Two American boys (Hernandez and Richardson) take a backpacking trip across Europe trying to hook up with sexy European women. Once they learn of this hostel in Bratislava where all the beauties will do anything to be with Americans, they immediately head out that way to Slovakia. They soon learn the hard way that it's all a front for something much more menacing and deadly.
There are very few different ways you can approach Eli Roth's follow-up to his 2003 Sundance favourite Cabin Fever, but originality isn't one of them. Roth rehashes the plot of vacationers arriving in a place where the locals want to harm them in a most unpleasant manner. Hostel is just another flick with plenty of gratuitous sex and violence and you'd have to be a true sadist and a real big fan of blood and gore to enjoy this flick. I guess I just don't fully appreciate the entertainment value of slasher flicks. But that would change if they demonstrate some reason behind the madness, like in the Saw films and the brilliant drama/action/horror film Seven.
If you really wanted to dig deep and find a message that Hostel is trying to convey; you could say that it is a diatribe on how out-of-hand consumerism has gotten when rich people can and will pay any amount of money to be able to torture and kill pretty young tourists, and how we've become so desensitized to violence that it's considered a rush worth paying for. Or you can go with the obvious that Hostel simply wants to show as much blood, gore and naked women as possible without any real storyline. I think it's the latter.
On a side note: I hear fights to Slovakia are real cheap this time of year.
