Hostel (film)

Hostel (2006) is director Eli Roth's second feature film. The movie is rated R for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language, and drug use. Due to the graphic nature of this film, its showing has been restricted in certain countries, primarily those with strict censorship policies.

Plot

The movie is set in Europe, opening with a shot of a man washing blood down the drain of a mysterious-looking room. Moving from there, we meet three backpacking buddies: Paxton and Josh (From the United States) and Óli (From Iceland), who described himself to his friends and to all who would listen as "the king of the swing." They enjoy repeated experiences of drugs and prostitution, looking for cheap thrills instead of art.

After being kicked out of a club and a hostel, they meet Alex, a man who tells them of a Slovak hostel that is filled with American-loving women that are easy to get into bed. They hop a train there, meeting a bizarre, sexually forward man (Later to be known as the Dutch Surgeon) on the way. Once they arrive at the hostel, they meet Natalia and Svetlana, two very beautiful girls who have sex with them after a night out at a club.

Soon after, Óli and a Japanese woman who was also staying at the hostel go missing, leaving Paxton and Josh to wander about in search of him (Little do they know that both of them have been abducted and taken to an abandoned factory used for torture). A Japanese woman named Kana runs up to them with a picture message on her cell phone. It shows Óli with his friend Yuki (Paxton later finds out the picture was taken just outside the factory.) It says , but they are not buying it. They follow a man wearing Óli's jacket over to the Museum of Torture (Not related to the abandoned factory), and he says it is his. Going back to the hostel, they get another picture message on their cell phone. It is a picture of Óli's decapitated head (although from the picture it does not seem decapitated) saying, "I go home." They give up looking for him, realizing that Óli is too free-spirited for them to be worried. Paxton asks Kana if she wants to get a train, presumably back to Amsterdam, with them. She says yes. They decide to hit the disco with their girlfriends, Josh gets sick, returns to the hostel and goes to bed while Paxton accidentally gets locked in a storage room and passes out.

The next day, Josh wakes up in the factory Óli was taken to; handcuffed and nearly naked, he realizes that this factory is a club (called Elite Hunting) for murder-loving “artists,” where you can pay to torture and murder anyone you want. It is revealed after Josh offers to pay him for his freedom, to which the Dutch man replies, "I am the one who is paying THEM." Three prices are written on a business card Paxton later finds, Americans $25,000, European $10,000, Russian $5,000, with the price of other nationalities remaining unknown to the viewer. The Dutch Surgeon has paid for him, and after some drilling and heel-slitting, he proceeds to kill Josh off-screen.

Paxton, meanwhile, gets out thanks to the janitor, and finds his surroundings growing more and more mysterious: The girls are acting strange, Kana's also missing, and his cell phone is stolen by a candy-grubbing gang of violent children known as the Bubble Gum Gang. He is told by Natalia and Svetlana that Josh and Óli went to an art show, and he demands that they take him there.

Bringing him to the murder factory, Natalia lures him inside and he wanders the halls, shortly witnessing the Dutch Surgeon sew up his latest victim, Josh. Paxton vomits, then Natalia laughs saying he will make her lots of money, as he is grabbed by two thugs, who drag him down the hall to his cell (Along the way, he witnesses the other acts of butchery that are taking place). He is handcuffed to a chair and left to await his fate in the dark.

A torturer soon shows up to kill him. He toys with Paxton using scissors and pliers. After Paxton begins speaking german, the torturer slaps him and asks a guard to place a ballgag on him. The torturer, left alone again, grabs a chainsaw and revs it dangerously close to Paxton's head. Paxton starts to vomit, and the torturer wanting his money's worth removes the ballgag from Paxton's mouth so he does not suffocate. Paxton tries to bite the torturer's fingers, and the torturer accidentally cuts through the handcuffs while taking off two of Paxton’s fingers. When he starts to charge forward, he slips on the ballgag, and the pool of blood formed from from Paxton's severed fingers, resulting in him falling and the chainsaw cutting his own leg nearly in half. Paxton is able to break free and kill the torturer with a pistol on the table of tools. The guard checks it out and is killed too. From there, he begins his escape from the factory.

