FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

Three vacationers are traveling across Europe, looking for all the best the various countries have to offer. Their youthful, hedonistic ways lead them to all sorts of drugs and women. After a run in with a local of Amsterdam, they head off to Slovakia to find an out of the way hostel that promises to have the hottest, sluttiest women who just love American men. How could anyone pass up such an opportunity? When they finally find the place, they find what they’re looking for and so much more that they weren’t.

You wouldn’t guess from watching the first half of the movie that you were watching a horror flick. Instead, the best bet would be on horrible college sex comedy. I have no problem with opening a scary movie with some light-heartedness to lead us in or to help draw us into the characters, but I don’t need it to be the majority of the damn picture. Eli Roth is a strange writer/director. I can’t ever tell if his humor is intentional or not. I laughed a lot during the movie, but not because the dialogue was funny, but rather the situations and the characters were so laughably lame, stupid and completely ridiculous. Yet somehow I came out of the theater wondering if he’s in on the joke. I mean, there’s a slow motion close up of a silhouetted hand pound as two dudes bang this hooker. Was that supposed to be as funny as I found it? It could go either way. I tend to lean towards the cautious side and say that he didn’t mean for it to play so horribly. That of course, makes the movie worse. Oh, and Eli, all the pubescent boys out there thank you for all the naked ladies (and plenty of the post-pubescent guys as well, of course).

So now, once you finally get to the horror stuff, the movie is forced to play out the entire typical storyline in a much condensed time. Luckily, the killing and the torture and all that good stuff are quite good and very gory. You’ll find several worthwhile moments to make you cringe, clench, or to get you riled up in some way. But since that accounts for such a small percentage of the total experience, it doesn’t do all that much to get your blood pumping. The whole thing just isn’t all that effective. It spends way too much time on a set-up, gets us going for about ten minutes and then shuts it all down again. I didn’t come to watch two random guys travel Europe uneventfully and uninterestingly for half a picture. I wanted to see the nasty, bloody carnage of this psychotic societal underbelly. I didn’t see enough of it, and what I saw the rest of the time didn’t do anything for me either. This may be better than “Cabin Fever,” but that’s not saying much

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