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Hostel (2005 film)

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Hostel
Theatrical release poster
Directed byEli Roth
Written byEli Roth
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyMilan Chadima
Edited byGeorge Folsey Jr.
Music byNathan Barr
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release dates
  • September 17, 2005 (2005-09-17) (TIFF)
  • January 6, 2006 (2006-01-06) (United States)
Running time
94 minutes[3]
Countries
  • United States[1]
  • Czech Republic[1]
LanguageEnglish
Budget$4.8 million[2]
Box office$82 million[2]

Hostel is a 2005 horror film written and directed by Eli Roth. It stars Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eyþór Guðjónsson, and Barbara Nedeljáková. It was produced by Mike Fleiss, Roth, and Chris Briggs, and executive produced by Boaz Yakin, Scott Spiegel, and Quentin Tarantino. The film follows a group of American tourists, as they end up in Slovakia where they are eventually taken one-by-one by an organization that allows people to torture and kill others.

Hostel was released theatrically in the United States by Lions Gate Films and Sony Pictures Releasing's Screen Gems on January 6, 2006, and in the Czech Republic by Falcon. The film received divisive reviews from critics, but grossed $82 million worldwide on a $4.8 million budget. It successfully launched a film series, and was followed by Hostel: Part II (2007) and Hostel: Part III (2011).

Plot

Two college students, Paxton Rodriguez and Josh Brooks, travel across Europe with their Icelandic friend Óli Eriksson. In the Netherlands, they visit an Amsterdam nightclub and wind up getting kicked out for fighting, followed by a brothel. Unable to get back into their hostel because of a curfew, they accept the offer of a man named Alexei to stay at his apartment. He convinces them that, instead of going to Barcelona, they should visit a hostel in Slovakia filled with beautiful women.

The three board a train to Slovakia, where they encounter a Dutch businessman, who makes a friendly gesture and touches Josh's leg. Josh flips out at him, causing him to leave. Arriving in Slovakia, the trio find that their roommates in the hostel are two women, Natalya and Svetlana. The women invite them to a spa, and later to a disco. Josh has a run in with a gang of local criminal kids. The Dutch businessman from the train intervenes to defend him by offering gum. As a sign of good faith, Josh apologizes for his reaction on the train.

Paxton and Josh have sex with Natalya and Svetlana, while Óli leaves with the desk girl, Vala. The next morning, Óli does not return. The two are approached by a Japanese woman named Kana, who shows them a photo of Óli and her friend Yuki, who is also missing. Paxton and Josh search for Óli and spot someone wearing an orange coat with the Icelandic flag patch, same coat Óli wore. They follow the man to an old tourist site and discover the man wearing the similar coat was not Óli. They later get a message from Óli which said he returned home. Elsewhere, Óli has been decapitated, while Yuki is being tortured. Josh is anxious to leave, but Paxton convinces him to stay one more night with Natalya and Svetlana. Both women slip the men mickies. Josh faints on his bed. The ill Paxton ends up locked in the pantry.

Josh wakes up in a dungeon-like room, where the Dutch businessman begins with a statement about how he was denied his rights to practice the art of surgery, while maiming Josh with a drill, making holes in Josh's body, slicing his achilles tendons, then slitting his throat, while revealing he was paying the people who allowed him to do all of that. Paxton wakes up in the disco and returns to the hostel, where he learns that he had supposedly checked out. The desk clerk then agreed to check him back in. Paxton is then greeted by two women who invite him to the spa. Determined to find Josh and Oli, he attempted to go to the police to find they were of no help. Suspicious, he locates Natalya and Svetlana; Natalya reveals to Paxton that both Óli and Josh went to a place called the Art Show. She then takes Paxton to an old factory, where he not only sees a wealthy man leave the place, and deep inside he sees Josh's mutilated corpse being dissected and stitched together by the Dutch businessman. Natalya reveals she made some money off of him as two men drag Paxton down a hallway, passing by several rooms where other people are being tortured. Paxton is restrained and prepped to be tortured by a German client named Johann.

