Blog From The Bench

Hostel
Director: Eli Roth
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What better way to end a film festival than with a horror movie? And even better, with an unfinished, edited yesterday, rough sound mix and non-color timed horror movie?

Eli Roth (Cabin Fever) stole the show at TIFF when his little indie film Cabin Fever outsold every other film that year at Midnight Madness, instantly putting young Mr. Roth on the map of hip independent filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Richard Kelly. So it was with great excitement that Roth debuted his new film Hostel on closing night of the 2005 festival, letting nothing stand in his way – not even the film being incomplete.

Embarrassed, Roth stood up on stage and explained how the film was being shown on a digital projector, burned to DVD because he just finished a rough edit last week, and threw together what he could in order to get on a plane to fly to Toronto to show his fans. You can actually hear Roth on a walkie-talkie at certain points in the film, issuing commands to his crew. That’s how rough we’re talking here.

Despite the hurriedness of the assembly, Hostel seemed as fully-realized a film as one would expect, a shocking foray into brutality and cruelty not often seen in North American horror films these days. The story: three backpackers traveling through Europe enjoying the finer things in life (beer, blunts and babes) catch wind of a hostel in Eastern Europe so remote and out of the way that the local girls go crazy when American accents appear. Lured by the prospect of loose women, the boys finally arrive in the most unlikely of locations – a virtual paradise of naked women ready to satisfy their every desire. But when the boys start disappearing one after the other, the curtain pulls away on the fantasy to reveal a very disturbing reality of dismembered bodies and sadistic torture straight out of a medieval dungeon.

If the plot sounds overly simplistic, it is. Doesn’t matter. The film isn’t here to make you think, only to scare the bejeezus out of you with bloody torsos and entrails. And believe it or not, the plot is half-decent, managing to avoid all but a few of the tenuous horror film clichés that plague the recent flurry of Hollywood horror remakes. Plus, Hostel has some serious weight being thrown behind it, as the executive producer is Quentin Tarantino – and say what you want about Tarantino, but the man knows a good bloody film when he sees it.

I am something of a horror film snob, so I found myself scoffing as much as I squirmed during Hostel, but it held up better (at least from a story and plot perspective) than Saw did. It was hardly the ultra-violent screamfest than the brochure advertised, but if the film survives the trip through the ratings board, there should be enough blood and guts to satisfy the most ardent Fangoria reader. The dialogue is sharp and witty, the film moves at a languid pace for the first two acts, keeping all the secrets deep in the box until the very end, the way a good horror film should. And really, the show was worth the price of admission only to hear Eli and the cast tell stories for an hour after the show – that guy is hilarious beyond words.

I am sure Hostel will do just fine when released, but when all the glitzy excitement of the festival faded away, I felt slightly let down, as if I had gotten myself carried away in all the excitement of five hundred sleep-deprived nerds screaming hysterically at dismembered eyeballs and naked teenage girls. It was a short, thrilling, yet oddly dissatisfying roller-coaster ride that I remember enjoying immensely at the time, but for the life of me cannot remember why the next day.

Oh yeah, now I remember. The naked girls. Freeow.

Verdict: 75