Hostel is one of the most disturbing horror movies I've seen in the past couple of years. Disturbing in its excessive use of blood and gore and disturbing in its excessive use of nude female bodies.

The film is the tale of three young male backpackers who are touring Europe in search of "memories to last a lifetime". When we are introduced to the trio at the start of the movie, we learn that Paxton (Jay Hernandez of Crazy/Beautiful) and Josh (Derek Richardson of Dumb and Dumberer) are Americans and best friends who have only recently met their wild Icelandic buddy Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson). The three spend the evening in Amsterdam getting high and trying to have sex a myriad of nameless women.

When they return to their hostel, they find they are past curfew and have been locked out. A Dutch guy invites them to his apartment where he entices the trio with photos and stories of hot women just waiting to be had in a hostel just outside of Bratislava, Slovakia. To the three drunk horny stoners, this sounds too good to be true. So, of course, they take the next train out to the Eastern European country to find this hostel.

Nothing scary happens during the first half of the movie -- other than how easily these guys are swayed by the promise of easy women. And to prove they're easy, the audience is inundated with an almost constant stream of naked surgically-enhanced breasts and women in compromising positions. I was almost beginning to wonder if the projectionist had put in the right film, when the body count finally started.

Or should I say body piece count.

For it seems the hostel is really a front to obtain unwilling participants for a torture dungeon. And the hot easy women? Simply bait to lure in the ignorant horny travelers. One by one the trio and several other visitors to the hostel come up missing. And as each is taken, we are shown more of what happens in the torture rooms.

Guess they never heard the adage "if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't", because none of the guys seems to have any inkling that perhaps doing drugs and having sex with strangers in a strange country is probably not the smartest thing to do. And I'm not saying that from a morality point of view, but seriously, if people I'm traveling with start disappearing, I might lay off the partying and try to figure out what's going on.

Of course, if they did that right away, there wouldn't be much of a movie.

It's in this second half of the film that Hostel works best -- when it concentrates on just being a horror film. Director Eli Roth, who gave us the gory Cabin Fever, ups the ante with this film. And, since it's billed as a "Quentin Tarantino presents" feature, the blood flows...and sprays...and...oh, you get the idea. Think Tarantino's Kill Bill v.1's Bride vs. the Crazy 88's duel and then add more blood and less camp.

If you're in the least bit squeamish, stop reading now.

For Roth, it's not enough to have the suggestion of fingers being cut off with a chainsaw...you get to see the blood fly as the fingers hit the floor. You don't just hear the ankle tendons being severed, you see the muscles separating as the person tries to walk and ultimately falls to the ground.

Honestly, it's these scenes that make the film truly horrifying to watch. But for me, the terror was all visual and not so much mental. Roth goes through the trouble to make the torture scenes progressively more brutal and hard to watch, so much so that I covered my eyes briefly during two scenes. Yet he kills off the most sympathetic characters right off the bat...and then adds several more characters so briefly that they're still strangers when they're killed off. He does a good job of portraying the helplessness of those being tortured, but I just didn't feel a real connection with the survivors. I was more disturbed by the real secret behind the torture chambers and the torturers than the loss of most of the characters.

There were some interesting psychological subtleties that crop up during the Slovakia segments of the film, though. As the trio enters the hostel, Pulp Fiction is being shown on the television -- albeit dubbed into Czech -- as an homage to Tarantino. I also found it interesting that the women who seduce the trio are all made up and dressed to kill, but later, when they are confronted about the missing friends, they are shown sans make-up, as if to say the charade is over and we're about to find out what's really going on.

Hostel is a good horror movie, once it actually gets to the horror. It's just sitting through the first 40 minutes or so of never-ending naked women was so unnecessary to the plot that I actually found myself wondering if someone was actually going to die or if this was just a soft-core porn film masquerading as a horror film -- a truly terrifying thought, eh?

And it's because of this, that I can only recommend the film to horror fans who enjoy the gore.

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Cast: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eythor Gudjonsson, Barbara Nedeljakova, Jana Kaderabkova, Jan Vlasák, Jennifer Lim, Lubomir Silhavecky, Paula Wild, Lubomir Bukovy, Petr Janis, Jana Havlickova, Vanessa Jungova

Director: Eli Roth

Rated: R [for brutal scenes of torture and violence, gore, strong sexual content and nudity, language and drug use]

Rating Score: 7 out of 10

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Official website: www.hostelfilm.com

Website hint:
To access more clips and downloads, click on "Enter the Experience" and then enter the following information on the form that pops up --

First: John
Last: Smith
DOB: 03/23/1978
Zip: 95206
Country: United States

Afterwards, click on any red dots or red lettering you find.

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