Ooh, can I be an anonymous 'F' grader too?

The movie starts out slow but picks up towards the end. There are some pretty sick moments also. It seems like the only way to kill someone in this movie is to run them over. The factory where the end of the movie takes place has a very "Saw" like feel. I enjoy the movie but it doesn't have that great of a story and the characters I did care about where dead before the first hour was up. A movie made just for a lot of gore.

B-

the slow pace for the first 45 minutes or so takes my grade down a bit, but the last 45 minutes or so are excellent

B+

This post may be duplicated elsewhere by me...

HOSTEL

Where: Amc24 OKOKC
When: 010606 @ 1910
Size/Occ: 450/50%

Trailers: Lots of Lions Gate stuff with a lot of forgetful titles. One really looked interesting sadly I can't recall much about it at the moment. The rest were all similar in nature in terms of trailer presentation sadly. One that really sucked was the trailer involving the girl inside the house where the "phone call is coming from inside."

Movie: Hostel presented by Quentin Tarantino clearly being used just for name recognition which I guess is okay in this case. The movie follows the travels of three guys in Europe seeking drugs, sex, and hostels for a place to sleep. The movie takes some time setting things up and letting us get to know the three people on the surface, so we can care what happens to them later on as usual. When things do start going down it comes quick and mercilessly save for Jay Hernandez's character who we get to spend a lot more time with. The carnage in this film goes full throttle the last 20 minutes where we get our measure of satisfaction. I thought the music in this film was very good and really built the mood when it needed. I was definitely hoping this film wouldn't turn into a Wolf Creek and although it may seem over the top when you watch it most of it seems to have a definite purpose save for one scene involving some children. I was actually "glued" to this film the whole way through and it did not let me down. I did feel that it was bordering on sadistic towards the end which I was actually enjoying but I think it stops short...barely. Although "fictional" I seriously wouldn't doubt that this stuff in the film goes down somewhere in this world which is almost unreal to imagine. In the end, I thought the setup was maybe a bit too long, but I may be wrong there. The film just really keeps one glued to the screen which I certainly appreciate.

Grade: B+

Well I first want to start off by saying that the nudity in this film is the most I have seen in quite some time, not that I'm complaining. But the build up takes way to long and could have cut down significantly. But once the blood starts, it doesn't stop. Although the blood and gore is not the most I've seen in a movie, but the way it is executed left me a little queezy, and that has never happened before. I loved the rooms and the surgeon outfits they wore, it just added to the sadistic feel of the movie. But I must say the ending was the best I've seen in one time ( especially the scene where he runs over those two girls and kills the guy in the bathroom.

All in all it was a great horror movie but I was actually looking for more blood and guts which I'm sure the DVD will bring since I heard it was edited to bring it down from NC-17.

A-

Hostel shoulda been NC-17.

The first half was just plain porno, and the second half was pretty sick. It was a hell of a time, though. Some awesome scenes and hilarious moments. It's just that the whole film didn't have much of a point. It was just really entertaining.

B+

As torture entertainment goes, I've got to give Hostel the full two severed thumbs!

This is a lovingly twisted nightmare tale, well told, and well directed. Luckily, we live in an age of "torture chic", where it's the cool thing for freedom lovin' people to do - otherwise this would be a freakin' sick bit of trash. But as it is, I have to applaud the committment of the filmmakers in this celebration of perversity. The dichotomy between the strategies of the two American travelers is instructive to anyone who is unfortunate enough to be trapped in any similar industrial torture setting - indeed, I recommend that henceforth, this movie be viewed as pre-training for any European vacation by the naive and uninformed...

5 out of 5.

went to 4 theatres.. all sold out! I shall be ordering them online tomorrow morning.

Really like the reviews

Verypointless,butverygood.Ilovedallthebloodandgoresplatteringeverywhichwayonceitstartedpouring. Andhimrunningoverthosebitchesattheendwasgreat,theaudienceloveditwhenshewasrunoverbythesecondcar.

Itwasverybeen-there-done-that,though.Couldhavebeenbetter,andIthinkthefirsthalf couldhavebeentrimmedalittlebit,butit'sstillagoodmovie.B-.

The car scene, the "eye" scene, and the bathroom scene had the audience clapping. It was great.

It seemed like they couldn't figure out better ways for people to die towards the end so they said hey, lets just have them all in one place and run them over, kinda funny though. As some of the theater reactions have stated.

I passed through this movie but decided on catching the Matador.

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One thing though, I saw this black lady in the front row with her 3 year old son and a baby also. > is this even close to being appropiate > just don't understand some people.

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and also during Match Point > there was a woman who had to see this movie with her 5 year old daughter who of course got bored so she spent part of the movie ither running through the rows or screaming.

just don't get some clueless people or ones that just don't care.

Taking a three-year-old to this film is probably the stupidest thing a person could do.

A terribly amateurish first half filled with adolescent humour and gratuitous nudity gives way to a pretty kick-ass second half once they get to the abandoned factory. The set-up just takes way too long and the way the Hostel is used as a provider of fresh meat is poorly handled. But the horror buff in me got a decent fix once that bald dude slipped and chainsawed himself . The sense of dread and terror was palpable and the level of violence was a bit surprising. I found myself rooting for the Jay Hernandez character to get the hell out of there and take a few bastards out in the process and that's just what I got. That group of kids is just some twisted shit though .

By the way, did anyone else think that that Russian chick was the spitting image of Monica Bellucci?