Paxton begged for his life and even spoke German to sway Johann, instead, the German ordered one of the guards to gag Paxton. While cutting off a few of Paxton's fingers off with a chainsaw, Johann unintentionally severs his hand restraints. Johann then charges at Paxton with the chainsaw, but slips on the severed fingers, accidentally severing his leg with the chainsaw. Paxton then collects the pistol the German had and shoots Johann in the head. He then calls for the guard, pretends to be dead, and as the guard checks on Johann, Paxton kills the guard, changes into business clothes, and finds a business card for the Elite Hunting Club, an organization that allows its wealthy clientele to pay to kill and mutilate tourists. As he was looking for a way out, he hid on a cart covered with corpses, including Josh's. He sees a large butcher throwing cadavers and body parts into a furnace, and knocks out the butcher with a mallet. He then comes across an American client who was more than thrilled to carry out a kill, asking Paxton about the thrill, assuming he was a client. Paxton then discovers the exit and the guards paying off the local police. As Paxton was prepared to make a run for it, he then hears Kana screaming. Paxton discovers Kana in one of the torture rooms, whose face is being disfigured with a blowtorch by the American client. Paxton kills the man and rescues Kana. He then discovered that Kana's eye socket was hanging out and decided to cut it off and bandage her face. They both flee in a stolen car, pursued by guards. Back in Bratislava, Paxton soon discovers Natalya, Svetlana, and Alexei, and as Natalya saw Paxton in a vehicle, Paxton floored it and rammed into them, killing Svetlana and Alexei, while the pursuing car finished off Natalya. He also encountered the delinquents from earlier and gives them a big pack of candy and gum. They then attack and kill the men pursuing Paxton and Kana with concrete blocks.

With the tail gone, they encounter a police barricade and watch the police brutally beating one of the drivers. Remembering that the cops were on the Elite Hunters payroll, both Paxton and Yana fled the vehicle and bolted to the train station. The two make it to the train station and discover the police and the Elite Hunters henchmen keeping a lookout. Kana, seeing her disfigured face, kills herself by leaping in front of an oncoming train, which attracts attention and allows Paxton to board another train unnoticed. Aboard, Paxton hears the voice of the Dutch businessman. When the train stopped in Vienna, Austria, Paxton followed the Dutch businessman into a public restroom and flipped the sign indicating maintenance. As the Dutch businessman enter a stall, Paxton entered a stall next to his, threw down and Elite Hunters calling card, which the Dutch businessman reached down and saw in horror. Furious about what happened to Josh, Paxton then severed the Dutchman's fingers, then entered his stall and tortures him before slicing the businessman's throat, killing him. Paxton then exits the bathroom and jumps onto another train.

Alternate ending

In the director's cut of the film, Paxton follows the Dutch businessman being accompanied by his young daughter into a public restroom of a train station. After finding her teddy bear in the women's restroom, the Dutch businessman frantically searches the crowd for his missing daughter. Paxton is then seen aboard the moving train with the Dutch businessman's daughter, whom he has kidnapped.

Cast

  • Jay Hernandez as Paxton Rodriguez, an American tourist and the protagonist of the film
  • Derek Richardson as Josh Brooks, an American tourist along Paxton
  • Eyþór Guðjónsson as Óli Eriksson, an Icelandic tourist who accompanied Paxton and Josh throughout the European Mainland
  • Jennifer Lim as Kana, a Japanese tourist accompanied by her sister Yuki
  • Barbara Nedeljáková as Natalya, a brothel hostess in Bratislava who help the Elite Hunters scout out victims
  • Jana Kaderabkova as Svetlana, a brothel hostess in Bratislava who help the Elite Hunters scout out victims
  • Jan Vlasák as The Dutch Businessman, a Dutch client for the Elite Hunting Club
  • Rick Hoffman as The American Client, an ecstatic man who paid to tortured Kana
  • Keiko Seiko as Yuki, a Japanese tourist accompanied by her sister Kana
  • Lubomir Bukovy as Alexei, a Russian tourist who tricked Paxton, Josh, and Óli in travelling to Bratislava to find a gruesome fate
  • Jana Havlickova as Vala, the desk girl at the Hostel in Bratislava
  • Petr Janiš as Johann, the German Surgeon and client for the Elite Hunting Club
  • Takashi Miike as The Japanese Sadist
  • Patrik Zigo as The Bubblegum Gang Leader
  • Milda "Jedi" Havlas as Jedi, the desk clerk at the Hostel in Bratislava
  • Miroslav Táborský as Police officer
  • Josef Bradna as The Butcher, the big guy who chops up the body parts and tosses them into a furnace
  • Eli Roth as American Stoner

Production

After the release of Cabin Fever (2002), Eli Roth was met with praise from several industry figures, including Quentin Tarantino, who placed the film in his 'Top 10' of the year and immediately reached out to Roth in hopes of working with him on a future project. Roth was offered many studio directing jobs, mostly in the form of horror remakes such as The Last House on the Left, The Fog, and a film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, among several others, but Tarantino advised him to turn down those offers to instead create an original horror story. While swimming in Tarantino's pool, Roth brainstormed an idea for a low-budget horror film based on a Thai "murder vacation" website he came across on the dark web.[4] Tarantino loved the idea and encouraged Roth to immediately start writing a draft that day, which later formed the basis for Hostel.[5]

Roth had originally debated creating the film in the style of a fake documentary that would incorporate real people and locations from supposed real underground "murder vacation" spots. When hardly any credible information could be found on the topic, the idea was scrapped in favor of a traditionally flowing narrative using fictional locations and characters. Principal photography took place in the Czech Republic, and many scenes were shot in Český Krumlov.[6] The torture chamber scenes were filmed in the wing of a Prague hospital that had been abandoned since 1918.

