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Hostel (2005 film)

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Hostel
Theatrical release poster
Directed byEli Roth
Written byEli Roth
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyMilan Chadima
Edited byGeorge Folsey Jr.
Music byNathan Barr
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release dates
  • September 17, 2005 (2005-09-17) (TIFF)
  • January 6, 2006 (2006-01-06) (United States)
Running time
94 minutes[3]
Countries
  • United States[1]
  • Czech Republic[1]
LanguageEnglish
Budget$4.8 million[2]
Box office$82 million[2]

Hostel is a 2005 horror film written and directed by Eli Roth. It stars Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Eyþór Guðjónsson, and Barbara Nedeljáková. It was produced by Mike Fleiss, Roth, and Chris Briggs, and executive produced by Boaz Yakin, Scott Spiegel, and Quentin Tarantino. The film follows a group of American tourists, as they end up in Slovakia where they are eventually taken one-by-one by an organization that allows people to torture and kill others.

Hostel was released theatrically in the United States by Lions Gate Films and Sony Pictures Releasing's Screen Gems on January 6, 2006, and in the Czech Republic by Falcon. The film received divisive reviews from critics, but grossed $82 million worldwide on a $4.8 million budget. It successfully launched a film series, and was followed by Hostel: Part II (2007) and Hostel: Part III (2011). A television series based on the film is reportedly in development with Roth's involvement.[4]

Plot

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Two college students, Paxton Rodriguez and Josh Brooks, travel across Europe with their Icelandic friend Óli Eriksson. In the Netherlands, they visit an Amsterdam nightclub, followed by a brothel. Unable to get back into their hostel because of a curfew, they accept the offer of a man named Alexei to stay at his apartment. He convinces them that, instead of going to Barcelona, they should visit a hostel in Slovakia filled with beautiful women.

The three board a train to Slovakia, where they encounter a Dutch businessman, who touches Josh's leg. Josh yells at him, causing him to leave. Arriving in Slovakia, they find that their roommates in the hostel are two women, Natalya and Svetlana. The women invite them to a spa, and later to a disco. Briefly exiting the disco, Josh is accosted by a gang of local Romani criminal children, but the Dutch businessman intervenes to defend him. Josh apologizes for his reaction on the train.

Paxton and Josh have sex with Natalya and Svetlana, while Óli leaves with the desk girl, Vala. The next morning, Óli does not return. The two are approached by a Japanese woman named Kana, who shows them a photo of Óli and her friend Yuki, who is also missing. Elsewhere, Óli has been decapitated, while Yuki is being tortured. Josh is anxious to leave, but Paxton convinces him to stay one more night with Natalya and Svetlana. Both women slip the men tranquilizers. Josh faints on his bed, while the ill Paxton stumbles into a pantry and is locked inside.

Josh wakes up in a dungeon-like room, where the Dutch businessman begins maiming him with a drill, making holes in Josh's body, slicing his achilles tendons, then slitting his throat. Paxton wakes up in the disco and returns to the hostel, where he learns that he had supposedly checked out. He is greeted by two women who invite him to the spa. Suspicious, he locates Natalya and Svetlana; Natalya takes Paxton to an old factory, where he sees Josh's mutilated corpse being stitched together by the Dutch businessman. Two men drag Paxton down a hallway, passing by several rooms where other people are being tortured. Paxton is restrained and prepped to be tortured by a German client named Johann.

While cutting off a few of Paxton's fingers with a chainsaw, Johann unintentionally severs his hand restraints. Johann falls over, accidentally severing his leg with the chainsaw. Paxton shoots Johann in the head with a gun. He then kills a guard, changes into business clothes, and finds a business card for the Elite Hunting Club, an organization that allows its clientele to pay to kill and mutilate tourists. Paxton also discovers Kana, whose face is being disfigured with a blowtorch by an American client. Paxton kills the man and rescues Kana and they flee in a stolen car, pursued by guards. Paxton runs over Natalya, Svetlana, and Alexei, killing the latter two, while the pursuing car finishes off the first. He also encounters the young delinquents from earlier and gives them a big pack of candy and gum. They then attack and kill the men pursuing Paxton with concrete blocks.

The two make it to the train station. Kana, seeing her disfigured face, kills herself by leaping in front of an oncoming train, which attracts attention and allows Paxton to board another train unnoticed. Aboard, Paxton hears the voice of the Dutch businessman. When the train stops in Vienna, Austria, Paxton follows the Dutch businessman into a public restroom and tortures him before slicing his throat. He then reboards the train and sits calmly.

