Hostel is a 2005 horror film written and directed by Eli Roth. It stars Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eyr Gujnsson, and Barbara Nedeljkov. It was produced by Mike Fleiss, Roth, and Chris Briggs, and executive produced by Boaz Yakin, Scott Spiegel, and Quentin Tarantino. The film follows a group of American tourists, as they end up in Slovakia where they are eventually taken one-by-one by an organization that allows people to torture and kill others.
Two college students, Paxton Rodriguez and Josh Brooks, travel across Europe with their Icelandic friend li Eriksson. In the Netherlands, they visit an Amsterdam nightclub, followed by a brothel. Unable to get back into their hostel because of a curfew, they accept the offer of a man named Alexei to stay at his apartment. He convinces them that, instead of going to Barcelona, they should visit a hostel in Slovakia filled with beautiful women.
The three board a train to Slovakia, where they encounter a Dutch businessman, who touches Josh's leg. Josh yells at him, causing him to leave. Arriving in Slovakia, they find that their roommates in the hostel are two women, Natalya and Svetlana. The women invite them to a spa, and later to a disco. Josh has a run in with a gang of local Romani criminal kids. The Dutch businessman intervenes to defend him. Josh apologizes for his reaction on the train.
Paxton and Josh have sex with Natalya and Svetlana, while li leaves with the desk girl, Vala. The next morning, li does not return. The two are approached by a Japanese woman named Kana, who shows them a photo of li and her friend Yuki, who is also missing. Elsewhere, li has been decapitated, while Yuki is being tortured. Josh is anxious to leave, but Paxton convinces him to stay one more night with Natalya and Svetlana. Both women slip the men tranquilizers. Josh faints on his bed. The ill Paxton ends up locked in the pantry.
Josh wakes up in a dungeon-like room, where the Dutch businessman begins maiming him with a drill, making holes in Josh's body, slicing his achilles tendons, then slitting his throat. Paxton wakes up in the disco and returns to the hostel, where he learns that he had supposedly checked out. He is greeted by two women who invite him to the spa. Suspicious, he locates Natalya and Svetlana; Natalya takes Paxton to an old factory, where he sees Josh's mutilated corpse being stitched together by the Dutch businessman. Two men drag Paxton down a hallway, passing by several rooms where other people are being tortured. Paxton is restrained and prepped to be tortured by a German client named Johann.
While cutting off a few of Paxton's fingers with a chainsaw, Johann unintentionally severs his hand restraints. Johann falls over, accidentally severing his leg with the chainsaw. Paxton shoots Johann in the head with a gun. He then kills a guard, changes into business clothes, and finds a business card for the Elite Hunting Club, an organization that allows its clientele to pay to kill and mutilate tourists. Paxton also discovers Kana, whose face is being disfigured with a blowtorch by an American client. Paxton kills the man and rescues Kana and they flee in a stolen car, pursued by guards. Paxton runs over Natalya, Svetlana, and Alexei, killing two of them while the pursuing car finishes off the third. He also encounters the young delinquents from earlier and gives them a big pack of candy and gum. They then attack and kill the men pursuing Paxton with concrete blocks.
The two make it to the train station. Kana, seeing her disfigured face, kills herself by leaping in front of an oncoming train, which attracts attention and allows Paxton to board another train unnoticed. Aboard, Paxton hears the voice of the Dutch businessman. When the train stops in Vienna, Austria, Paxton follows the Dutch businessman into a public restroom and tortures him before slicing the businessman's throat, killing him.
In the director's cut of the film, Paxton follows the Dutch businessman being accompanied by his young daughter into a public restroom of a train station. After finding her teddy bear in the women's restroom, the Dutch businessman frantically searches the crowd for his missing daughter. Paxton is then seen aboard the moving train with the Dutch businessman's daughter, whom he has kidnapped.
After the release of Cabin Fever (2002), Eli Roth was met with praise from several industry figures, including Quentin Tarantino, who placed the film in his 'Top 10' of the year and immediately reached out to Roth in hopes of working with him on a future project. Roth was offered many studio directing jobs, mostly in the form of horror remakes such as The Last House on the Left, The Fog, and a film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, among several others, but Tarantino advised him to turn down those offers to instead create an original horror story. While swimming in Tarantino's pool, Roth brainstormed an idea for a low-budget horror film based on a Thai "murder vacation" website he came across on the dark web.[4] Tarantino loved the idea and encouraged Roth to immediately start writing a draft that day, which later formed the basis for Hostel.[5]
Roth had originally debated creating the film in the style of a fake documentary that would incorporate real people and locations from supposed real underground "murder vacation" spots. When hardly any credible information could be found on the topic, the idea was scrapped in favor of a traditionally flowing narrative using fictional locations and characters. Principal photography took place in the Czech Republic, and many scenes were shot in Česk Krumlov.[6] The torture chamber scenes were filmed in the wing of a Prague hospital that had been abandoned since 1918.
