Eli Roth
Hostel

Inspired by some real-life crime events, Eli Roth's work has long been criticized due to the massive presence of gratuitous violence, but despite this (and also thanks to the controversy), it recorded significant box office earnings both during its theatrical release and following its home video distribution.

It's challenging to categorize in a single genre (it spans from thriller, to action, to drama, to splatter, and teen movie - mostly), the film delivers, in its opening minutes, a sort of music video filled with clichés: a poorly depicted typical trip to Amsterdam by typical hormone-crazed American boys searching for easy and limitless sex, drugs, and unrestrained fun. After twenty minutes of sex in club bathrooms, jokes, joints, and various frivolities, the film's tone slightly shifts. Upon reaching this dream hostel on the outskirts of Bratislava, the 3 protagonists, seduced by 2 girls, fall into an endless nightmare: they are tortured to death, along with other youths, by an organization that offers wealthy dissatisfied gentlemen, for a handsome fee, the chance to vent their anger and frustration through various atrocities inflicted upon their victims.

It can’t be denied that the basic concept is valid: the problem, however, is its unsatisfactory and crude execution: first and foremost, the much-touted level of violence seems, apart from a couple of scenes, to fall within the norm and habits of any "Saw" episode or similar, or at least of films of the genre released in recent years. However, the depiction of the torture site is interesting, an old factory with ever-smoking chimneys and an atmosphere that's dirty, degraded, and degrading, as well as claustrophobic. It's also notable that the perpetrators are no longer the classic deviant and megalomaniacal killer, but wealthy men with anonymous if not reassuring appearances, driven solely by the amusement derived from torture. The scene of a victim's ankles being cut and then left free is borderline sadistic, while the scene involving the oriental girl's eye is untenable. Only one of the three protagonists survives, blending in with the perpetrators, and enacts, at the end of the film, a ruthless revenge that (albeit slightly) takes on Tarantino-esque tones.

In conclusion, a film that is conceptually interesting but severely hindered by a crude and superficial execution, as well as by absolutely avoidable and useless superstructures, aimed solely at business. But then, what allowed the film to achieve such high revenue levels? The answer is simple: firstly, Tarantino's name (which here only serves as a guarantor, but in fact does not participate in the project at all), prominently displayed on the poster even more than the director's name; followed by a comprehensive marketing campaign, featuring impactful phrases and unnecessary but effective warnings about the film's content (it’s known that what is forbidden, banned, or announced as not politically correct sells more), but above all, the ability to stimulate, even if slightly, the hidden voyeuristic dimension within each of us.