Hostel (2006)

Cabin Fever director Eli Roth offers a finger-chopping, Achilles heel-slashing, blood-soaked, breast-filled variation on The Most Dangerous Game in this sophomore shocker that shifts the focus from goofy humor to squirmy splatter to nerve-shredding effect. To those familiar with the torture-happy films of Takashi Miike (who makes a humorous cameo as a satisfied customer) or the reprehensible horrors of the infamous Guinea Pig or All Night Long series of films, the sadistic concept that drives Hostel may be familiar and even somewhat passé by now. Casual filmgoers looking for a simple shock are in for quite a surprise, though, when they find out just how far Roth is willing to go in order to bring these Asian atrocities to the cozy, MPAA-policed confines of the American multiplex. Make no mistake, Hostel has a mean streak a mile wide, but horror is relative, and in the end it's the ability or willingness of viewers to endure the visceral terrors of the torture subgenre that will likely make or break the film for them. The fact that Roth's central trio of horny hikers are so instantly unlikable may make their grim fate a bit easier to endure, given that the viewer is hard-pressed to connect with them on any kind of emotional level, but the gut reaction that one gets when witnessing someone handcuffed to a chair and tormented with chain saws and rusty medical instruments just might not be everyone's idea of entertainment, regardless of whether or not one can relate to the characters. In a time when the multiplex is filled with watered-down horror remakes that strip away any and all social subtexts that may have been present in the original films to simply offer a glossy, jump-scare variation on a familiar central concept, Roth deserves credit for crafting a film that, even if it isn't entirely original, truly is relevant to his generation. It's as interesting to witness the reactions that two young Americans traveling abroad have to their new surroundings as it is to see how those from other cultures react to them, and even if they are little more than sex-crazed, frat-boy caricatures of Western values, Roth is obviously attempting to make a comment on how the U.S. is viewed from an outside perspective. When all is said and done, Hostel is most definitely more interested in making audiences cringe than it is in making any sort of bold political or sociological statement, but the presence of those aspects within Hostel is testament to Roth's successful ability to utilize the genre in a similar manner as Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper (two filmmakers who obviously made a big impression on the fledgling genre specialist) did in the 1970s. Though Roth may not have quite earned the privilege to be ranked alongside those two undisputed masters as a result of his first two features, he's certainly headed in the right direction. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide