We follow two American friends, Paxton and Josh, who are off on a backpacking tour of Europe. 'Hostel' is the first of Hostel movies trilogy (and, if we can say so, the best of them all ). However, only one explains the whole story. There are many suppositions and theories that surround this extremely controversial tale, most of which make a decent attempt to explain the mystery behind Hostel. But what if I told you that what you’ve seen on screen could have actually happened? What if Hostel is actually based on a true story? Also, despite a tighter, Quentin Tarantino-vetted script, there is no real sense of escalating terror: it’s just one damn blow-torching after another.'Hostel', a blood and gore horror film released in 2006 written by Eli Roth (and produced by Quentin Tarantino), remains one of the most gruesome horror movies to ever make it big in mainstream cinema. But where does this leave the audience when Josh is getting his Achilles tendons slashed with a scalpel? Too often, Roth’s fanboy enthusiasm runs away with him, the brilliantly staged charnel-house horror tipping over into adolescent gross-out humour. There are two contradictory impulses here: a visceral, nightmarish genre movie with some spurious basis in a post-war Balkan reality and a more knowing satire about crass, xenophobic Americans abroad getting their just desserts. Soon after, Oli and Josh go missing, and Paxton finds himself manacled to a chair in an abandoned factory. But a visit to the torture museum turns out to be a trailer for the main horror feature, in which they will star. The signs are promising: the hostel is packed with semi-naked women, and they hook up with Natalya (Barbara Nedeljáková) and her sexy pal Svetlana (Jana Kaderabková). Together with their crazy Icelandic pal Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), American backpackers Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) are lured to a small Slovakian town by the promise of compliant Euro babes. Sadly, as with Roth’s promising but flawed debut feature, its central conceit is more compelling than what ended up on screen.

Laced with an unsettling humour that vacillates between bleak and black, this is another low-budget, high-concept horror movie. After the flesh-eating horror of ‘Cabin Fever’, writer-director Eli Roth brings us a grisly tale of abduction and torture.

Hostel the movie reviews