C+

I was actually hoping Jay was gonna Run over the kids and just send the film right over the top, but it stopped short. It was still a good flick non the less.

BTW, what's the with the 6 bonehead F's. If any "horror" flick deserves those F's it's Wolf Crap.

Once again Eli Roth shows his David Lynch weirdness by having little kids do unneccessary things in the movie. First it was that pancake kid in Cabin Fever, and now its a bunch of 9 year olds who would kill an adult for candy. It was too laugh out loud about that scene. Just like Devil's Rejects, it was a completely pointless film. I probably wouldnt give it high marks if it wasnt horribly gruesome (the eye dangling scene, the butcher severing the remaining body parts in the boiler room). The first act was completely boring and had basically the same setup as Deuce Bigelow 2. The movie wasnt great so I dont understand why everyone is giving it an A simply because its gory but I will give my grade

Storyline: D
Gore : A
Intensity: B
camera work: C
Final grade is probably C+

Zach I gotta say, the first line of your review:


Gave me a great chuckle

Pretty boring in the first 70 minutes. The director must have thought he was making a Hot BubbleGum movie. The last 20 minutes saves it from total embarassment. Best seen on premium cable to save on paying for the movie either at the theater or on DVD.

C-

I disagree with the many comments about the first "x" number of minutes of Hostel being slow or boring.

Alll of the set-up is key to creating a believable scenario the average person might find themselves in! I found the nightmare of the torture factory all the more horrific, because I had bought into the whole reality. As I mentioned in another thread, Open Water is an excellent comparison to Hostel - they are both credible nightmare situations that an normal guy might find himself in - that's what makes them so freakin' scary - they are possible - plus the fact that their storylines are then taken right out to their logical extremes. Both are excellent movies and great examples of this sub-genre of horror of "real-life nightmares" - I suppose the element of hate towards both of these movies has to do with an "impatience" with the needed grounding of the storyline in day-to-day life - fair enough, if that's your bag, go for the instant adrenalin - but for those who like their horror credible and visceral - go see Hostel again, and hang on for dear life...

Hostel

I realize I'm in the very slim minority on this one both here and at the theatre I saw it in, they were very into this film and it played incredibly well, but I just didn't "get" it, I guess I was expecting it to be more Faces of Death (from the early 90s) like.

I was a bit confused for the better part of the movie; based on what we had seen of the three main characters I was under the impression that we were supposed to have a desire for them to be tortured, Ollie and Paxton especially. I would have figured that the start of the movie would be spent establishing why we are supposed to care what happens to these characters and get us involved in their travels, it didn't. What we learn is that these three are backpacking through Europe trying to get high and have as much sex as possible, both admirable goals but nothing that endears them to me. "You go get high Ollie, wohoo.", "Screw that girl proper, Paxton! I hope she doesn't give you an STD" really are we supposed to care what happens? So their desire to score, in more ways than one, takes up a good portion of the movie. I guess you could say the movie starts in earnest when they meet Alexei, who leads them to a Super hostel with lots of hot girls in the idyllic town just outside of Bratislava. It is a bit creepy because Alexei looks as though he should be studying for G11 Algebra instead of telling college kids where to score. I don't want to go too much into the "plot" of this "movie" so I'll just gloss over some things now.

Where this movie was supposed to deliver was in the horror and the torture scenes and it failed as bad as the structural supports of a South Korean department store. We don't even see how Ollie dies, just that his head is no longer attached to his body, sucks to be him. Josh's fate is a bit more explored. We actually hear his screams of fear and see the after effects of some torture, not that we actually see the acts take place, just what happens after them. We get to see a few fingers being severed from different people, and a few gun shots to the head, the result of a trip to an unaccredited ophthalmologist, a bludgeoning, a drowning, a hit and run and how much blood a person committing hari-kari via train lets out. But the actual act of torture? That's rare and not really graphic when shown. All told, this movie was more of a soft core pornographic film, than a sadistic horror, you're more likely to find richer dialogue in actual pornography.

You can't really call this a movie, its characters don't even warrant being called one-dimensional, the dialogue basically amounts to how many synonyms they could come up with for breasts and better plots have been written on bar napkins. When they try and infuse some build up, some meaning, it's so obvious that you can't help but laugh of the ridiculousness of it all. At one point Paxton begins telling Josh a story of how he saw a girl drown and tried to do something to help her but he failed a propos of absolutely nothing, so you know it's going to come up later. The thing is I might have been able to forgive much of this if it accomplished what I would have thought it would set out to do, which is scare.

I think I've seen scarier episodes of Full House. There was absolutely no suspense, nothing that surprised, nothing that really shocked me. The torture scenes were also sub-par. If you are going to do a movie that has a major plot involving torture, I would think you'd actually see some torture, but no. Not so much of that. They were heavy on the effects, but not so much the cause.



Also there's an element of hate towards this film from me that has to do with the fact that it's just fucking horrible.

F. Maybe a G.

That's what I said that this should've gone straight to DVD and putting "Quentin Tarrantino Presents" in the title was sort of misleading wouldn't you say??? Did he really have any involvement in this movie or not??

In terms of "long setup equals tension," Wolf Creek was much, much better. Still, Hostel was better than Cabin Fever.

QT is one of the producers. That probably bought in some of the crowd.

This movie is a SAW wannabe. This movie is dumb as much as Saw was smart.

The best part of the movie is the somewhat action-oriented revenge part.