It’s impossible to know where to begin dissecting the broken sewer main that is the movie, Hostel.  Of course, any critique of a film with such obviously skyscraping levels of suckage begs the question of why someone like me didn’t see it coming.  Here, I admit to being a horror fan from childhood who, having had a few ecstatic scares before I had pubic hair, have been chasing the “first high” ever since.  

Hostel plays like it was written by two of the stupidest frat boys on the planet after a bong-fueled conversation where everyone thought their ideas were brilliant.  This is usually accomplished by the absence of anyone actually brilliant in the room.  The first three-quarters of the movie involve a group of friends and their casual sex travelogue through Europe.  Of course an enterprising foreigner tells them about this hostel tucked away in the Eastern bloc where the model-hot local girls tumble out of the trees, legs spread, waiting to get screwed by shitfaced lugs.  But, of course, the women are merely lures (evil, evil vaginas) leading the young men to a pay-per-kill dungeon where psychos act out protracted and theatrical murders.  

I won’t spend too much time savaging the plot for the simple reason that it’d be shooting fish on your plate at Red Lobster.  But I was intrigued by the almost backhanded inclusion of repeated homosexual panic, as the main characters police each other’s behavior with casual homophobia.  Methinks they doth repress too much. For those with fine-tuned gaydar, nothing is quite as obvious as the conquistador penis, the man desperate to prove his masculinity by having human-to-meat interactions with as many women as possible, as if sexuality can be denied with enough bed post notches.  In my experience, there are far too many men who hate women because they dig men.  When the entire film leads to a climax with the two nearly naked male protagonists getting tortured, I couldn’t help but wonder, why doesn’t everybody in this movie fuck so we could have less violence?  It sort of cements the sexual panic theory for me that one of the killers turns out to be an older man who had previously come on to one of the characters on a bus in a clearly dangerous spasm of gay.  Open homosexuals really must be the epitome of horror for closet-case jocks.

One side note that I must admit made me laugh out loud.  At one point Jay Hernandez’ character saves this Asian woman who just had her eye plucked out.  Of course she scrambles and fights to survive only to see herself in the mirror and commit suicide by train rather than live a life of imperfection.  Don’t they have plastic surgery in her country of origin?  I guess Asian women must be so obsessed with their looks that they’d rather die than face a life of asymmetry.  Since none of Gwen Stefani’s back-up Asians have glass eyes, the writers of Hostel couldn’t imagine a world where a woman they considered unattractive would want to live.    

Terry Sawyer