Hostel

THE BAD:
Bad: too short. But they needed it to be that short or it would've dragged out and would have been boring.

SUMMARY:
let me begin with a summary of hostel complete with spoilers:

3 guys, Paxton, josh and their new Icelandic buddy Oli are backpacking across Europe. Paxton is an outgoing extrovert and fun loving guy; josh is a stiff loser and a bit on the queer side. Oli is a complete goofball but they later learn as ridiculous as he is, he has a wife and family.

They first get to Amsterdam, where they goof off and get into a club fight and stuff. They are in a hostel, but it's not THE hostel. but they stayed up past curfew and the hostel wouldn't let them back in. so then they go to the red light district, and fool around with the chicks, and you see josh kind of sucker out for some reason. Then they go to this random guy's house, where they sleep and the guy tells them to go to Czechoslovakia because there are hot chicks there. As if the chicks in Amsterdam weren't good enough.

So they go on the train to Czechoslovakia, and meet this creepy dude who eats salad with his fingers on the train. When they get to Slovakia there are these annoying little kids that should have been omitted from the movie. They go to a torture museum. Anyway they check in this great hostel, with a party room and nude unisex steam room and unisex rooms, where they *bleep* the female roommates. Even josh does. Then they party some more. They meet some Japanese hot twins. i wont say much yet, but it is essential that Paxton locks himself in a club bathroom and somehow josh avoids the hostel room.

The next day they can't find Oli or one of the Japanese twins. They walk around trying to find them and let me just say it: they were victims of an elaborate business in blood. Oli has been decapitated. The girl, probably the same, but josh and Paxton are still oblivious to this, right now they are still on vacation. Only now, it's a vacation gone slightly wrong.

The next one to go is josh. Getting slightly drunk he goes too sleep. They don't show it, but he gets captured. They show briefly the first torture scene, where that freaky guy they met at the train mutilates him and slits his throat. That’s a little weird, considering they were just friends the day before. The thing you have to know is that creepy guy is a failed surgeon and wants to experience the thrill of surgery once again, so he gives josh a relatively quick death so he can operate on his corpse.

Now the only one left is Paxton, and he is getting really freaked out. The guy at the front desk is a queer geek who won't help for shit. So he decides to ask the roommates. When he does find them, they start speaking in Dutch and chuckling, and he's like "speak English please!!" but that's a little weird, because he himself speaks Dutch. Anyway: one of the women escorts him to a "museum" which is actually this old, dank, cold run down building. This is not a museum at all, but a functional club headquarters, where people can pay to torture and murder victim for a price, using whatever tools you need. Now you see that the roommates were in on it, and for the first time you see the twist in this movie: it was all just an elaborate, organized crime.

I believe "American" was the most expensive on the sign up sheet thing. It's creepy because I assume that after doing this a while, you become a torture expert, and know which parts of the body hurt the most and when to stop, so they don't die. Then when you've had you're fill you can just shoot them with a gun. Okay that was a tangent.

So anywayz, Paxton is now the last victim in this neat little organization, and gets captured against his will and gets handcuffed to a chair. His host is a Dutch dude, could be a former Nazi, who stabs him and cuts off two fingers with a chainsaw. The Nazi then slips and falls on the fingers and chops his own leg off by accident. Paxton slips out of the cuffs using his busted hand and shoots the Nazi.

So then basically Paxton has to escape. He encounters a janitor, who mistakes him as dead guy and puts him on a cart. the most violent part of this movie is seeing all the different rooms that he goes past, my favorite being this one where a guy is wrapped up in rubber saran-wrap stuff, being strangled by a noose, and getting his genitals pulled… fricken' A. Talk about getting into it. He sees the surgeon operating of joshes dead body. All these doors are wide open... the people must not care. Then Paxton encounters the butcher, who chops up the bodies and put them in a furnace. He kills the butcher with a hammer.

The next guy he encounters is this Jewish looking guy who is American, and mistakes him for a member of the club. Paxton is nervous as the guy talks to him like a buddy. This is the only time in the movie you get a glimpse of why the killers don't do anything real overly sexual to the victims. In the words of the guy: "pussy is pussy". They need a new kind of rush. So anyway, Paxton escapes and then hears the screams of the one Japanese girl. He thinks about it, and then goes back into the building to save her. He finds out that it was the Jewish looking guy that was torturing her, burning her eye sockets with a torch. He shoots the bastard, takes her and leaves… but not before cutting off her eye, just for some gross-out kicks.

He steals a car and goes speeding through the streets of the Slovakian village. he is trying to escape these bouncers who want to re-capture him. Then, as he is speeding, he sees the roommates on the street and that random guy they saw in Amsterdam. Now you see him of all people was in on it, but I don’t get that part. Paxton sees the two roommates, but then you see the random guy from Amsterdam there. This is Slovakia. Well in any case he runs over them with a vendetta. with the help of those annoying little kids, he loses the pursuers.

Okay at this point in the movie there needs to be more gross-out happenings or the viewers get bored. So the Japanese girl looks at her reflection and decides not to live anymore, and jumps into the train as it goes past, spattering blood on people. and Paxton’s like "dammit, I did that all for nothing."

okay Paxton almost out of there: at the subway back to Amsterdam he just happens to notice that creepy surgeon guy returning to Amsterdam. He decides to get even, and kills him in a bathroom stall. Like a lot of movies, the main character who is supposed to be passive has now become a murderer. He’s not really any better than the bad guys themselves, but he's getting even, and you're allowed to do that. Then he goes back on the train its THE END. There, how was that? i just put the whole movie into your head.

Notes:

they could've done the typical plot of a movie: a buildup, a primary action scene, some more buildup with some flashbacks and then a final death scene. Horror movies don't normally follow the "bad guy dying at end" thing. I guess this one did. Oh yeah, that’s the other thing I didn't like about the movie.
Anyway: instead of that format that I said, the movie is just sort of one big build up, a build up for the last maybe half an hour. But that's okay; there have been other movies like that.

Believe it or not this movie actually made me want to go on a backpacking trip to Europe, which I have still yet to do. It looks fun. If any body tries to capture me and torture me, I'll kick their ass.

Another note is that this movie unfairly portrays Europeans as ugly, sick, twisted people with no compassion. Even though this takes place in the Dutch-land area, former Nazi territory and people there tend to be like that. Oh yeah, and about the ugly thing: all the Europeans in the film were actual Europeans, who had never been in a movie before. Some of them didn't even speak English were told how to say the lines right there.

The bottom line: call me sick and twisted but they could've taken it a step further and made it a lot more violent than it was. I won’t really go into details.

See it: not with your mom or family. And for Christ’s sake: no grandparents. "Hey Gran-ma, you like Europe, let's see this movie!" a BAD idea... on so many levels. If you must see this movie, see it with a close friend or something. I saw it alone.