Paxton's first plan is to dress himself as a tourturer, by putting on a surgons apron and a horned helmet he finds in his tourture room. He quickly exits his room, just as a groups of thugs are rounding the corner of the hall he is in. Ducking into a closet to avoid being seen, he is disgusted by a pile of bodies on a cart. When he hears someone entering the room, he pretends to be a corpse and hides himself under the bodies on the cart. The cart used by a butcher to collect corpses to be taken to a furnace. From there, Paxton spots Josh’s corpse, kills the butcher with a hammer, and moves on. He finds a dressing room of sorts and looks out the window only to see police officers talking to torturers and then leaving. Realizing that the police are deep in the cover-up of the murder factory, he raids one of the lockers in the dressing room and puts on a suit that he finds, as well as some leather gloves to cover the fact that he is bleeding and missing two of his fingers. An American businessman arrives and, believing Paxton is a fellow killer, talks to him about whether or not he should "make it quick" with a pistol. The businessman leaves for his "special treat" while Paxton escapes, but then hears the screams of the businessman’s victim, who turns out to be the Japanese woman, Kana, from the lobby. He breaks back into the factory, enters the torturing room where he finds the businessman melting her eye with a blowtorch. Paxton kills the businessman with the pistol. Kana is still alive, but her right eye is loosely hanging from its socket. In an act of sympathy, Paxton cuts out her eye, which makes a gruesome yellow fluid drain out, and takes her with him in his escape.

They steal a car and flee the factory, but are chased down by the guards. Paxton then finds Natalia and her friend, and also finds Alex, who was helping them lure the boys to their deaths all along. He runs them over in revenge and then when cornered by the bubble gum gang hands the kids a bag of bubble gum that was in the car (Which the other guards, fortunately, do not have, leading to their brutal murders.) They finally arrive at a train station, but other guards are there as well, bribing the police and looking for Paxton.

As Paxton prepares to hop a train, Kana sees her disfigured reflection in a message board window and is horrified at what she sees. She kills herself by jumping in front of a passing locomotive, which also serves as a distraction to everyone else, allowing Paxton to get on the train and escape.

For a while Paxton hides in the lavatory with a knife pointed at the handle, as the Slovakian countryside passes by. During the ride, Paxton hears a familiar voice: The Dutch Surgeon is also on the train. When the train stops, the Surgeon goes into a bathroom, with Paxton, being careful not to be noticed, following. Once inside, Paxton drops an Elite Hunting card on the floor in the next stall over, then cuts off the surgeons fingers. He then procedes to drown the Surgeon in the toilet before lifting his head momentarily up to show who was doing this to him -- the Dutch Surgeon saw his and Paxton's reflections in the toilet paper dispenser -- and then slits his throat, killing him. Paxton then boards another train and escapes.

Partial cast

Jay Hernandez — Paxton
Derek Richardson — Josh
Eyþór Guðjónsson — Óli
Barbara Nedeljáková — Natalya
Jana Kadeřábková — Svetlana
Jan Vlasák — The Dutch Businessman
Jennifer Lim — Kana
Lubomir Šilhavecký — Alex
Paula Wild — Monique
Petr Janis — The German Surgeon
Jana Havlíčková — Vala
Vanessa Jungova — Saskia
Rick Hoffman — The American Client

Reaction

The film opened to decent reviews, especially for a horror film. The film scored a 60% “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes a good showing for a horror film (By comparison, Saw only received a 45% “Rotten” rating [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/saw/).

The film opened #1 at the box office in its opening weekend, grossing $19.5 million and going on to gross a grand total of $47.2 million. Being budgeted at just $4.5 million[http://imdb.com/title/tt0450278/business, the film’s performance was a monumental success.

While the critical results were mixed, countries featured in the film were not so pleased. Slovakia was disgusted by the film’s portrayal of its native country, claiming that it would “damage the good reputation of Slovakia” and would make foreigners feel that it was a dangerous place to be. However, director Roth said that the film was not meant to be offensive, but rather to point out “Americans' ignorance of the world around them.” ^*

