"Hostel"
by Sonya Artero


If you liked the blood and guts movie of Saw 1 and 2, than you'll like Hostel. Three college-aged buddies are backpacking around Europe with one goal in mind: get laid. 

After receiving a hot tip on where to find the easiest women in Europe, they head straight to that exact location, a youth hostel located in the Eastren European Slovakian town of Bratislava where they indeed score big-time. From the moment they check in to the youth hostel, they are greeted by beautiful, half-dressed women who ooze of sex.

Paxton, played by Jay Hernandez, Josh, played by Derek Richardson and Oli, played by Eythor Gudjonsson, play their roles to the tee. Just when you think the movie is all about having gratuitous sex, you are thrown in a whole other direction, as the three travelers quickly find themselves trapped in a human trafficking scheme, which is evidently based on true events.

Hostel is the second studio movie by director Eli Roth but is produced by internationally renown filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. If you're a fan of gore - and I don't mean the fake blood-spurting gore that Tarantino's know for - you'll be highly entertained by the multitude of bloody events that feature limbs being chopped-off, throats being sliced-open and eyeballs being ripped-out.

The best part of the movie entails one nightmare-inducing scene that features an electric saw. Need I say more?

I have to admit though - the movie is so deeply disturbing and graphic, that there were a couple time I literally had to turn my head away in sheer unadulterated horror. Hostel won't win a prize for being the scariest movie you'll ever see, but because the blood and guts scenes were so disturbing, it made it that much more believable, which equals good entertainment.

It's definitely not a family movie, but for what it's worth, a disturbingly bloody film, I give 3 out of 5 stars.