The original music score was composed by Nathan Barr, who previously scored Cabin Fever, and commissioned The Prague FILMharmonic Orchestra to perform the score over a four-day period in October 2005. Also featured in the film's nightclub scene is the song, "Some Kinda Freak" by Mephisto Odyssey. The song featured the repeating hook, "everyone's some kinda freak...", an audio sample taken from the 1973 horror film Ganja & Hess directed by Bill Gunn (writer) and starring Duane Jones.[7]

The film is rated 18 by the British Board of Film Classification.[8]

Release

Box office

Hostel opened theatrically on January 6, 2006, in the United States and earned $19.6 million in its first weekend, ranking number one at the box office.[9] By the end of its run, six weeks later, the film grossed $47.3 million in the US box office and $33.3 million internationally for a worldwide total of $80.6 million.[2]

Critical response

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 59% based on 109 reviews and an average rating of 6.1/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Featuring lots of guts and gore, Hostel is a wildly entertaining corpse-filled journey—assuming one is entertained by corpses, guts, and gore, that is."[10] On Metacritic, the film had a weighted average score of 55 out of 100 based on 21 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[11] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C–" on an A+ to F scale.[12]

Entertainment Weekly's film critic Owen Gleiberman commended the film's creativity, saying "You may or may not believe that slavering redneck psychos, of the kind who leer through Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, can be found in the Southwest, but it's all too easy to envision this sort of depravity in the former Soviet bloc, the crack-up of which has produced a brutal marketplace of capitalistic fiendishness. The torture scenes in Hostel (snipped toes, sliced ankles, pulled eyeballs) are not, in essence, much different from the surgical terrors in the Saw films, only Roth, by presenting his characters as victims of the same world of flesh-for-fantasy they were grooving on in the first place, digs deep into the nightmare of a society ruled by the profit of illicit desire."[13] Jean-François Rauger, a film critic for Le Monde, a French newspaper, and programmer of the Cinémathèque Française, listed Hostel as the best American film of 2006, calling it an example of modern consumerism.[14]

German film historian Florian Evers pointed out the Holocaust imagery behind Hostel's horror iconography, connecting Roth's film to the Nazi exploitation genre.[15] The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that Hostel was "silly, crass and queasy. And not in a good way".[16] David Edelstein of New York Magazine was equally negative, deriding director Roth with creating the horror subgenre "torture porn", or "gorno", using excessive violence to excite audiences like a sexual act.[17]

Slovak reaction to setting

The film's release was accompanied by strong complaints from Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Slovak and Czech officials were both disgusted and outraged by the film's portrayal of their countries as undeveloped, poor, and uncultured lands suffering from high criminality, war, and prostitution,[18] fearing it would "damage the good reputation of Slovakia" and make foreigners feel it was a dangerous place to be.[19] The tourist board of Slovakia invited Roth on an all-expenses-paid trip to their country so he could see it is not made up of run-down factories, ghettos, and kids who kill for bubble gum. Tomáš Galbavý, a Slovak Member of Parliament from the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union – Democratic Party, commented: "I am offended by this film. I think that all Slovaks should feel offended."[19]

Defending himself, Roth said the film was not meant to be offensive, arguing, "Americans do not even know that this country exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans' ignorance of the world around them."[19][20] Roth argued that despite The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, people still travel to Texas.[21]

