Hostel (2005 film)

Hostel
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Eli Roth
Produced by	Eli Roth Scott Spiegel Tom Hanks Mike Fleiss Quentin Tarantino
Written by	Eli Roth
Starring	Jay Hernandez Derek Richardson Eyþór Guðjónsson Barbara Nedeljáková Rick Hoffman
Music by	Nathan Barr
Cinematography	Milan Chadima
Editing by	George Folsey, Jr.
Studio	Raw Nerve Nex Entertainment International Production Company
Distributed by	Screen Gems Lions Gate Films
Release dates	September 17, 2005 (2005-09-17) (Toronto International Film Festival) January 6, 2006 (2006-01-06) (United States)
Running time	93 minutes[1]
Country	United States
Language	English Czech German Icelandic Japanese Dutch Russian Slovak
Budget	$4.8 million[2]
Box office	$80,578,934[2]

Hostel is a 2005 American horror film written, produced, and directed by Eli Roth and starring Jay Hernandez. It is the first installment of the Hostel film series, followed by Hostel: Part II, released on June 8, 2007, and Hostel: Part III, released on December 27, 2011.

Plot

College students Paxton and Josh are traveling across Europe with their Icelandic friend Óli. After being thrown out of a club and visiting a brothel, the three meet a man named Alexi who convinces them to visit a Hostel in Slovakia filled with beautiful women, redirecting them from Barcelona.

The three board a train to Slovakia, encountering a strange Dutch businessman who touches Josh's leg. Josh yells at him causing the embarrassed businessman to leave. When they arrive at the Slovakian Hostel, they are greeted by Natalya and Svetlana, who invite them to the spa, and later to the disco. Josh is encountered by a group of street boys known as the "Bubblegum Gang" who demand money. They are about to attack Josh when the Dutch Businessman saves him. In return, Josh buys the Dutch Businessman a drink and apologizes to him for his reaction back on the train. Later, Paxton and Josh have sex and sleep with Natalya and Svetlana, while Óli sleeps with the desk girl. The next morning, they are surprised to see that Óli hasn't returned yet, and they are unable to contact him. They are approached by a Japanese girl named Kana, who shows them a photo of Óli and her friend Yuki, who is missing as well.

Even though Josh is anxious to leave, Paxton convinces him to stay one more night. That night, Josh and Paxton are slipped tranquilizers and Josh stumbles back to the hotel room, while Paxton passes out in the disco's storage room closet.

Josh wakes up in a dungeon-like room, and is approached by a man. The man drills holes into Josh's chest and legs. After drilling the holes, he removes his mask, revealing to be the Dutch Businessman. He tells Josh about his failed dream of becoming a surgeon. After Josh pleads with him to set him free, he agrees; instead, he slices Josh's achilles tendons. Unable to walk, Josh attempts to crawl to the door, but is killed by the Dutch Businessman, who slices his throat with a scalpel.

Paxton wakes up the next morning to find Josh missing, and returns to the hostel. He gets frustrated with the desk clerk who insists he checked out that morning. When he returns to his room, Paxton is greeted by two women who invite him to the spa in an eerily similar manner to Natalaya and Svetlana.

Paxton tracks Natalya and Svetlana to a pub. He interrogates them, demanding to know where Josh is. Natalya tells him that Josh and Óli are visiting an art exhibit, and she agrees to take him there. They arrive at a factory, and Paxton is horrified to find Josh's mutilated corpse being stitched together by the Dutch Businessman. Paxton is then ambushed by thugs, and dragged to a cell. He is restrained in a chair, and joined minutes later by a German client named Johann. Paxton tries to plead with the businessman in German, resulting in having a guard putting a gag ball in Paxton's mouth. As he begins to torture Paxton with a chainsaw, Johann takes out the gag ball when Paxton starts to vomit out of fear, leaving the ball on the floor. Johann then severs two of Paxton's fingers with the chainsaw and accidentally severs his restraints as well. Johann charges at Paxton with the chainsaw and slips on the gag ball, severing his own leg. Paxton reaches for a gun, and shoots Johann in the head. A guard enters the room after hearing Paxton call in German. Paxton then shoots the guard and escapes the cell.

Paxton enters another room and hides in the bottom of a cart filled with severed limbs and corpses. A man takes the corpses to the bottom floor to be incinerated, and Paxton knocks him out with a large hammer. He then takes the elevator to the top floor and makes it into the dressing room where he puts on some business clothes and meets an American client who mistakes Paxton for another customer.

