Last night I had the misfortune to watch this film. I haven’t seen the original and frankly don’t want to. My brother hired it and I was semi-forced to watch. The film has a real reputation for opening a new can of worms as far as horror is concerned. However, the gripes I have with this movie are not particularly over the Guignol but rather the horror movie cliches/rules that were being adhered to religiously.
Take the three chicks, you know immediately which ones will be killed; I.E. the one’s that try/succeed in getting laid. Sex = death in horror movies. Then you have the wafer thin portrayal of eastern Europeans. Are Americans that afraid of Slavic types? Here they are, across the board, characters straight out of a 1950’s vampire movie. Including some very heavy eyebrows, sexy yet evil thin model type chicks, local straw haired inbred’s, etc.
Unlike the original, the main killers’ back stories are also highlighted. Here the “rich” yanks are in Europe to chop up girls so that they get a thousand-yard stare when on the golf course or taking to the wife. Quite sad. Such stares often come from you being the person surviving ordeals, not the one causing them.
Anyway more cliches abound when they actually get to the murder acts. It seems the yanks just don’t have the balls for this job, in contrast to the smilingly evil Europeans who make a real meal of their work in the most shocking of ways (you have to see the film to understand how many jokes were in that last sentence). So whilst the poor girls do die in gory, bloody and frankly unimaginative ways (especially the one in the poster who I last saw in Devil’s Advocate), it is all so unrealistic in setting that it effected me about as much as, say; Blade did. Ridiculous evil is not actually frightening only gross. Much like the terrible Jeepers Creepers, where, once I had realised that the bad guy was simply a monster, the whole thing stopped being frightening in any way.
Real fear comes from normality, The Wicker Man being a great example. Pass this one over, not scary, just sick. 5/10.
Basho
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October 24th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Well, it turns out that the hanging, bloodbath scene is actually based on a real event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory
Watch out!
January 14th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I loved hostel but haven’t seen hostel 2 yet.. it looks great though