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What kind of hellspawn might result if "Saw" bought a copy of "Let's Go: Europe" and went backpacking across Europe to have a one-night stand with Dracula? Something like Hostel.
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75It's a back-to-basics, gore-and-gristle look at the no-frills nastiness of 1970s films, in which monsters, mutants and ghosts can't hold a candle to the sheer, unadulterated evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
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75The entertainingly unhinged Hostel reeks of kneeling reverence to the grisliest of psychotronica while simultaneously striving to out-gore and out-shock its predecessors.
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75It's obligatory for a horror film to feature exploitative sex as an appetizer, but Roth, even as he fulfills the sleaze imperative, does something shrewder: He mocks his heroes, presenting them as cold-eyed horndog jerks who fail to see that they've wandered into an entire country of exploitation.
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70Eli Roth turns to modern-day Asian fright filmmakers as inspiration for his latest blood-soaked effort while demonstrating an intriguing, original voice of his own.
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70I admired the humor, the tremendous craftsmanship and even the shock value of Hostel, but found the Grand Guignol torture scenes excessive. (Unless you're a hardcore fan of Italian, Spanish and Japanese gore flicks, you've never seen anything like this.)
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70Hostel may become something of a classic among Fangoria magazine's readership, acolytes of George Romero and audiences who thought "Saw II" was for babies.
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70There's a reason why one goes to see cinematic gorefests like Hostel: to partake vicariously of the bloodfest, to get hopped up on the sickness of it all, the utter degradation, the fall of Western Civilization, yadda yadda yadda, and oh yeah, to hoot at the flying fingers, the guts, the blood, the bare breasts.
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63The thing is just a clunky and tasteless and dumb scare picture, isn't it? Clunky, yes. Tasteless, for sure. But not so dumb I fear.
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60This is an old-school exercise in shock and gore, with scary ideas and unblinking splatter.
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60Although he damn near slanders an entire country - expect poor Slovakia's tourism industry to take a hit - Roth is not an unskilled ringleader of gory crisis moments, or breathless escapes. The squeamish should simply stay away, but carnage queens will appreciate some of Roth's less grisly, even amusing details.
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60Seems to have been tailored to its designated R "for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use."
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50Not horrifying enough.
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50A thrill-less thriller that uses gore to obfuscate its inability to generate tension, this motion picture has the profile one might expect from a direct-to-video release.
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50What prevents Hostel from fully harnessing the suspense factor in its rising action, climax, and conflict resolution is the insufficient impetus to pity or to feel too badly for Paxton and Josh.
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50Hostel certainly delivers in the gore department, and Roth, who knows and loves his favorite genre at least as well as the gang over at the Alamo Drafthouse, peppers the proceedings with various witty in-jokes.
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50Falling somewhere between fratboy porno wish fulfillment and Europhobic sex-tourism scare flick, Eli Roth's taut, wily, but ultimately pointless shocker Hostel is neither as transgressive nor as grueling as it aims to be.
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Director Eli Roth is adept at building a sense of foreboding; unfortunately, once the bloodletting begins, all sense of drama and logic oozes out along with it.
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50Roth gets the notes right while missing the music: He studiously replicates Miike's unblinking depiction of torture, but without much reflection or wit. It's merely unpleasant and more than a little dumb.
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Hostel is motivated by an adolescent urge to shock. And while it's true that no civilized person will remain unscathed by the film's relentless bigotry - this is one of the most misogynistic films ever made - Mr. Roth's gory spectacles are too calculated to deliver the transgressive jolts they so obviously seek.
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38The question is, can a Slovakian lawsuit against the filmmaker be far behind?
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 57 out of 108
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Mixed: 10 out of 108
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Negative: 41 out of 108
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