Accolades

Award Date Held Category Subject Result
Empire Awards
(12th Awards) 		27 March 2007 Best Horror Hostel Won[22]
MTV Movie Awards
(15th Awards) 		3 June 2006 Best Frightened Performance Derek Richardson Nominated[23]
Golden Schmoes Awards
(6th Awards) 		2006 Best Horror Movie of the Year Hostel Nominated[24]
Golden Trailer Awards
(8th Awards) 		2006 Best Horror Hostel Nominated[25]
Scream Awards
(1st Awards) 		9 October 2006 Best Horror Movie Hostel Nominated[26]
Most Memorable Mutilation The eye removal Won[27][28]
The "Holy Sh!t"/"Jump-From-Your-Seat" Award The eye removal Won[27][28]
Best Screamplay Eli Roth Nominated[26]
Best Flesh Scene Jay Hernandez, Jana Kaderabkova, Barbara Nedeljakova, and Derek Richardson, Hostel Nominated[26]
Saturn Awards
(33rd Awards) 		10 May 2007 Best Horror Film Hostel Nominated[29]
Teen Choice Awards
(8th Awards) 		20 August 2006 Choice Movie: Thriller Hostel Nominated[30]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f "Hostel (2006)". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. Archived from the original on April 15, 2019. Retrieved September 16, 2019.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Hostel (2006)". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. February 17, 2006. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  3. ^ "HOSTEL (18)". British Board of Film Classification. January 18, 2006. Archived from the original on September 12, 2023. Retrieved January 28, 2012.
  4. ^ Pirnia, Garin (April 9, 2016). "11 Intense Facts About Hostel". Mental Floss. Archived from the original on November 17, 2020. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  5. ^ Hill, Logan (December 29, 2005). "Scream Kings: Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino". New York. Archived from the original on January 9, 2008. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  6. ^ Schwinke, Theodore (July 5, 2006). "Eli Roth plans Czech shoot for Hostel 2". Screen International. Archived from the original on September 28, 2015. Retrieved June 8, 2015.
  7. ^ "Mephisto Odyssey Soundtracks IMDb". IMDb. Archived from the original on September 12, 2023. Retrieved August 29, 2023.
  8. ^ "Hostel". Archived from the original on October 7, 2022. Retrieved October 7, 2022.
  9. ^ "Weekend Box Office Results for January 6-8, 2006". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. January 9, 2006. Archived from the original on September 6, 2015. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  10. ^ "Hostel (2006)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Archived from the original on August 30, 2013. Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  11. ^ "Hostel (2006): Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Archived from the original on May 29, 2006. Retrieved February 8, 2008.
  12. ^ "Find CinemaScore" (Type "Hostel" in the search box). CinemaScore. Archived from the original on January 2, 2018. Retrieved April 15, 2022.
  13. ^ "Movie Review: Hostel". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved April 19, 2011.
  14. ^ Jean Francois Rauger (December 27, 2006). "Les films préférés des critiques du "Monde" en 2006". Le Monde (accessed with Google Translate). Archived from the original on January 2, 2015. Retrieved May 13, 2009.
  15. ^ Evers, Florian (2011). Florian Evers. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 9783643111906. Archived from the original on September 12, 2023. Retrieved October 18, 2020. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  16. ^ Peter Bradshaw: "Hostel" review Archived September 4, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, at Guardian Unlimited
  17. ^ David Edelstein: Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn Archived October 11, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, at New York Magazine, published on January 28th, 2006.
  18. ^ Cameron, Rob (February 24, 2006). "Smash hit horror Hostel causes a stir among citizens of sleepy Slovakia". Radio Prague. Archived from the original on December 6, 2008. Retrieved September 7, 2008.
  19. ^ a b c "Slovakia angered by horror film". BBC News. February 27, 2006. Archived from the original on August 4, 2013. Retrieved September 7, 2008.
  20. ^ "Hostel: April 2006 Archives". Archived from the original on August 17, 2010. Retrieved July 16, 2006.
  21. ^ "Hostel - DVD Review - Horror Movies". Archived from the original on September 10, 2015. Retrieved December 7, 2015.
  22. ^ "Empire Readers Awards 2007 - Best Horror, Hostel". Empire Magazine (www.empireonline.com). Bauer Consumer Media. 2007. Archived from the original on 19 January 2012. Retrieved 8 July 2023.
  23. ^ "MTV Movie + TV Awards, USA - 2006 Awards". IMDb (www.imdb.com). Archived from the original on 2 December 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  24. ^ "Golden Schmoes Awards, 2006 Awards". IMDb (www.imdb.com). Archived from the original on 20 December 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  25. ^ "Golden Trailer Awards, USA - 2006 Awards". IMDb (www.imdb.com). Archived from the original on 10 July 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  26. ^ a b c "Get Yer Scream On! Categories and Nominees Announced for Spike TV's Scream Awards 2006". The Futon Critic (www.thefutoncritic.com). July 18, 2006. Archived from the original on January 9, 2019. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
  27. ^ a b "Army of Darkness Wins Scream Award". Broken Frontier (www.brokenfrontier.com). 9 October 2006. Archived from the original on 7 April 2012. Retrieved 18 July 2023.
  28. ^ a b Jacobs, Evan (October 10, 2006). "Spike TV's Scream Awards 2006 Winners!". MovieWeb. Watchr Media. Archived from the original on May 18, 2022. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
  29. ^ "Superman Returns Leads the 33rd Annual Saturn Awards with 10 Nominations - X-Men 3 and Pan's Labyrinth receive six nominations". Movie Web (www.movieweb.com). 21 February 2007. Archived from the original on 3 February 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  30. ^ "Teen Choice Awards Spread the Love - 'Lost,' Depp, Black earn multiple nominations". Zap2it (www.zap2it.com). Nexstar Media Group. 15 June 2006. Archived from the original on 19 June 2006. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
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