Alternate ending

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In the director's cut of the film, Paxton follows the Dutch businessman being accompanied by his young daughter into a public restroom of a train station. After finding her teddy bear in the women's restroom, the Dutch businessman frantically searches the crowd for his missing daughter. Paxton is then seen aboard the moving train with the Dutch businessman's daughter, whom he has kidnapped.

Cast

[edit]

Director Eli Roth makes an uncredited appearance as an American stoner.

Production

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Development

[edit]

After the release of Cabin Fever (2002), Eli Roth was met with praise from several industry figures, including Quentin Tarantino, who placed the film in his 'Top 10' of the year and immediately reached out to Roth in hopes of working with him on a future project. Roth was offered many studio directing jobs, mostly in the form of horror remakes such as The Last House on the Left, The Fog, and a film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, among several others, but Tarantino advised him to turn down those offers to instead create an original horror story. While swimming in Tarantino's pool, Roth brainstormed an idea for a low-budget horror film. The concept for the film came from a conversation between Roth and Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles, in which the conversation eventually approached "the sickest thing [one] could find on the internet." Knowles then shared with Roth a Thai "murder vacation" website he came across on the dark web, where one could pay $10,000 to shoot someone dead. Knowles described the website as "the most disturbing thing I've ever seen."[5][6] Roth had also met with Mike Fleiss and Chris Briggs after Cabin Fever to discuss future projects. Briggs stated "I want to make a movie called Hostel about backpackers, but I have no idea what it's about." Roth liked this, and developed a film around the idea. Upon hearing his pitch, Tarantino loved the idea and encouraged Roth to immediately start writing a draft that day, which later formed the basis for Hostel.[7]

Roth had originally debated creating the film in the style of a fake documentary that would incorporate real people and locations from supposed real underground "murder vacation" spots. When hardly any credible information could be found on the topic, the idea was scrapped in favor of a traditionally flowing narrative using fictional locations and characters.

Casting

[edit]

Jay Hernandez was cast as Paxton, with Roth praising his acting as "such a good actor that he feels like a regular guy." Roth had wanted actors who "who felt like guys I went to college with, grew up with, people that I know..." and added that "The thing about Jay is he’s really like a real guy. He has that quality, that very natural style of acting. You don’t feel like he’s acting..." while also praising Hernandez's ability to act vulnerable.[8] Jan Vlasák, a Czech actor with limited screen appearances known for his work in Shakespearean theater, was cast as the Dutch businessman. At a casting session in Prague, Slovakian actress Barbara Nedeljáková read for the part of Vala, but Roth instead asked her to read for the part of Natalya.[9]

Filming

[edit]

Principal photography took place in the Czech Republic, and many scenes were shot in Český Krumlov.[10] The torture chamber scenes were filmed in the wing of a Prague hospital that had been abandoned since 1918. In the scene in which Paxton, Josh and Óli are driven by cab to the hostel, the actor playing the cab driver showed up to the set drunk, and had a stuntman double as him. The scene was instead rewritten to have the three keep the bags on their laps, as the actor could not load them into the cab's trunk.[11]

Music

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The original music score was composed by Nathan Barr, who previously scored Cabin Fever, and commissioned The Prague FILMharmonic Orchestra to perform the score over a four-day period in October 2005. Also featured in the film's nightclub scene is the song, "Some Kinda Freak" by Mephisto Odyssey. The song featured the repeating hook, "everyone's some kinda freak...", an audio sample taken from the 1973 horror film Ganja & Hess directed by Bill Gunn and starring Duane Jones.[12]

The film is rated 18 by the British Board of Film Classification.[13]

Release and reception

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Box office

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Hostel opened theatrically on January 6, 2006, in the United States and earned $19.6 million in its first weekend, ranking number one at the box office.[14] By the end of its run, six weeks later, the film grossed $47.3 million in the US box office and $33.3 million internationally for a worldwide total of $80.6 million.[2]

Critical response

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Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 59% based on 109 reviews and an average rating of 6.1/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Featuring lots of guts and gore, Hostel is a wildly entertaining corpse-filled journey—assuming one is entertained by corpses, guts, and gore, that is."[15] On Metacritic, the film had a weighted average score of 55 out of 100 based on 21 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[16] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C−" on an A+ to F scale.[17]

