If there ever was a product of its time, then surely it was the aggressively nasty horror sub-genre known as torture porn. Technically jump started by the success of James Wan’s Saw and a direct response to the teen-slashers and remakes that had made the cinematic landscape fairly predictable, well plotted scares and measured, manufactured dread were mostly discarded in favour of taboo-pushing gore and an open challenge to its audience to see if they were “tough” enough to weather the gruesome sadism inflicted within. While some interpreted the brief into such different territories as foreign art house, lazy shocks and whatever the hell the Human Centipede movies were supposed to be, unsurprisingly it was Eli Roth who truly brought torture porn into the mainstream with probably its most accessible entry.
Released in 2005 with a lot of hype to back up, could this vacation gone wrong flick find a balance between creating sustained misery and suffering and actually doing something with it? It’s time to take a vacation into torture-ville to find out.
Two bawdy college students Paxton Rodriguez and Josh Brooks are travelling across Europe in order to seemingly indulge in as much weed and sex as their young bodies will allow while joined by their Icelandic friend, Óli, who hooked up with them at some point in their odyssey. However, when they reach the Amsterdam leg of their journey, they bump into Alexi who urges them to skip their future destination of Barcelona and instead head over to Slovakia where he fills their heads with tales of a hostel supposedly crammed with more hot babes than the Playboy mansion. Because our trio of travelers are thinking exclusively with their dicks with this point, they think that this is a great idea and do exactly that – but after discovering that their destination in Slovakia is a sleepy town, the women in the hostel they were directed to do indeed seem to be hot to trot.
This is where things inevitably turn south because after only one night there, Óli supposedly leaves with another random tourist which spreads a fair amount of unease within Josh. It soon becomes clear that these horny American kids have been led by the nose (and other protruding body parts) into the middle of a trap orchestrated by a secret underground business who trade in kidnapping wayward tourists in order for high-paying, seemingly normal clients to live out their sordid and violent whims of murder and mutilation. If Josh and Paxton don’t get wise sooner rather than later, they’re liable to end up strapped in a metal chair while some rich goon gets to satisfy their everyday frustrations by taking it out on young, jubilee flesh with every blunt and sharp tool you can imagine. You’ve heard of tourist traps? Pal, you ain’t seen nothing yet…
This may be a strangely obvious thing to say about a torture porn movie made back in 2005, but large parts of Hostel haven’t aged particularly well. There’s an argument to be made that a lot of films don’t, but I found that a long overdue rewatch of Eli Roth’s second feature included moments that were noticeably tough to watch that actually had nothing to do with graphic mutilation and drawn out abuse. You see, while Roth’s first movie, Cabin Fever, also included a fair amount of “frat boy” attitude that saw its male characters engage in hefty amounts of homophobia and misogyny, it not mirrored how certain youths communicated, but it made these arrogant, self absorbed personalities the perfect foil for a flesh eating disease that got to business dissolving their relationships just as fast as it did their bodies. However, while Roth seems to be trying to use the same trick to make some sort of jumbled metaphor for how unbearable Americans (or first world people in general) from privileged backgrounds can be when in another country, the writer director overeggs the pudding so much that it’s actually virtually impossible to empathise with these guys even when they’re losing fingers and having drills bored through their legs. This may be deliberate for a whole raft of reasons, the most likely being that he’s trying to f8nd a situation that can actively scare the kind of dude bros who don’t often get creeped out by the likes ghosts or vampires – but there’s always a chance that Roth is also trying to put us in a mindset where we can’t wait to see these guys tortured only to shock us back to our senses when they do.
Maybe I’m reading into it too much, but whatever the reason, it doesn’t work and as a result, a decade after its initial release the first half of Hostel ends up being the wrong kind of excruciating to watch and if Roth is trying to make a statement about Americans abroad, by necessity he has to torpedo it with a hefty dose of weaponized xenophobia (aka. aren’t foreigners weird, dude?) to create the all-important sense of unease about the whole thing.
However, once Roth finally manages to drop the setup and go into the payoff, his horror credentials finally manage to pay off as he delivers a second half that moves like lightning and offers up all the squirm-worthy moments the entire movie was sold on. Yes, the torture stuff is appropriately nasty with a pair of sliced achilies tendons still making you flinch as if you’d just experienced them yourself, but you can tell that Roth is having way more fun setting up the secret murder trafficking organisation and, more importantly, the people who use it. Finding out that rich, toxic, creepy males are gleefully paying to slaughter nobodies to give them that thrill that they’re yearning for is hardly cutting edge satire, but Roth adds lots of little nice touches such as Jan Vlasák’s quite family man who uses the grotesque service to fulfill his foiled dreams of being a surgeon, or Rick (Suits) Hoffman’s typically brash boardroom bully who gives a shell-shocked Paxton a pumped, pro-murder tirade (“I just fucked a girl two days ago and I don’t even remember the color of her tits.”) – but chances are you’ll most remember the hard-core stuff.
Be it those popping tendons, the sight of someone having their face blow torched off or the subsequent butt-clenching snipping of a dangling optic nerve, Roth scores bulleyes when he most needs them and he continues his tongue-in-cheek string of unlikely cinematic payoff when the survivors amusingly run into the exact people who put them into this nightmarish situation in the first place and act accordingly. However, while Hostel does enough to justify its notoriety, you tend to wish that Roth had the balls to make his protagonists actually likable in order to make the terrible things that occurs actually mean more than just bringing the nasty.
Regardless of your opinion of torture porn in general, Hostel does actually stand as a good entry point to a sub-genre that contains some truly harrowing entries. However, as a stand-alone horror release, Eli Roth’s offensive opus is hardly the most extreme example, nor is its vacation-ruining plot that original either. Hostel is appropriately hostile, but it doesn’t break the mold anywhere as much as it thinks it does…
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