, the less reward the audience is given for withstanding these endurance contests, like a roller coaster ride with track pieces removed or a hot sauce that's so spicy that you can no longer taste its flavor. Roth clearly recognizes this, as well as the need to tell a fleshed-out story with more surprises than who's going to get their tendon sliced next. Effectively upsetting as a variation from the standard dimensionlessness of serial-killer plots, Hostel is a thrilling high-water mark for an inherently dumb sub-genre, and that's only back-handed praise to those who wouldn't have even considered buying a ticket.
—Aaron Hillis