I picked up Hostel at a massive DVD sale (stolen from a library a couple of hours away, oddly enough) and I have to say, nostalgia didn't quite work on this one. I'd only seen it a few times, around 13 years old maybe, and it isn't nearly as good as I remembered. I have an aversion to sex scenes in movies -- in fact, I hate them and actively avoid them when possible. It's always male/female, it's always awkward, and it's always uncomfortable. Needless to say, I forgot that the first half of this film is just straight-up porn. The second half? Poorly-executed torture porn. It's just porn all around. I got bored within 30 minutes.
For those that haven't seen it: it follows a group of college-age men traveling around Europe to club and sleep around with foreign women. They get what's coming to them... That's about it.
The mirroring isn't lost on me. I understand that the latter half of the film is a mirror of the former and that that's significant to the message of the whole thing. At the very least I can admire how explicit it is, down to identical halls and doors with victims waiting within. But, if there was a message other than "sex tourism is bad," I missed it. At its core, it just feels like a violence-for-the-sake-of-violence type of film with a flimsy moral lesson to justify it. That isn't always a bad thing, but this one just didn't feel like it had much payoff. Neither endings were satisfying enough to tie the movie off in a way that made me feel like it was worth the watch in the first place.
The characters weren't at all interesting, and as a result, I lost interest in what happened to them very quickly. The acting was mediocre and they were too stereotypical and poorly written for me to give a shit. Not making the viewer care about the protagonists is a death sentence, regardless of whether you're supposed to hope for the best or worst for them.
I was actually a bit disappointed by how much bodily harm happens off-camera, considering how often people praise this movie for being so gritty and raw. What's the point if you don't see the worst offenses to humanity? We could show the exploitation of the women in the beginning ad nauseam, but we couldn't see the reverse to the same extent in the end? The later Saw films had better gore than this did.
Thinking about it, I can't say I like anything Eli Roth has done aside from his role in Inglourious Basterds. That alone is what made me fall in love with him, not his shoddy movie-making. Maybe that's harsh, but looking at his catalog, nothing else he's done has impressed me.
Overall, I'd give this a 2/5. I doubt I'll watch it again, but it's still nice to have in my collection. I fucking love beefing up my DVD collection. I'm planning on sharing it here sometime.