>>FEATURE
HOSTEL
Starring Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson.
Written and directed by Eli Roth.
An object lesson in giving the target audience exactly what it wants (before giving it something else entirely), the early scenes of Hostel portray Amsterdam as a frat-boy fantasyland of hash and T&A. Young, dumb and stuffed with skeet, Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) are two Americans living it up on a backpacking trip across Europe.
But as they enjoy Amsterdam’s smoking cafés, clubs and bordellos with their wild new Icelandic pal Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson), they can’t help but notice that the city is filled with Yankee bozos just like them. Eager to reach a new frontier, they hear about a hostel in Slovakia where beautiful girls "go crazy for any foreigner." Thus begins our heroes’ introduction to a whole other level of thrill-seeking, thereby transforming this frat-boy fantasy into a dank and bloody nightmare.
Often crass and nasty, Hostel will not be loved by anyone who isn’t thrilled by the sight of severed tendons or a cameo by sicko auteur Takashi Miike. That said, this category includes a wide swath of the movie-going public — Hostel topped the North American box office in its first weekend, earning just over $20 million US. Director Eli Roth’s tale about tourists turned torture victims has a much rougher edge than the toothless and largely bloodless remakes of vintage American and recent Japanese titles that dominate the horror category. It also comes with the same satirical bite that Roth lent Cabin Fever, the viral-panic thriller that caused a bidding war at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and became one of the decade’s most profitable indie pics. Though he was inevitably courted for big studio projects (and is developing a movie with Donnie Darko-maker Richard Kelly), Roth opted to make another film on the cheap. The relative obscurity of the setting dovetailed neatly into Hostel’s unflattering portrait of Americans abroad.
"The whole reason I picked Slovakia as the place they go was because no Americans have any idea that it’s really a country," says Roth in an interview in September, when Hostel made its world première at the Toronto International Film Festival. "They still think it’s Czechoslovakia. They think it’s all one big war zone, they don’t really know. Even one of the sound guys who was cutting the movie with us turned to me and said, ‘Did you make that place up?’ Other people who’ve seen the film are like, ‘Wow, I’m never going to Czechoslovakia.’ They completely proved my point."
As Roth explains, Hostel’s inspiration was twofold. Roth and Quentin Tarantino (Hostel’s exec-producer) were intrigued by the idea of people paying to torture or kill after the Ain’t It Cool News website’s Harry Knowles sent them a link about a Thai website that sold the opportunity to shoot someone in the head for $10,000. "I wanted to do a documentary about it, to find out if this site was bullshit or a real thing," says Roth. "As I was researching it, I realized that if I found anyone who was really involved in this, I’d get killed."
After a producer suggested the title and the backpacking milieu, Roth realized the hostel could be what lures in his young Americans. "That’s what gets them there," he says, "but this is what the horror of the movie is."
But rather than present his protagonists as the innocent victims of a diabolical scheme, Roth attributes some of his characters’ fate to the arrogance and ignorance they display in a foreign land. While Roth’s film doesn’t go so far as to sanction killing drunken tourists for sport, the buddies’ boorishness is made patently obvious, especially when Paxton catches a glimpse of Pulp Fiction on the hostel’s TV and wonders why it doesn’t have subtitles. "It’s as if everything should be provided for them wherever they go," says Roth. "I think Americans are very self-centred. There’s a whole attitude of superiority, and that extends to the idea of buying and selling other people. It’s like when they’re looking at girls in the window in Amsterdam and saying things like, ‘Aww, that bitch is so hot.’ Then they end up as the pieces of meat."
Though Hostel plays on fears about morally flexible foreigners and boasts an unsubtle parade of Eastern European femme fatales and menacing heavies, it’s hard to miss the irony that this torture club’s clients hail from the so-called civilized nations, including a Japanese businessman played by Miike. Roth recalls airing his worries about stereotyping Slovakians in a conversation with his girlfriend Barbara Nedeljakova, who plays the temptress Natalya.
"Is this movie going to make people from Slovakia look insane?" he asked her.
"I don’t think anybody looks worse than the Americans," she replied.
The real target of Hostel’s hostility couldn’t be clearer. |
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