Went to watch Hostel last night with CMDCC. I’ve got to say this was one of the grossest, most disgusting and disturbing movie I’ve seen in awhile. It wasn’t exactly horrifying, but there were some parts that were so disturbing I hit behind my icee cup and bag of popcorn. IMDb users give it a rating of 6.3. You can watch the trailer here. I would only recommend that you ever see this movie only if you have the guts. I almost couldn’t stomach it myself. The movie is really consisted of 2 parts. The first 30 minutes or so was like a porno. Tons of sex and nudity. The remaning hour was filled with sick demented things which I’m not even sure I can describe in my spoilers.
Spoilers:
The story starts out with 3 guys, 2 American college students who are backpacking in Europe and a Icelandic man they met in London or Paris which joined their journey. F*CK! Just thinking about think is creeping me out. It also doesn’t help that I saw a bunch of screenshots when I was searching for the poster images. Anyway, these 3 guys arrive in Amsterdam and you know Amsterdam, pot is legal and a popular red light district. These guys smoked pot all morning and afternoon and then ends up clubbing at night. When they get thrown out, they wanted some girls and ended up at the red light district. Don’t worry, nothing happens in Amsterdam. There was a secondary goal for this trip. Josh, one of the guys, just got dumped by his girlfriend, and they were here to help him get her out of his mind. They end up hiring a prostitute, but Josh ended up not doing it.
So they’re all tired so they head back to the hostel. Apparently, there’s a curfew. It wasn’t clear if it was a curfew for that hostel or if it was a curfew for Amsterdam, but they were locked out in the cold. After awakening up almost everyone by their awful singing and having people throw glass bottles at them, some guy in a different hostel offers them his place if they climb up from the fire escape. So they chat there while a stoned guy and stone girl are having sex. The conversation got to the point where they were talking about girls and how they thought European girls would be easier to get. This was when the guy comes out and tells them about thsi special place in Slovokia where there so many hot chicks just waiting for Americans. At first the 3 were hesitant about, but after the guys showed them the pictures he took with his digital camera, the 3 decided they’d take a side journey to this little town.
Story continues fine. They arrive at the city. There’s a ton of hot chicks just as described and their roomates were these 2 hot chicks that were undressing when they entered and even invited them to the spa. They clubbed and they had sex and everything was going great until the next morning when their Icelandic friend disappeared. The clerk in the front desk says he checked out, but he wasn’t answering his cell phone or anything. They went searching for him the entire day, but couldn’t find him. They were pretty freaked out, but there wasn’t realy much they could do. They decided to go clubbing one last time since this was going to be their last night here. Somehow both of them got really sick and ended up falling asleep with a massive headache. Paxton (the other guy) fell asleep in the storage room while Josh fell asleep back at the hotel. The next morning, Josh wakes up chained to a chair. Ugh, this is going to be so gross. A surgeon looking like guy walks in and takes a drill and drills 2 holes, one in each leg. He unmasks himself and it turns out to be the man they met on the train and at the bar. He tells how he always wanted to be a surgeon, but the board would never pass him because of his non-stoppable shaking hands (reminded me of Mechy). Josh begged him to let him go and he started talking some more and took a knife and sliced 2 areas rather quickly. He then unlocked the chains and walks away. Josh sees this as an opportunity and tries to escape. But no good, the 2 places where he sliced were the tendons behind the ankle and you see his feet rip open the wound. He tries to crawl his way out, but when he reaches the door, the man was already standing there. That was basically the end of Josh.
Back to Paxton. He wakes up the next morning in the storage room and returns to the hostel. Apparently someone had already checked him out. He argues with the clerk which then gives him another room. He tries calling Josh, but no one answers. He enters his new room and there’s 2 females there undressing. They invite him to the spa. He’s starting to get even more scared. Could it just be a coincidence? He goes to the police to file a report, but they said there really wasn’t much they could do. He walks around and bumps into the 2 female roommates and asks if they know where Josh is. At first they were reluctant to talk, but finally ended up telling him he was at an art exhibition. Paxton demands that she take him there and she obliges. When he arrived at the building, he sees a man walking out. Paxton asks him how was it. This man replies, “If you’re not too careful, you might spend all your money on it.” They continue and walk in and Paxton suddenly sees the horror. I believe he actually sees Josh cut open right down the middle. He starts throwing up.
