Hostel: Critic Reviews

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.

The calculated outrages of Eli Roth's brutal exploitation film prove less shocking that its relentless bigotry.

Even after an outre punch line is revealed, the film is neither shocking nor adequately terrifying.

The film is too casually misanthropic and enamored of its expulsive prosthetic virtuosity to be politically relevant, and it's not clear what response -- shame? outrage? titillation? -- Roth is after.

All this in a 94-minute movie that takes 45 minutes getting started!

[The film] willfully takes us someplace cruel -- and deeply unfunny. Just because that's Roth's intention doesn't mean his movie is any good.

Portrayed the way Transylvania was in a 1930s vampire film, with lascivious beauties intent on seducing and drugging their unwitting American dates so they can be fed into the machinery of recreational death.

Hostel is a screaming good time, marred only by a lazy ending.

Roth doesn't know when to leave well enough alone. Piling the gore on without benefit of artful tension, the film ends up approaching parody.

The thing is just a clunky and tasteless and dumb scare picture, isn't it? Clunky, yes. Tasteless, for sure. But not so dumb I fear.

Let's hope 2006's first horror film isn't an indication of where the genre is going this year.

Eli Roth turns to modern-day Asian fright filmmakers as inspiration for his latest blood-soaked effort while demonstrating an intriguing, original voice of his own.

Whether or not this kind of horror movie is your cup of tea, you have to at least admire Roth for the daring and creativity with which he illustrates that concept.

A series of interesting ideas floating around a sea of blood

Roth is able to change the focus from frolicking raunchiness to extreme chilliness in a way that's quite sobering.

A stern moralistic rebuke to ugly-Americanism. The movie is in-your-face but not pointlessly so.

This is routine Roth as usual. Homophobia, attempted nihilism, vapid writing, paper thin plot, and nonsensical all the way...

Roth proves unable to control the tone of his premise, in the end pandering too much to the male adolescent audience that he at first seems to be satirising.

The skill with which Eli Roth has constructed his film, especially its first 40 minutes, leads me to give it the benefit of the doubt. It's creepy, gripping, horrifying stuff.

While there are some cheap thrills to be had here, much of the movie is profoundly boring.