HOSTEL - eli roth - 4.1 / 10

As far as I can tell, the point of this film is to see how much you, the viewer, can stomach. There's nothing in its artfully disturbed head besides a desire to maim and torture. So much so that during the film's climactic escape from the house of horrors there are numerous scenes of horrible violence for no apparent reason (two men get their heads bashed in by hungry looking children, a Japanese woman throws herself in front of a train). These moments do not advance the plot and are not necessary from any sort of story perspective. (Notice that I've left out the final murder in a Prague bathroom which is somewhat justifiable.) They are bloodletting for the sake of bloodletting.

So the question becomes, what the hell is the point of this sadism and why are people interested in watching it? These days the vogue in horror / thrillers is to set the action in medieval looking dungeons with years of blood and grim soaked into the artfully photographed cracks in the floor. Various tools of torture (all artfully rusted and squeaking of course) are strewn about the room. And there's always some sort of half human hunchback waiting in the wings to clean up the mess when the sadist torturers have completed their work. I guess the thinking is that we are no longer scared of death itself, that what we really fear is a gruesome and prolonged death. And so these films (Saw, Wolf Creek, etc.) give us the bloody torture before the eventual murder. There's nothing wrong with that approach in and of itself (except perhaps for what it says about a society hungry to eat up this sort of uber violence) but what is often lost, as it is in this film, is any pretense of scaring the audience. There's no build-up of tension and no question of what's going to happen. It's just a waiting game for scenes of torture.

There's also the issue of the gross misuse of music in Hostel. Throughout the beginning of the film, in which there's nothing much horrible happening, the music is used to give a sense of foreboding when none would otherwise exist. I suppose that's somewhat necessary because of the complete lack of anything interesting happening but the way in which it's overused is just grating. There's no need to have a huge build with violins screeching away as the train pulls into the station. It's distracting and annoying and completely unjustified.