Natasha (the female) starts laughing and some big buff guy comes and takes Paxton away and chains him into a chair. The guy tells him to say something and Paxton responds asking what he wanted him to say. He goes, American and walks away. Some other guy walks in, in a butcher suit takes a scissor and starts snipping in front of his face. He starts begging the guy to stop and the guy actually seemed hesitant and accidentally speaks a line. Paxton knew that language and started begging in that language for him to stop. The guy gets frustrated and starts the chainsaw which he accidentally slices off the ring finger and pinky of Paxton. Paxton is screaming in pain and the man was in a hurry to stop him from screaming because I’m guessing was distracting him, but he slips on the blood and the chainsaw chops off his leg. Paxton saw and opportunity and because his hand was now smaller due to 2 missing fingers, he was able to get out of the cuffs and started yanking the chair until it got loose. The man on the other hand was trying to get back up. Paxton reaches for the gun and shoots to kill. He collects his fingers and sits back down and waits for the big buff guy to come in. He eventually comes in and Paxton turns around and shoots him. If you’re wondering why there was a gun, the tables were lined with tons of tools which allows you to inflict pain on the human body.
The rest of the movie consisted of him trying to escape. He gets to see what they do with the body parts. Apparently some butcher chops up the body parts and burns them.
MAJOR TWIST PLOT AHEAD. SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON’T WANT IT RUINED. So he finds a locker room and changes into some clothing. Some guy enters. Apparently, he’s a “paying” customer. All this time, I thought they were paying to see people get tortured and killed. But it turns out that they are actually paying to torture and kill these people themselves. Apparently, you can identify someone from this group by a tattoo on the inner part of your elbow. Also there’s different costs for different types of people. 3 costs were shown. That included Americans, Europeans, and Locals with Americans being the most costly at $25,000.
This following scene is where I had to almost cover my eyes. There’s another character I haven’t introduced you yet. There were these 2 Japanese girls also visiting this area and Josh and Paxton had met one of them back in the Hostel. While Paxton was escaping, he heard her scream, so he went back to help. He barges in the room and finds a man torching her face with a butane torch or something similar. Her eyeball was hanging out of her socket. Paxton shot the guy and Kana, the girl continued screaming. Paxton didn’t know what to do, so he took a scissor and cut the dangling eye ball off from the socket. *shivers*
He takes the girl and continues their escape. He finds a car and luckily there were keys in the ignition already. People had already started searching for them both. He drives off and the people chase after him. I’m guessing the police were also in on this since they set up road blocks, but it could’ve been for something else too. My intuition tells me it’s not.
[MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD] One of the coolest scenes is in the next few minutes where he sees Natasha and the other girl along with… THE BOY FROM AMSTERDAM that recommended them to come here. In a fit of anger he rams over them killing 2. Natasha was the only one that survived that crash, but nonetheless, the car suddenly comes out of nowhere and runs over her a second time.
One of the interesting group of characters were the children that demanded bubblegum or they beat the crap out of you or even kill you.
Paxton and Kana make it to the train station, but the bad men were already there looking out. While they were hiding, Kana saw her face [MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD] and couldn’t believe how ugly she had become. She couldn’t deal with this and jumps into an on coming train and kills herself. Pretty gross.
Paxton manages to escape during this diversion. He then hears the voice of that man they bumped into on the previous train ride. Paxton follows him and ends up killing him, but torturing him by cutting finger after finger off his hand. That’s the end of the movie. One thing CDMCC and I couldn’t figure out was how Paxton figured the man was part of this society? He did show his tattoo once, but it was to Josh during the bar and Paxton was nowhere near him then. It could’ve been when Paxton saw Josh’s body and he saw the man, but I guess I’ll have to rewatch.. scratch that… I’m not going to rewatch it and just assume it is so…
Film causes wrong kind of horror in Slovakia – “It’s so sad,” said Alzbeta Melicharova, marketing head at Slovakia’s state tourist board. “The events in the film are so absurd. They have nothing to do with reality. We are actually one of central Europe’s safest places. It’s one of our selling points.” Scenes of teens locked in a dungeon, tortured with chainsaws and blowtorches and sold to sadists have shocked this tiny, mainly Catholic, nation that is trying to lure tourists away from the beaten paths that lead to Prague, Budapest and Vienna.