Entertainment Weekly's film critic Owen Gleiberman commended the film's creativity, saying "You may or may not believe that slavering redneck psychos, of the kind who leer through Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, can be found in the Southwest, but it's all too easy to envision this sort of depravity in the former Soviet bloc, the crack-up of which has produced a brutal marketplace of capitalistic fiendishness. The torture scenes in Hostel (snipped toes, sliced ankles, pulled eyeballs) are not, in essence, much different from the surgical terrors in the Saw films, only Roth, by presenting his characters as victims of the same world of flesh-for-fantasy they were grooving on in the first place, digs deep into the nightmare of a society ruled by the profit of illicit desire."[18] Jean-François Rauger, a film critic for Le Monde, a French newspaper, and programmer of the Cinémathèque Française, listed Hostel as the best American film of 2006, calling it an example of modern consumerism.[19]

The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that Hostel was "silly, crass and queasy. And not in a good way".[20] David Edelstein of New York Magazine was equally negative, deriding director Roth with creating the horror subgenre "torture porn", or "gorno", using excessive violence to excite audiences like a sexual act.[21] German film historian Florian Evers has pointed out the Holocaust imagery behind Hostel's horror iconography, connecting Roth's film to the Nazi exploitation genre.[22]

Slovak reaction to setting

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The film's release was accompanied by strong complaints from Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Slovak and Czech officials were both disgusted and outraged by the film's portrayal of their countries as undeveloped, poor, and uncultured lands suffering from high criminality, war, and prostitution,[23] fearing it would "damage the good reputation of Slovakia" and make foreigners feel it was a dangerous place to be.[24] The tourist board of Slovakia invited Roth on an all-expenses-paid trip to their country so he could see it is not made up of run-down factories, ghettos, and kids who kill for bubble gum. Tomáš Galbavý, a Slovak Member of Parliament from the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union – Democratic Party, commented: "I am offended by this film. I think that all Slovaks should feel offended."[24]

Defending himself, Roth said the film was not meant to be offensive, arguing, "Americans do not even know that this country exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans' ignorance of the world around them."[24][25] Roth argued that despite The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, people still travel to Texas.[26]