Trivia

The idea for the film was developed when Harry Knowles, an Internet film critic, discovered a South-East Asian website advertising human hunting. He showed the site to Eli Roth, who in turn showed it to Quentin Tarantino. Roth asked Tarantino if he could use his name to help the promotion of the film and cash in.
Although he is only listed as an Executive Producer, Quentin Tarantino has been quoted as having worked on both the screenplay and the editing for the film. From an interview with Eli Roth: "I sat down and did another draft…and I showed it to Quentin, and he was like, 'This is awesome. Let’s go through it.' And we went through the script… And he’s like, 'You know, I’d love to be involved in this,' and I’m like, 'Yeah, it’d be so fun.' So he was just great. So we shot in Prague while he was doing a Crime Scene Investigation episode, but he was really helpful in the editing room… Quentin came in the editing room and said, 'Well, what do you think of this, maybe, you know I think you can cut this. You know, I think this is a good scare, but what if you added some this to that?' He helped us trim it down."
Hostel also includes numerous references to the work of Quentin Tarantino, including:
1. - Pulp Fiction running on a TV at the hostel.
  - A character screaming "I'm going medieval on her ass!" during a torture scene.
  - During a torture scene, a murderer uses a blowtorch on a victim, and later the victim's eye is removed with a pair of pliers; Marcellus Wallace told Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction that he was going to get some men to work on Zed with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.
  - Paxton running over his captors with a car after having to stop due to a black van blocking the street on which he is driving. (All of the above are references to the Gold Watch segment of Pulp Fiction).

In the hostel, the main characters stay in room 237, a reference to The Shining.

There are several references to classic Euro horror films of the 1970s. The chase of the character wearing the red hooded coat is a reference to Don't Look Now. The music played during the sex scene in the Hostel is the Sneaker Pimps cover version of "How Do", the song (also known as "Willow's Song" and also covered by Doves) played during the naked dance in The Wicker Man. Both Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man feature outsiders trapped in strange exaggerated European locations whose depiction is unlikely to please local tourist officials. Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man were both released in 1973 in the UK on a double bill.

The most of the movie is set in a small fictional location near Bratislava, Slovakia, but actually no sequence was shot in Slovakia. The filming locations were at the Barrandov Studios, in Prague, Czech Republic and Germany. Barrandov has well-equipped sound stages, making it a popular choice for US productions set in Europe.

Hostel is a low-budget movie; the entire production ran at about $4.5 million.

At the end of the film, when Paxton arrives at the railway station in Vienna, there is a fictional billboard saying "jetz auch am dvd-grosse hits". In correct German it should read "Jetzt auch auf DVD — große Hits". The shot was actually done in Prague.

On the director's commentary for the unrated version of the DVD, Eli Roth revealed that Takashi Miike travelled nine hours by plane to Prague to film his brief cameo as the Japanese businessman.

Kana's suicide by train is a reference to the opening sequence of the movie Suicide Circle, where 54 school girls commit suicide in the same way, using similar camera angles.

Other notable horror references are the German torturer accidentally cutting his own leg with a chainsaw (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and the severing of the achilles tendon to prevent the victim from escaping (Pet Semetary).

Sequel

Hostel 2 is the upcoming thriller sequel to Hostel. The film is currently scheduled for release on January 7, 2007.

Criticism

The movie has been subject to harsh criticism in both Slovakia and in the Czech Republic. It portrays Slovakia as an undeveloped, poor and uncultured country suffering from high criminality and prostitution. To many people, Hostel appears to be misplaced, both culturally and geographically. Slovakia is really in Central, rather than Eastern Europe and although the country has some underdeveloped regions, it hardly differs from any other Central or West European country.

The "local" songs in the film are 20 year old pop songs from Communist Czechoslovakia. The buildings, pubs, discos and other equipment do not reflect the reality - all cars shown in the film allegedly showing Slovakia are 20 to 30 year old cars that are not used anymore (Lada 2101, Volga M21, Tatra T613), the TV sets shown in the film have not been used since the 1960s in this region. Another geography-related goof is the incorrect use of languages. Except for one word, all conversation in the film that is supposed to be in the local language is in Czech, almost all "local" actors are Czechs and all inscriptions are in German or in Czech. Also, there has never been a war in Slovakia, as one sentence in the film suggests. The characters in the film, however, would be far too young to have had parents in World War II nor were any major Second War battles in Slovakia.

The region of Bratislava, where the film is set, is the second most economically advanced region in whole Central and Eastern Europe (far more prosperous than many regions in western Europe or the US) and does not consist only of historic buildings and empty factories, as portrayed in the film.

Member of Parliament Tomas Galbavy recently commented about the film and said, "I am offended by this film. I think that all Slovaks should feel offended." In the same article, Roth has defended his work and commented "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." ^* In defense, Roth said he did this intentionally to portray Slovakia as old stereotypes to represent the backpackers' general ignorance of their surroundings.^*

External links

2006 films | American films | English-language films | Horror films | Films shot in Super 35