Hotel. Hostile. Hostel.

I’m ready to come out: I’m a closet admirer of Eli Roth’s recent foray into ultraviolence and the maccabre side of exotic European women. As I’m writing this I know that I’m going to incur the wrath of several of my pseudo-intellectual nonconformist-type cronies by writing an honest review of Hostel, however I’m willing to risk it because I really did enjoy this film.

But the critics are right: if a friend takes you to see this movie with no prior knowledge of the film, you should seriously consider why you call that person a friend. Hostel is violent, and not violent in the Dead Alive, too insane to be taken seriously sense; but in the Spanish Inquisitional, I didn’t know there were that many ways to cause excruciating pain sense. If you can’t handle scenes of graphic violence—nay, if you don’t revel in scenes of graphics violence—Hostel is not for you.

Hostel’s plot is nothing to write home about. If Friday the 13th and Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game had a torrid love affair, Hostel would be their illegitamate and unloved child.

Two run-of-the-mill beer-drinking, tail-chasing American guys, Josh (Derek Richardson) and Paxton (Jason Hernandez), embark on the obligatory post-college trek accross Europe with the single-minded goal of having sex with Europe’s wildest women, smoking it’s best weed, and consuming as much booze as possible. Midway through their journey they meet a young man that tells them to visit Bratislava, and he convinces them that it is the best “party country” that Europe has to offer. The country does not dissappoint, at least not until people from the hostel they’ve stayed at begin to disappear. Drinks are consumed, breasts are beared, and almost immediately death and torture spoils the fun. What, did you think since Jason, Michael, and Freddy Kreuger are dead that horror rules no longer apply? Premarital sex and drugs are sure-fire ways to get iced in a horror movie, and Hostel makes no exceptions.

For me to appreciate Hostel I had to recognize it for what it is. It’s not scary. It’s not going to redefine the horror genre. It’s not artistic; and it’s certainly not all that original. What it is is very, very violent. Going to see Hostel with an expectation of being frightened is like listening to Howard Stern and expecting deep social commentary. You’re going to be disappointed. I love Hostel not because it made me feel scared again, but because it’s the first movie in over a decade that made me feel alive. You can’t help but leave with a certain appreciation of how alive you are in comparison to all of the people that you’ve just watched become so irreversibly dead.

I give Hostel one blow-torched eyeball, a vivisected forearm, and two severed achilles tendons up. With inflation, that should equal about 4 out of 5 stars. Now go see it!