review # 28: Hostel (2005)

I am a great fan of horor movies. I don't know why, they are NEVER scary. Maybe I just like bad movies and horror is a genre that lens itself well to being poorly executed. Hostel is, by far, no exception (does that make sense?). The movie starts as what could easily be a buddy comedy, another automaticaly bad genre, with three college like dudes cruising Europe in the biggest cunt hunt since, umm,...Meatballs 4? The horror movie formula is met by me not caring about any of the characters and, in fact, making want them dead. The character Josh, who I thought was the main character, only wins my favor because he is relativley cute. However, he plays the ugly American, shouting about how he's better cuz he's american when he gets in a fight at a bar. Dilhole. Now the general male audience would love the,oh, 40 minutes of the red-light district dolls and hostel honeys, all more than willing to display their mamories. However, by the time we get to the spa at the hostel I'm hoping that the gore to come will be enough to get the image of all those tits out of my head. I have nothing against breasts, hell, women are beautiful, but it's like being bombarded with advertisments for things I just don't want to buy. One cool thing about the movie is the gang of street kids, all like eight years old...It reminds me of my friend Bob's stories of when he was a kid in Turkey in, I think, the 50's. He got in good with them because he had leverage...tootsie pops. Another good thing is the music at the clubs. It's awful foreign rock/pop, but it's better than american because a) I don't know what they're saying and it seems mocking and b) They seem to have a lot more passion in their voices that's not polished away in the studio. Maybe it's just me. Cut forward, the girls fuck the guys over and sell them to killer artist rich guys or something, and Josh ends up in his underwear. This would be cool if he wasn't tied to a chair and made swiss cheese of with a power drill. So just the lame-ass Paxton is left who ends up escaping through a series of very fortunate coincidences. He saves a Japanese girl he met at the Hostel because of some back story where he didn't save a little girl a long time ago. This poor girl getting mutilated made me thing of Battle Royale and the Suicide Club, cool movies, but they just made me feel real sorry for her. In a nutshell Saw 2 was stupid and Hostel was boring.