Paxton makes it out of the factory, but returns after hearing cries for help. He discovers Kana being tortured by the American client by holding a blowtorch in her eye. After killing the American client, Paxton cuts Kana's hanging limp eye out to calm her down and they are pursued by guards.

Paxton and Kana flee in a car. While driving, Paxton spots Natalya, Svetlana, and Alexi. He runs them over, killing them. Paxton gives the Bubblegum Gang a bag containing bubble gum to let him pass and they later kill the two guards chasing them. Paxton and Kana make it to the train station, but after seeing a reflection of her disfigured face, Kana leaps in the path of an oncoming train. This creates a distraction, allowing Paxton to board another train unnoticed.

Once aboard, Paxton hears the voice of Josh's torturer, the Dutch Businessman. As the train stops in Vienna, Austria, Paxton follows him to a public restroom and throws the Elite Hunting Club's card under his stall. When the Dutch Businessman reaches down to pick it up, Paxton grabs his hand and, using a scalpel, cuts off the same fingers he lost during his escape. He then breaks into the stall and nearly drowns the Dutch Businessman in the toilet bowl, allowing time for him to recognize Paxton, before slitting his throat, killing him. Paxton then leaves to board another train.

Cast

Production

Despite the fact that most of the film is set in a fictional location near Bratislava, Slovakia, not a single sequence was actually shot in Slovakia.^{[citation needed]} It was filmed at the Barrandov Studios, Prague and in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic. In addition to the lower costs of filming in the Czech Republic, Barrandov has well-equipped sound stages, making it a popular choice for U.S. productions set in Europe. 95% of the film was shot on location in and around Prague, and the stage was only used for the main torture rooms. The last scene was filmed at Hamburg Dammtor train station in Germany.^{[citation needed]}

Reception

Box office

The film's opening weekend North American box office gross was $19.5 million, making it the top grossing film that weekend. It went on to gross a total of $47.2 million in the U.S. The film's budget was approximately $4.8 million, and the film went on to gross over $80 million at the box office worldwide.^[2]

Critical response

The film received mixed reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 60% based on 102 reviews, with the site's consensus stating, "Featuring lots of guts and gore, Hostel is a wildly entertaining corpse-filled journey -- assuming one is entertained by corpses, guts, and gore, that is."^[3] On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 55 out of 100, based on 21 reviews.^[4]

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."^[5]

German film historian Florian Evers pointed out the holocaust imagery behind Hostel 's horror iconography, connecting Roth's movie to the Nazi exploitation genre.^[6]

The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw noted that Hostel was "actually silly, crass and queasy. And not in a good way".^[7] David Edelstein of New York Magazine was equally negative deriding director Roth with creating the horror sub-genre "torture porn", or "gorno", using excessive violence to excite audiences like a sexual act.^[8] Jean-François Rauger, film critic for Le Monde, a French newspaper, and programmer of the Cinémathèque Française, listed Hostel as the best American film of 2006, calling it an example of modern consumerism.^[9] Hostel won the 2006 Empire Award for Best Horror Film. The film's underlying social critique and its link to Marxist and Nietzschean philosophy was debated by a panel at Rider University's 2010 Film Symposium by Dr. Barry Seldes, Dr. Robert Good, and James Morgart.^[10]

Slovak reaction to setting

The film's release was accompanied by strong complaints from the country of Slovakia, and also from the Czech Republic. Slovak and Czechs officials were disgusted by the film's portrayal of their country as an undeveloped, poor and uncultured land suffering from high criminality, war, and prostitution,^[11] fearing it would "damage the good reputation of Slovakia" and make foreigners feel it was a dangerous place to be.^[12] The tourist board of Slovakia invited Roth on an all-expense paid trip to their country so he could see it is not made up of run down factories and kids who kill for bubble gum. Tomáš Galbavý, a Slovak Member of Parliament, commented: "I am offended by this film. I think that all Slovaks should feel offended."^[12]

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."^[12][13] Roth has repeatedly argued that despite the many films in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, people still go to Texas.^[14]

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Hostel (2005 film)

• Official website
• Hostel at the Internet Movie Database
• Hostel at allmovie
• Hostel at Box Office Mojo
• Hostel at Rotten Tomatoes
• Hostel at Metacritic