FILM: Hostel

American college buddies Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) are backpacking through Europe with their new Icelandic friend Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson). When they get tired of all the Americans in Amsterdam, they head for an out-of-the-way Slovakian town that promises a Hostel full of beautiful Eastern European women starved of male contact since the war...


If it wasn't for the brief glimpse of some teeth in the opening shots of this film, you might think you'd wrongly bought a ticket to a soft core porn movie. The three unsympathetic main characters are drinking and fucking their way around Europe on a backpacking holiday. By the time they finally head to a hostel on the promise of hot loose girls you're not exactly rooting for them. (Judging by their snatched conversation, I'm guessing this is also the point the two reviewers sitting in front of me who were supposed to be watching MirrorMask next door realised this wasn't their film).

If there's a moral to Hostel it's the same one that should be applied to the tempting email offers that clog up your Inbox - if something seems too good to be true it probably is. When the three leads reach the hostel it's like a male fantasy brought to life. However, the slow build-up to reach this point doesn't work as well as with something like House of Wax, partly because you care less about the characters here.

SPOILER (highlight to read):
Anyone who has seen House of Wax must also wonder if there is a new set of horror rules being created. The Scream series blew apart the old set of horror cliches by naming and then using them as part of the plot. House of Wax and Hostel both share some new rules: Had your achilles tendons cut? You're a goner. Lost one or more fingers? That's your lot for this film, see you at the closing credits.

At the moment there seems to be a push towards really nasty psycho horrors in mainstream cinema. When modern horrors are mistakenly made for a PG-13 audience (The Fog, Cursed, etc), do 18 certificate films have to push things that much further? Or is this just an expression of a culture where rendition and torture are so everyday that you have to step it up and show what people have only imagined before? When Jack Bauer kills and tortures terrorists for fun every week on TV, would Quentin Tarantino's pull away from an ear-slicing shot in 1992 look weak today rather than clever? Whatever the reason, this is pretty nasty stuff and it's the quickest I've seen a viewing room empty when the credits started to roll.

Still, these movies have their uses. If in a few months your 18-year-old is making plans to go backpacking, why not host a DVD night for them. Pick up a takeaway, pop along to Blockbuster and rent out Wolf Creek and Hostel. After that they'll probably prefer two weeks in Tenerife instead...

Hostel is out now in UK cinemas and is released on Region 1 DVD at Amazon.com on April 18 2006