REVIEWED - HOSTEL: Hostel is a nerve-shredding tale of ugly Americans trapped in an Eastern European chamber of horrors, writes Michael Dwyer
WRITER-director Eli Roth follows his gory, highly profitable debut movie, Cabin Fever (2002) with a darker, more serious excursion into the horror genre in Hostel, which prominently carries the imprimatur, "Quentin Tarantino presents".
Roth says Tarantino "went crazy" with excitement when he outlined his ideas for the movie. Although he pops a homage into a hotel lobby scene where a dubbed version of Pulp Fiction is playing, Roth cites the recent cycle of Asian psychodramas - and in particular, Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Takashi Miike's Audition - as his primary influences.
Miike makes a cameo appearance in Hostel, which follows two naive US college students (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) seeking out sex and drugs over a hedonistic summer holiday across Europe. In Amsterdam they team up with a gregarious Icelandic sex tourist, played by Disney Home Video's former marketing manager in Reykjavik, Eythor Gudjonsson, in a scene-stealing acting debut.
When they hear about the unlimited sexual prospects available at a hostel-cum-spa outside Bratislava, all three head for Slovakia. What they don't know is the terrible fate that awaits them as playthings in a torture chamber where the props department wheels out chainsaws, drills, knives and scalpels.
The consequences are blood-splattered in this nervy, slick horror movie made with true genre panache by Roth, and not without humour, as when he cuts from a scene of gruesome toe torture to mundane manicuring.
Making impressively unsettling use of sound effects, Roth effectively uses powers of suggestion to make us imagine that what we are witnessing is even worse than what is actually shown. He keeps audience empathy with the protagonists at bay, establishing an emotional distance from these essentially unsympathetic characters. The viewer is likely to feel more sympathy for the aggrieved Slovak tourist board.