Accolades

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Award Date Held Category Subject Result
Empire Awards
(12th Awards) 		27 March 2007 Best Horror Hostel Won[27]
MTV Movie Awards
(15th Awards) 		3 June 2006 Best Frightened Performance Derek Richardson Nominated[28]
Golden Schmoes Awards
(6th Awards) 		2006 Best Horror Movie of the Year Hostel Nominated[29]
Golden Trailer Awards
(8th Awards) 		2006 Best Horror Hostel Nominated[30]
Scream Awards
(1st Awards) 		9 October 2006 Best Horror Movie Hostel Nominated[31]
Most Memorable Mutilation The eye removal Won[32][33]
The "Holy Sh!t"/"Jump-From-Your-Seat" Award The eye removal Won[32][33]
Best Screamplay Eli Roth Nominated[31]
Best Flesh Scene Jay Hernandez, Jana Kaderabkova, Barbara Nedeljakova, and Derek Richardson, Hostel Nominated[31]
Saturn Awards
(33rd Awards) 		10 May 2007 Best Horror Film Hostel Nominated[34]
Teen Choice Awards
(8th Awards) 		20 August 2006 Choice Movie: Thriller Hostel Nominated[35]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f "Hostel (2006)". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. Archived from the original on April 15, 2019. Retrieved September 16, 2019.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Hostel (2006)". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. February 17, 2006. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  3. ^ "HOSTEL (18)". British Board of Film Classification. January 18, 2006. Archived from the original on September 12, 2023. Retrieved January 28, 2012.
  4. ^ Goldberg, Lesley (June 4, 2024). "'Hostel' TV Series Starring Paul Giamatti in the Works (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved August 1, 2024.
  5. ^ Pirnia, Garin (April 9, 2016). "11 Intense Facts About Hostel". Mental Floss. Archived from the original on November 17, 2020. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  6. ^ "Mark Walters interviews Eli Roth and Barbara Nedeljakova". www.bigfanboy.com. Retrieved August 8, 2024.
  7. ^ Hill, Logan (December 29, 2005). "Scream Kings: Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino". New York. Archived from the original on January 9, 2008. Retrieved May 28, 2019.
  8. ^ Staff, Dread Central (January 2, 2006). "Roth, Eli (Hostel)". Dread Central. Retrieved August 13, 2024.
  9. ^ "Mark Walters interviews Eli Roth and Barbara Nedeljakova". www.bigfanboy.com. Retrieved August 13, 2024.
  10. ^ Schwinke, Theodore (July 5, 2006). "Eli Roth plans Czech shoot for Hostel 2". Screen International. Archived from the original on September 28, 2015. Retrieved June 8, 2015.
  11. ^ "11 Intense Facts About Hostel". Mental Floss. April 9, 2016. Retrieved August 13, 2024.
  12. ^ "Mephisto Odyssey Soundtracks IMDb". IMDb. Archived from the original on September 12, 2023. Retrieved August 29, 2023.
  13. ^ "Hostel". Archived from the original on October 7, 2022. Retrieved October 7, 2022.
  14. ^ "Weekend Box Office Results for January 6-8, 2006". Box Office Mojo. Internet Movie Database. January 9, 2006. Archived from the original on September 6, 2015. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  15. ^ "Hostel (2006)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Archived from the original on August 30, 2013. Retrieved May 1, 2022.
  16. ^ "Hostel (2006): Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Archived from the original on May 29, 2006. Retrieved February 8, 2008.
  17. ^ "Find CinemaScore" (Type "Hostel" in the search box). CinemaScore. Archived from the original on January 2, 2018. Retrieved April 15, 2022.
  18. ^ "Movie Review: Hostel". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved April 19, 2011.
  19. ^ Jean Francois Rauger (December 27, 2006). "Les films préférés des critiques du "Monde" en 2006". Le Monde (accessed with Google Translate). Archived from the original on January 2, 2015. Retrieved May 13, 2009.
  20. ^ Peter Bradshaw: "Hostel" review Archived September 4, 2006, at the Wayback Machine, at Guardian Unlimited
  21. ^ David Edelstein: Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn Archived October 11, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, at New York Magazine, published on January 28th, 2006.
  22. ^ Evers, Florian (2011). Florian Evers. LIT Verlag Münster. ISBN 9783643111906. Archived from the original on September 12, 2023. Retrieved October 18, 2020. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  23. ^ Cameron, Rob (February 24, 2006). "Smash hit horror Hostel causes a stir among citizens of sleepy Slovakia". Radio Prague. Archived from the original on December 6, 2008. Retrieved September 7, 2008.
  24. ^ a b c "Slovakia angered by horror film". BBC News. February 27, 2006. Archived from the original on August 4, 2013. Retrieved September 7, 2008.
  25. ^ "Hostel: April 2006 Archives". Archived from the original on August 17, 2010. Retrieved July 16, 2006.
  26. ^ "Hostel - DVD Review - Horror Movies". Archived from the original on September 10, 2015. Retrieved December 7, 2015.
  27. ^ "Empire Readers Awards 2007 - Best Horror, Hostel". Empire Magazine (www.empireonline.com). Bauer Consumer Media. 2007. Archived from the original on 19 January 2012. Retrieved 8 July 2023.
  28. ^ "MTV Movie + TV Awards, USA - 2006 Awards". IMDb (www.imdb.com). Archived from the original on 2 December 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  29. ^ "Golden Schmoes Awards, 2006 Awards". IMDb (www.imdb.com). Archived from the original on 20 December 2022. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  30. ^ "Golden Trailer Awards, USA - 2006 Awards". IMDb (www.imdb.com). Archived from the original on 10 July 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  31. ^ a b c "Get Yer Scream On! Categories and Nominees Announced for Spike TV's Scream Awards 2006". The Futon Critic (www.thefutoncritic.com). July 18, 2006. Archived from the original on January 9, 2019. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
  32. ^ a b "Army of Darkness Wins Scream Award". Broken Frontier (www.brokenfrontier.com). 9 October 2006. Archived from the original on 7 April 2012. Retrieved 18 July 2023.
  33. ^ a b Jacobs, Evan (October 10, 2006). "Spike TV's Scream Awards 2006 Winners!". MovieWeb. Watchr Media. Archived from the original on May 18, 2022. Retrieved August 20, 2022.
  34. ^ "Superman Returns Leads the 33rd Annual Saturn Awards with 10 Nominations - X-Men 3 and Pan's Labyrinth receive six nominations". Movie Web (www.movieweb.com). 21 February 2007. Archived from the original on 3 February 2023. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  35. ^ "Teen Choice Awards Spread the Love - 'Lost,' Depp, Black earn multiple nominations". Zap2it (www.zap2it.com). Nexstar Media Group. 15 June 2006. Archived from the original on 19 June 2006. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
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