Review of Hostel

Hostel (2005)
7/10
Good idea...turned to generic garbage.
15 April 2006
This movie really could have been so much more. The idea would have been much better off with someone who actually wanted to make a decent movie, instead of a porno gorefest. The first half of the movie consists almost entirely of sex, talk of sex, drugs, and talk of drugs. Instead of, hey, maybe develop the characters a little so the audience might care about them and make their plights a little more tense, the filmmakers decided to have a lot of party scenes and annoying main characters acting like idiots until, uh oh, we didn't plan on being tortured, oops! The sad thing is, there are hints of something more intelligent beneath the surface, but the surface is piled so high with garbage that it's lost. For example, while at a sex club (wow, original!) one of the characters mentions something along the lines of "paying to do anything you want to a person," of course he means sexually, but we know the basic plot of the movie involves the same concept with death and torture instead of sex. One of the characters is supposed to seem like a nice guy, but still never really develops enough for us to care. The main character has absolutely no depth other than a childhood story and his shallow interaction with his friend. The last half or so of the movie actually starts to gain momentum, and the first half not been an entire waste of film, I could have walked away with more than a feeling that I'd just watched 15 minutes of an okay movie, and an hour and fifteen minutes of porn and senseless gore. Sadly enough, the idea of this movie was put into the wrong hands. A little less than halfway through, my friend turned to me and said, "Maybe I picked up the wrong movie..." to which I replied, "Yeah, I think you got Eurotrip by accident." I am baffled as to why they decided to write the first half like they did. I guess I was hoping for something deeper. Don't watch this expecting anything special, be ready for lots of nudity and lots of incredibly disturbing gore mixed randomly, the two not even seeming to fit like they would in a slasher flick.
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