This movie reminded me of Baksheesh's now abandoned plan to established an elite bear-hunting lodge in Romania!The idea apparently came to Eli Roth after he 'found' a Thai website advertising murder vacations in which you could pay $10,000 for the thrill of torturing and killing someone. Roth intended to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but ended up making a fictional movie with some help from Quentin Tarantino instead. Hence the "inspired by true events" tag.
It's a rather adolescent take on material that had the potential to result in an altogether more tense and terrifying experience, and yet Hostel remains one of the better bad movies I've seen in a while. For all its faults it's extremely memorable.
Roth apparently made a big deal about apologising formally to the Icelandic government for having protrayed their citizens as drunked sex maniacs. I haven't been able to discover if he ever tried to apologise to the good folk of Slovakia. You could write whole essays about what this movie tells us about prevailing New Europe phobias. I laughed when one character explained why there were so many available girls in Bratislava and so few blokes keeping an eye on them:"Because of the war..."
No comments:
Post a Comment