This week I will be reviewing the 2005 gore-fest Hostel. Great Googily Moogily. Seriously… this movie is awful. It should be renamed, “I know what you did in the Czech Republic last summer”. I am absolutely astonished Matthew Lillard isn’t in this film, playing a sarcastic, devil-may-care rascal that ends up being the villain – that would have probably improved this movie.

Okay, plot synopsis: We start with 3 frat brother wannabe types who cannot talk about anything other than getting high and getting laid. This they do ad nauseum in Amsterdam. Paxton is an ethnic American with badly capped teeth who calls everyone “dude”. Josh is a Caucasian American that is a closet homosexual with a not-so-closeted penchant for fannie bags. And Oli is the crazy Icelander who is a sex addict and an adulterer. The three musketeers get locked out of their hostel and meet some random generic Slavic fellow with a hairlip named Alexei who promises them the craziest sex ever in some town in the Czech Republic.

Of course, our sex-crazed protagonists board the train to head to fantasyland where we learn that they like to get naked in front of each other and have no inner dialogue whatsoever. They meet some skeevy older fellow who likes to eat salad with his hands and tries to grab Josh’s junk while on the train. He later turns out to be important.

They find a hostel to stay in, meet some hot young naked Czech women, and Oli dubs himself “the King of Swing!”. Surprisingly, this gets old the 2nd time you hear it and oddly enough, makes you want to kill someone the 600th time you hear it. I actually blasted my crypt-mates stupid cat with a flamethrower the 5th time I heard it, then threw my television in the sewer the 67th… took me a few weeks to find another one. While in The Czech Republic, we find out two very important things as our three scamps hump their way through this peaceful little Czech town for two nights of debauchery: Czech music is horrible, but the breasts are spectacular.

To make a long story short, Oli disappears with an Asian girl, then Josh disappears (the naked chicks drugged him… NO WAY!), and Paxton is left alone with no one willing to help him find his cohorts. That is, until he becomes “Paxton P.I. detective AND male prostitute”. Paxton (what Hispanic dude has ever been named Paxton by the way? I mean really…) gets the naked chicks from the hostel to take him to some factory where he also gets grabbed. Everyone gets tortured in a horribly gruesome way. Josh gets his Achilles tendons cut and is forced to crawl around before being killed… a really nice touch. I did that once to this stupid cellmate of mine once while I was in a prison in Istanbul. He kept yammering on and on about triangles or some crap, and I was bored. That was forty-five minutes of pure pleasure, but he sure made noise. He was also good for like a full week’s worth of food, too… double bonus! But I digress…

As for Oli, I was so bored by this point, I couldn’t tell you what happened to him. I think he wound up in Nova Scotia as a private bodyguard to Bjork, or I might have dreamed that when I dozed off. Paxton, on the other hand, eventually gets away and rescues the Asian girl, but only after she gets her right eyeball torched. This leads to the tender scene of said eyeball, slightly cooked, hanging out of her eye-socket.

Basically everything other than those two scenes are just gore for gore’s sake and kind of boring. Evidently, the guy who liked to eat salad with his bare hands also kidnaps Americans for clients who pay him to torture Americans. Paxton eventually tracks down creepy salad finger-eater guy and kills him in a toilet and avenges his friends. Yay Paxton! Yawn…..

What we have here is a rip-off of Saw; an attempt to cash in on the snatch-gore genre. It is poorly acted and poorly made and, for 80% of the movie, boring. There is some underlying theme of Americans being crude and not understanding foreign cultures or something, but it was lost on my pre-Western World mind. I do not watch horror movies to learn a lesson; I watch horror movies to watch dozens of young people get killed, or zombies eat some brains (YUM!), or hot young women be possessed by demons. This movie is not scary at all. In fact, it makes Europe seem fun and exciting, at least to me. The pluses of the movie are: lots of naked women and a couple pretty cool gore/torture scenes as outlined above. In conclusion, this movie is boring, about 45 minutes too long, but with hot naked women. I give this pile of guano 2 out of 5 dangling eyeballs with EXTREME PREJUDICE.