Hostel

Back in the day, people who stayed at hostels worried about scabies, not masked men wielding chain saws. The times, they are a-changing.

Back in the day, people who stayed at hostels worried about scabies, not masked men wielding chain saws. The times, they are a-changing.

Rated 3.0

This is garbage but good garbage. A couple of American tourists (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) visit a Slovakian hostel, and it proves to be the worst vacation in the history of man. After partying at a disco, one of them wakes up in a torture chamber, and bad things are about to happen to multiple body parts. The film is quite gruesome and sure to blow a certain percentage of its audience right out the door before its credits run (there was a mass exodus at the screening I attended). Like last year’s The Devil’s Rejects, it’s a throwback to those grisly ’70s and ’80s horror films where nobody gave a damn about being politically incorrect. In the last act, it goes off the tracks a bit by becoming a silly revenge thriller, but otherwise it’s quite decent. Importantly, it was directed by Eli Roth, the guy who brought you Cabin Fever, not by Quentin Tarantino. His name is being used in the marketing because he dug Roth’s idea, and that’s it.