Eli Roth made a splash with his
Thanksgiving trailer from
Grindhouse, and has
Hostel: Part II hitting theaters in just over a month. So what better a time to revisit that last flick's predecessor, with a review of it on DVD and
naked pictures of its lithe stars (above)? To wit, a slightly redacted version of a piece originally published last year, concurrent with the film's bow on DVD, and from an outlet that has yet to make due on its contract to me:
Filmmaker
Eli Roth's first film,
Cabin
Fever, in which a group of friends turn on one another when beset by a
highly contagious flesh-eating virus, took a healthy dose of twisted humor and
married it to an isolated setting and gory concept. His bleak, Euro-backpacking
follow-up,
Hostel, is much
less a
cathartic genre romp than a willfully depraved exercise in stimulus response, largely a
film to be endured rather than viscerally enjoyed. There are still some touches
of mordant wit, both direct (in its slagging, fraternal dialogue) and more
surreal (a brickbat-armed gang of small kids who demand candy), but when you
get up after watching
Hostel, you want to take a shower. And that’s very much
the point.
The story centers on a trio of backpackers — including
Americans Josh (Dumb and Dumberer’s
Derek Richardson) and Paxton (Crazy/Beautiful’s
Jay Hernandez) — who are young, dumb and, as the rest of the saying somewhat
goes, not out to study art, history and cultural intricacies. Looking for
nothing more than good times, they stumble across a guy who recommends they
ditch their plans for Barcelona and
instead head to the remote Eastern European outpost of Bratislava,
where hot local women throw themselves at young guys, particularly anyone from
the United States.
They’re quickly sold on the idea. En route via train, they meet a strange Dutch
gentleman (Jan Vlasák), and are understandably weirded out when he digs into
his salad with his hands and intones, “I like to have a relationship with
something that gave its life so that I might not go hungry. With things I kill,
I feel its mortality.”
Upon arriving in Bratislava, Josh, Paxton and their Russian
pal Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson) immediately find welcome reception for all their
hedonistic dreams, the former two with a pair of mysterious comely lasses,
Natalya and Svetlana (Barbara Nedeljakova and Jana Kaderabkova, respectively).
The guys’ neon-lit pleasure trip, though, quickly turns into a descent into
hell. Oli disappears without saying goodbye, and Josh and Paxton eventually
find themselves drugged, tortured and sold into impending death in a chilling
murder-for-thrill ring.
Housed in a single-disc Amray case, this unrated, widescreen
cut of Hostel features an interesting
gross of supplemental features. Four, count ’em four, full-length audio commentary tracks kick-start the affair,
with Roth sitting in on each one of them. The first is a solo mission, but the
best, if most breathlessly paced, is probably the second option, with Roth and
executive producers Boaz Yakin, Quentin Tarantino and Scott Spiegel. A third
track features Roth, producer Chris Briggs and on-set documentarian Gabriel
Roth, while the fourth is stitched together from thoughts with actors
Nedeljakova (below left) and Gudjonsson (below right), editor George Folsey and Ain’t It Cool News’ tubby
sycophant, Harry Knowles. 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound tracks in both
English and French are featured, nicely showcasing the film’s well-mixed sound
design, which is as aurally panic-inducing as many of the torturous set pieces.
There’s also a brief, interactive featurette that showcases
a scene involving the destruction of an automobile by the aforementioned kiddie
gang, and a nearly hour-long, three-part making-of featurette that is divided
evenly between pre-production and the actual filming. Since Hostel was shot entirely on location,
Roth has interesting things to relate about Prague
toilets, and accountant Mark Bakunas, a former rocker, also emerges as an
interesting character. Finally, there’s equal parts humor and disbelief in a
scene where a Czech day-player shows up on set drunk, and unable to film his
scene. Still, like strung-together vacation slides, this stuff is mostly
formless, and thus only for those really into the movie. While certainly not
for all audiences, what recommends Hostel
is its grungily depraved authenticity; its dungeons come off convincingly as a
human abattoir. For squirming, squinting displeasure, Hostel delivers. B (Movie) B (Disc)
