Hostel

Yay! I did go watch the movie in the end with Natasha. This girl has nerves of steel! I'm a sucker for horror films! Eli Roth's Hostel, follows this formula: drugs - sex - slaugher.

The things I liked were the gruesome, explicit images of gore and torture, the haunting screams and sickening complexities of the tormentors.

The things I didn't like were the ever so familiar images of "stupid" Americans, backpacking around Europe, with no clue what Europe really is about. After bong-lighting and gratuitous exposure of naked women in Amsterdam, we see the two friends and their Icelander tag-along arrive in Slovakia.

I've read that Roth asked for an official pardon for making Icelanders look like drunken sex maniacs with the character of Oli and issued a formal apology to the Icelandic Minister of Culture, for all the damage Hostel may cause to Iceland's reputation. (source: imdb) Didn't he do this for Slovakia? This eastern European country, is depicted as a marketplace for everyone who has the right price. Even psychopaths and sociopaths who want to feel what it's like to kill a "fellow" human being. Talk about killing tourism... Anyhow, these weirdos don't go for the easy and less excruciating method of shooting. They use everything, from snips to flamethrowers.

As the bodycount increases, you feel like you want to take revenge for every scream. Our backpacker "heroes" paid for meat. They paid for prostitutes to have sex. The others paid for the pleasure of torture. The greatest scene is a parallel of the brothel corridor to the corridor of the "slaughterhouse". Pay attention to it, if you decide to watch it.

The final scene destroys this road to catharsis the movie could have gone on.

The german poster's tagline says: "Try not to puke". Well, I saw everything, but jumped startled from time to time and looked for Natasha. I'm such a wimp... No I didn't have nightmares afterwards...

What scared me the most is that it's inspired by true events. Director Eli Roth says that he found a Thai website that advertised itself as a "murder vacation", offering users the chance to torture and kill someone for the price of $10,000. Roth later showed the site to Quentin Tarantino and the two developed the idea for the film. I sure hope this isn't true...

There is a sequel already in the works and the DVD is out in the US which includes an alternate ending.