Hostel has the dubious honor of being the most anticipated horror film of the year – so far – and that’s rarely a good thing for a filmmaker, film, or audience. Expectations for Roth’s sophomore nightmare (he directed 2002’s Cabin Fever) were running redline even before he premiered a work-in-progress print at Austin’s Fantastic Fest this fall. Since then, word of mouth has been downright suppurating with gorehound glee: Finally, a horror film that tells it like it is! Well, not exactly. Hostel is actually two films in one. There’s the quasi-Eurotrip first half, with its ugly Americans rampaging through the EU’s flesh markets and drug bazaars in search of debauched bliss (a sort of Libertines on Leave), and then there’s the relentlessly bad vibes of what happens to our boorish antiheroes when they finally get their hands on “the good stuff.” And to top it all off, I get the sneaking suspicion that Roth’s film, for all its grim sadism and dodgily sensual Eastern European porn-lite, is a comedy, albeit a blacker-than-black one, aimed squarely at the hearts and loins (if not minds) of Modern America – if we build it, you will cum. It’s the sort of film that’s likely to cause a furor on Fox News while both sating horror fans and leaving the rest of the populace wondering either how to get a ticket to Slovakia or how to bomb it into oblivion. (Either way, Bratislavans are unlikely to add Roth or co-executive producer Quentin Tarantino to their Christmas card lists.) American pals Paxton (Hernandez) and Josh (Richardson) are backpacking through Europe with their newfound Icelandic friend Oli (Gudjonsson), getting baked on Amsterdam greenery, and generally behaving in ways ill-advised in this post-9/11 world. Toward journey’s end, they meet up with a shady, young pimp type who promises he can get them laid far more, ah, copiously in the former Soviet bloc country of Slovakia. “Because of the war, there’s no men,” he tells them, leaving the presumably obvious question of what war he might be referencing to evaporate in midconversation. Of course, they take the bait and end up in what at first appears to be National Lampoon’s version of heaven – featuring the rarely clothed Nedeljakova and Kaderabkova – before discovering, too late for the most part, that it is indeed a very lonely planet after all and that in Slovakia, no one can hear you scream – least of all the American Consulate. Hostel certainly delivers in the gore department, and Roth, who knows and loves his favorite genre at least as well as the gang over at the Alamo Drafthouse, peppers the proceedings with various witty in-jokes, including a sex scene set to the grinding beat of “Willow’s Song” from the cult classic The Wicker Man and a brief but canny cameo by Japan’s transgressive cinematic godhead Takashi Miike. Still, there’s a feeling of not quite hitting the mark here. A series of last-act coincidences – including a sudden, nasty moment of automotive retribution – leaves you wanting for more. More what? I’m still not certain. But I’m quite sure I won’t be Eurailing to check out the hotties of the former USSR without first packing a Mouser in my trousers. As girls go, they’re just way too wild.
This article appears in January 13 • 2006.