Hostel is a 2005 horror film written, produced and directed by Eli Roth and starring Jay Hernandez. Due to the graphic nature of this film, its showing has been restricted in certain countries.^{[citation needed]} The sequel, Hostel: Part II, was released on June 8, 2007.

Plot[link]

College students Paxton and Josh, along with their friend Óli, are backpacking across Europe. After a night of partying, they meet a Russian man named Alexei who informs them about an undocumented hostel near Bratislava filled with beautiful, desperate, American-loving women.

The three subsequently board a train on which they meet a peculiar Dutch businessman, whose bizarre behavior puzzles the trio until he places his hand on Josh's knee, causing him to react badly. The three leave the train at a small Slovak village, and check into the local hostel, finding themselves sharing a room with two beautiful single women, Natalya and Svetlana, who invite them to the disco. At the disco, Josh is saved from a gang of impoverished children looking for money and bubblegum by the peculiar businessman. The next day, a young Japanese backpacker, Kana, approaches Paxton and Josh, who are searching for Óli, informing them that her friend, Yuki, is strangely missing as well. An MMS photo sent from Yuki's phone shows Yuki and Óli, with the word "Sayonara" beneath it. A while later, they spot a man wearing Óli's jacket. Not long after, Paxton and Josh receive a second MMS photo message from Óli's phone, in which their friend appears in a closeup face shot with the text "I go home". Then, the scene shifts to the source of the photo, revealing Óli's severed head sitting on a table. Paxton and Josh decide to leave Bratislava with Kana the following day. Paxton later notices that the photo of Oli and Yuki has been faked. Although Josh is anxious to leave immediately, Paxton talks him into staying just one more night, so they can have sex with Natalya and Svetlana one more time. Josh reluctantly agrees. Later that night, while partying with Natalya and Svetlana, Paxton and Josh are slipped tranquilizers. Josh stumbles back to the hostel while Paxton passes out in the disco's storage room.

Josh wakes up handcuffed to a chair in a dungeon-like room. The businessman comes in and starts torturing him, telling him about his unfulfilled dream of being a surgeon. After slicing Josh's Achilles tendons and seemingly allowing him to leave, the now unable to walk Josh is killed by the businessman. Paxton returns to his room where two women invite him to a spa, eerily similar to Natalya and Svetlana. When the local police chief proves unhelpful, Paxton locates Natalya and Svetlana. He interrogates them on the whereabouts of Josh and the girls eventually agree to show them where he is.

Once Paxton enters the factory, he shockingly witnesses the businessman cutting open Josh's corpse. He is then ambushed by thugs and taken to a cell and learns that he was sold. He is restrained in a chair and joined minutes later by a German client, Johann. After trying to reason with him, Johann calls one of the thugs to silence him with a ball gag. He prepares to kill Paxton, however Paxton begins to vomit,where Johann takes the gag off and torments him and then accidentally cutting off two of Paxton's fingers, he unknowingly severs Paxton's restraints. Johann slips and cuts his own leg off with his chainsaw. Paxton gets out of the chair and shoots Johann. Paxton shoots the guard that comes in by pretending he's still in the chair. He escapes the cell and hides in the bottom of a cart piled with corpses. The man with the cart goes to the bottom floor of the building. In this floor he finds the stitched up corpse of Josh. He kills the cart pusher whose job is revealed to be the one that incinerates the bodies. He goes up and makes it to a dressing room. He meets another American who has also come here to join an organization called the Elite Hunting game. He asks Paxton questions on the experience believing that Paxton also paid. He discovers Kana being tortured by the American he met and frees her, killing the American. The two flee in a car, accidentally meeting Natalya, Svetlana and Alexei on a street. Paxton steps on the accelerator pedal to run them over. Svetlana dies instantly, while Natalya survives the hit by the Volga, but she is then run over by the car chasing Paxton and Kana. Alexei also dies. With the help of the child gang, Paxton and Kana elude the guards and head to the train station. When Kana sees a reflection of her disfigured face, she jumps in front of an oncoming train, while Paxton gets on another train.

Aboard the train, Paxton hears the voice of the businessman. In Vienna, he follows him to a public restroom and throws the Elite Hunting's card under his stall. When the businessman reaches to pick it up, Paxton cuts off two of his fingers, holds his head underwater and, when the businessman sees Paxton's reflection, slices his throat. Paxton then boards a train leaving Vienna.

Cast[link]

Production[link]

Despite the fact that most of the film is set in a small fictional location near Bratislava, Slovakia, not a single sequence was actually shot in Slovakia. 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 US productions set in Europe. Ninety-five percent of the film was shot on location in and around Prague, and the stage was only used for the main torture rooms.

Reception[link]

Box office[link]

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 around $4.8 million,^[2] and the film went on to gross over $80 million at the box office worldwide.

Critical response[link]

The film received mixed to positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 59% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 98 reviews, with the sites 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]

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw noted that Hostel was "actually silly, crass and queasy. And not in a good way".^[6] 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.^[7] 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.^[8] 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 recently debated by a panel at Rider University's 2010 Film Symposium by Dr. Barry Seldes, Dr. Robert Good, and James Morgart.^[9]

Slovak reaction to setting[link]

The film's release was accompanied by strong complaints from the country of Slovakia, and also from the Czech Republic. Slovak 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,^[10] fearing it would "damage the good reputation of Slovakia" and make foreigners feel it was a dangerous place to be.^[11] 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."^[11]

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."^[11][12] Roth has repeatedly argued that despite the many films in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, people still go to Texas.^[13]

References[link]

External links[link]

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

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