The original music score was composed by Nathan Barr, who previously scored Cabin Fever, and commissioned The Prague FILMharmonic Orchestra to perform the score over a four-day period in October 2005. Also featured in the film's nightclub scene is the song, "Some Kinda Freak" by Mephisto Odyssey. The song featured the repeating hook, "everyone's some kinda freak...", an audio sample taken from the 1973 horror film Ganja & Hess directed by Bill Gunn and starring Duane Jones.[7]
Entertainment Weekly's film critic Owen Gleiberman commended the film's creativity, saying "You may or may not believe that slavering redneck psychos, of the kind who leer through Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, can be found in the Southwest, but it's all too easy to envision this sort of depravity in the former Soviet bloc, the crack-up of which has produced a brutal marketplace of capitalistic fiendishness. The torture scenes in Hostel (snipped toes, sliced ankles, pulled eyeballs) are not, in essence, much different from the surgical terrors in the Saw films, only Roth, by presenting his characters as victims of the same world of flesh-for-fantasy they were grooving on in the first place, digs deep into the nightmare of a society ruled by the profit of illicit desire."[13] Jean-Franois Rauger, a film critic for Le Monde, a French newspaper, and programmer of the Cinmathque Franaise, listed Hostel as the best American film of 2006, calling it an example of modern consumerism.[14]
The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that Hostel was "silly, crass and queasy. And not in a good way".[15] David Edelstein of New York Magazine was equally negative, deriding director Roth with creating the horror subgenre "torture porn", or "gorno", using excessive violence to excite audiences like a sexual act.[16] German film historian Florian Evers has pointed out the Holocaust imagery behind Hostel's horror iconography, connecting Roth's film to the Nazi exploitation genre.[17]
Defending himself, Roth said the film was not meant to be offensive, arguing, "Americans do not even know that this country exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans' ignorance of the world around them."[19][20] Roth argued that despite The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, people still travel to Texas.[21]
See, I'd argue that the scene with the kids works in context. It's like how Rodriguez uses the cute kid in Planet Terror -- Roth knows our expectations and knows that we don't think he'll ACTUALLY kill one of those nuisance kids. The buildup, though squirmy, is well-handled enough that when Mr. Hostel-Ringleader strolls off, there's that brief moment of, "Well, okay, we avoided THAT..." Then the silencer comes out. I think, though, it's significant that a kid isn't just killed at random in a shock-cut -- the kids, who function as a social organism and no doubt have a hierarchy similar to any social structure, choose one of their own who is deemed expendable. From my eyes, it's the most poisonous and cruelly effective demonstration of Roth's world o' social Darwinism (we're all in agreement that's what he's trying, however clumsily, to do here, right?) as well as a brutal goose to the audience showing that, this time at least, Roth knows exactly what he's doing.
Too bad about the Mattarazzo segment, though; although it provides a more concise and effective summation of the Bathory legend than either Eternal or Stay Alive, it's really far out of tune with the rest of the film. (I seem to remember her pleading for mommy once, maybe twice. I could be wrong, though.)
As for best horror film of the year... well, I liked The Host a lot. But I'm far more partial to the intense savagery of 28 Weeks Later.
Darabont going balls-out monster-crazy on THE MIST is - after GRINDHOUSE's double-shot of the good stuff - the most exciting movie prospect of the year, horror or no. Stephen King's novellas are the exact-right length for screenplay adaptation. "The Mist" is vividly cinematic already, but practically begging-crying-screaming for some lucky creature shop to call in its Giant Albino Spider Design A Team and launch this thing into the stratosphere. THE MIST could be all-time great creature feature stuff of legend.
I really hope Mr. Roth can put his more sophomoric tendencies aside for his CELL adaptation and do right by Stephen King. It's a tricky book, and he's going to need every ounce of his filmmaking muscle, and none of his skills as a provocateur.