Hostel

Three teenage backpackers - ladies man Paxton (Hernandez), writer Josh (Richardson) and the much-travelled Oli (Gudyonsson) - cruise the red light district in Amsterdam looking for drugs and girls. When a stranger tells them that the best girls stay at a hostel just outside Bratislava in Slovakia, they don't need to be told twice. Jumping on a train, they reach the picturesque village and set about enjoying the nightlife. When they meet three beautiful and easy women, the boys can't believe their luck, but when Oli, and then Josh, goes missing, Paxton begins the search for his friends but what he finds is beyond his worst nightmares.

In 2002 Eli Roth delivered the usual scare-slash-run formula with Cabin Fever but almost reinvents the horror movie with Hostel. Similar to the realistic-horror of Wolf Creek, Roth discards the principles of the scary movie (the audience gets an early scare then twenty minutes of set up and character development and then a pre-horror jump, etc) as Hostel's first half is all set up with nothing but scantily-clad promiscuous women to scare the more moralistic of viewers, but it's at this halfway point that Roth takes us down a darker road. Although it is rumoured that some of the gore was cut after preview screenings in the US felt that it was all a little too much, Hostel still has the power to shock and repulse as scalpels slashed across ankles, chainsaws dissecting legs, butchers hooks tearing thighs apart and the gouging of eyes are all present. Roth cleverly twists expectations while simultaneously playing up to everyone's worst fears. While subtexts and themes of misogyny, xenophobia and the worthlessness of human life run underneath the terror, Roth hopes that no one can look at the screen for long enough to figure it all out. Not as gory as it was initially made out to be, Hostel still is not recommend as a date movie.