There were two things that surprised me about Eli Roth’s Hostel – one was the direction the film took, which I wasn’t expecting from the ads. The other was the fact that I liked it. Both of these surprises hit me about halfway through the film.
I won’t spill too much on the film’s plot, at least not until later in the review, after ample spoiler warnings (since I think the way the film turns out, while not a twist, is surprising and any level of mystery is worth keeping), but I will tell you that one of the reasons I liked Hostel is that it’s well made. That’s a pretty big shock, since Roth’s previous film, Cabin Fever, is passably made at best. Hostel, taken just as a film, is a light year jump ahead. There are scenes in the film that are wonderfully shot – the struggle of a man being drowned in a toilet, a car pulling up to a creepy factory, even a torture scene, all look great. Sadly the talent on display isn’t enough light years forward – a scene in a spa looks like it came out of a Cinemax After Dark teen sex comedy, and the writing is uniformly atrocious.
I’ve heard the movie referred to as torture porn. This made me hopeful, and I was looking forward to something like Ilsa: She-Wolf of the Hostel, maybe. I thought that Eli Roth was the latest guy to jump on the current 70s exploitation bandwagon, a bandwagon I have gone on the record as supporting. It turns out that Hostel is not torture porn at all, and it only has anything to do with 70s exploitation in that every gory film ever made owes a debt to those movies. What Roth is really taking on is Takashi Miike – so explicitly that he has the Japanese director make a cameo appearance in the film.
Eli Roth, I have seen many Takashi Miike movies, and you are no Takashi Miike. For one, Roth is too commercially minded – that’s the one thing he does really have in common with the old grindhouse directors. Look at the ads for this film, trumpeting that people fainted and vomited during screenings. That’s some old school barkery right there, and you have to appreciate it. But the commercial side of Roth means that he would never go where Miike does in terms of incoherence and surreality (and I think that’s a very conscious decision on Miike’s part – many people complain that his films don’t exactly make sense, but I don’t think that’s ever a consideration. Incoherence is creepy on its own. When you don’t understand everything that’s going on, you’re both off your guard and paying more attention) – Hostel owes a very large debt to Audition, but while that’s maybe one of Miike’s most straight-ahead pictures, Hostel never gets to the kind of sheer bizarreness that film does.
It does have the gore. Halfway through Hostel we come to the first torture scene, and I found myself cursing the MPAA. It seemed that the movie had been neutered. Turns out that’s not the case – Roth has set us up to expect a soft R, and when he unleashed the serious and truly nasty gore later on, it’s doubly shocking.
The film’s strong points are its sheer audacity of nastiness, a surprising storyline and some very nice camerawork. Sadly, its weak points are just about everything else. Roth sets up Hostel as a slow build, but he saddles us with thin, unlikable characters. There’s a proper touch needed to make unlikable characters bearable, and Roth and his actors don’t have it – every minute of screentime when these people are not being tortured or menaced is grating and a trial. There’s some method to this madness – Roth is looking to give the hero of the film an arc, but he’s just a despicable jerk and his arc comes across as fake.
There are spoilers that follow, so please skip the next paragraph if you want to remain spoiler-free. And again, I think this film, while not containing a “twist” exactly, should be seen with the least amount of information.
The film’s best moments and its biggest shortcomings all happen in the third act. The gore and the dread are intense – there’s an incredibly effective scene where a character is chained to a metal chair and left alone in the dark, where the screen is completely black and the only sound is the character’s ragged breathing, that’s actually terrifying. Scenes like this are the ones that show that Roth is instinctively a good filmmaker. But soon after that the movie turns into an extended chase scene that is so out of place and silly – culminating in a “I can’t believe this is in this movie” car chase that doesn’t stretch the bounds of believability but rather turns everything into a cartoon.
Of course the weirdness of a car chase is part of what Roth is going for. Miike’s Dead or Alive is a touchstone here – what was a fairly straightforward (if sick) film about gangsters goes completely off the rails in the last reel. Hostel is much less successful in its genresmashing, although the film’s finale, which is heavily reminiscent of the Bourne films (seriously!), is interesting. The problem is that Miike traffics so heavily in weirdness in his films that the ending of Dead or Alive comes naturally, while real headscratching bizarreness is, I think, anathema to the businessman inside Roth. I’m impressed that he’s willing to change lanes so suddenly here, but he’s not willing to leave us with questions. Every aspect of the story is spelled out for us by the end – there’s no mystery, just a chase and some vengeance.
Some of my favorite horror movies are made by directors with one eighth of the talent of Eli Roth. The writing in these films makes the dialogue in Hostel sound like iambic pentameter. But Roth is the Spielberg of gore – he doesn’t want to really alienate you, he doesn’t want to confuse you or unsettle you in any way more than a trip to the funhouse would. The best bad horror films work because there’s a passion and energy behind them that can’t be hidden by technical incompetence, and often a creepy obsession. The best horror movies aren’t just scary on screen, they’re scary off – who the fuck comes up with this stuff? It’s Ruggero Deodata killing real animals in Cannibal Holocaust. It’s Todd Browning having actual circus freaks in Freaks. It’s the creepy, desperate air of Last House on the Left. It’s the chanting girl at the end of Audition. It’s the guy in the bear costume in The Shining. It’s something truly unsettling. Roth has hit on an idea which I won’t spoil, but which could have been the basis of a truly fucking phenomenal, scuzzy exploitation film or a mind-blowing, Dali-esque visceral experience. Instead he’s plasticized it.
That’s probably my biggest problem with Hostel. I really did like it, when it was all said and done, and I was really impressed with it, technically. But in the end it’s an extreme film with its eye on a general audience, and you can’t serve those two masters. Still, I heartily recommend it to people who think there aren’t enough eyeballs being snipped out of sockets in films these days – a club I belong to. It’s only January, but it’s safe to say that Hostel is going to be hard to top when it comes to R-rated nastiness this year.