ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - January 6th
"HOSTEL" released in 2006
Three backpackers head to a Slovak city that promises to meet their hedonistic expectations, with no idea of the hell that awaits them, in Eli Roth's blood-soaked chiller, Hostel!
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College students Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) are traveling across Europe with their Icelandic friend Óli (Eyþór Guðjónsson), when the three meet a man named Alexei (Lubomir Bukovy) in Amsterdam, who convinces them to visit a hostel in Slovakia filled with beautiful women. When they arrive at the hostel, they are greeted by Natalya (Barbara Nedeljáková) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova), who invite them to the spa, and later to the disco. That night, Paxton and Josh sleep with Natalya and Svetlana, while Óli sleeps with the desk girl, Vala (Jana Havlickova). The next morning, they are surprised to see that Óli hasn't returned, and they are unable to contact him. They are later approached by a Japanese girl named Kana (Jennifer Lim), who shows them a photo of Óli and her friend Yuki (Keiko Seiko), who has disappeared as well.
Although Josh is anxious to leave, Paxton convinces him to stay one more night. That night, Josh and Paxton are slipped tranquilizers, and Josh stumbles back to the hotel room, while Paxton passes out in the disco's storage room. Josh wakes up in a dungeon-like room, and is approached by a man who drills holes into his chest and legs. The man removes his mask, revealing himself as the Dutch Businessman (Jan Vlasák) - whom Josh had encounted on the train to Slovakia - and tells Josh about his failed dream of becoming a surgeon. After Josh begs to be set free, the Dutch Businessman slices Josh's achilles tendons, and removes his restraints. Unable to walk, Josh attempts to crawl to the door, but the Dutch Businessman slices his throat with a scalpel, killing him!
Paxton wakes up the next morning and returns to the hostel, but gets frustrated with the desk clerk (Milda "Jedi" Havlas), who insists that he already checked out. When he returns to his room, he is greeted by two women, who invite him to the spa in an eerily similar manner to Natalya and Svetlana. Paxton finds Natalya and Svetlana at a pub and asks them if they know where Josh is. Natalya tells him that Josh and Óli are visiting an art exhibit, and she agrees to take him there. They arrive at an old factory, and Paxton is horrified to find Josh's mutilated corpse being stitched together by the Dutch Businessman. Paxton is then ambushed by thugs and dragged down a hallway, passing by rooms where people are being brutally tortured to death. He is then brought into a cell, where he is restrained in a chair and joined minutes later by a German client named Johann (Petr Janiš). After being tortured (and having two of fingers severed by a chainsaw), Paxton manages to escape his restraints and escape (killing a guard and Johann). As Paxton tries to escape, he discovers the true horrifying purpose of the hostel - to sell young tourists to a shadowy group called The Elite Hunting, where rich clients pay to torture (to death, which is mandatory) it's kidnapped victims!
Although Josh is anxious to leave, Paxton convinces him to stay one more night. That night, Josh and Paxton are slipped tranquilizers, and Josh stumbles back to the hotel room, while Paxton passes out in the disco's storage room. Josh wakes up in a dungeon-like room, and is approached by a man who drills holes into his chest and legs. The man removes his mask, revealing himself as the Dutch Businessman (Jan Vlasák) - whom Josh had encounted on the train to Slovakia - and tells Josh about his failed dream of becoming a surgeon. After Josh begs to be set free, the Dutch Businessman slices Josh's achilles tendons, and removes his restraints. Unable to walk, Josh attempts to crawl to the door, but the Dutch Businessman slices his throat with a scalpel, killing him!
Paxton wakes up the next morning and returns to the hostel, but gets frustrated with the desk clerk (Milda "Jedi" Havlas), who insists that he already checked out. When he returns to his room, he is greeted by two women, who invite him to the spa in an eerily similar manner to Natalya and Svetlana. Paxton finds Natalya and Svetlana at a pub and asks them if they know where Josh is. Natalya tells him that Josh and Óli are visiting an art exhibit, and she agrees to take him there. They arrive at an old factory, and Paxton is horrified to find Josh's mutilated corpse being stitched together by the Dutch Businessman. Paxton is then ambushed by thugs and dragged down a hallway, passing by rooms where people are being brutally tortured to death. He is then brought into a cell, where he is restrained in a chair and joined minutes later by a German client named Johann (Petr Janiš). After being tortured (and having two of fingers severed by a chainsaw), Paxton manages to escape his restraints and escape (killing a guard and Johann). As Paxton tries to escape, he discovers the true horrifying purpose of the hostel - to sell young tourists to a shadowy group called The Elite Hunting, where rich clients pay to torture (to death, which is mandatory) it's kidnapped victims!
Natalya: [as Paxton is taken away] I get a lot of money for you, and that makes you MY bitch.
Top: Alexei (Lubomir Bukovy) convinces (L-R) Josh (Derek Richardson), Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Óli (Eyþór Guðjónsson) to visit Slovakia;
Above: At the hostel, the group met the seductive Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova) and Natalya (Barbara Nedeljáková)
Director Eli Roth says that he found a Thai website that advertised itself as a "murder vacation," offering users the chance to torture and kill someone for the price of $10,000. According to the story, videos of a random person walking into a room and shooting someone in the head were posted on the Internet. Initially wanting to do a documentary on the subject, Roth found it almost impossible to get into contact with people involved in such business, and that he could put himself in danger for asking around. He decided to use the subject for a fiction, instead, and approached Quentin Tarantino to help develop the idea for the film (Tarantino and Roth said later on an Icelandic talk show that they have no idea if the website was real or not).
Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson were soon cast as the doomed American tourists Paxton and Josh. Reportedly, Roth wrote the role of Oli for Eythor Gudjonsson after he met him doing press for Cabin Fever (2002) in Iceland, and was taken with Eythor's charisma and charm. Promising he'd put him in a movie one day, Eythor was surprised when he saw that Roth had followed through with his promise, and happily accepted the role. Slovak actress Barbara Nedeljáková and Jana Kaderabkova were hired to play the roles of the seductive, yet treacherous, Natalya and Svetlana. American actor Rick Hoffman was also cast as the American Client, with British actress Jennifer Lim as fellow victim Kana and Petr Janiš as Johan, the German Surgeon. Apparently, Jan Vlasák (The Dutch Businessman) didn't speak a word of English and learned his lines phonetically.
Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson were soon cast as the doomed American tourists Paxton and Josh. Reportedly, Roth wrote the role of Oli for Eythor Gudjonsson after he met him doing press for Cabin Fever (2002) in Iceland, and was taken with Eythor's charisma and charm. Promising he'd put him in a movie one day, Eythor was surprised when he saw that Roth had followed through with his promise, and happily accepted the role. Slovak actress Barbara Nedeljáková and Jana Kaderabkova were hired to play the roles of the seductive, yet treacherous, Natalya and Svetlana. American actor Rick Hoffman was also cast as the American Client, with British actress Jennifer Lim as fellow victim Kana and Petr Janiš as Johan, the German Surgeon. Apparently, Jan Vlasák (The Dutch Businessman) didn't speak a word of English and learned his lines phonetically.
TRIVIA: Over 150 gallons of blood were used in the making of the movie, nearly three times the amount used on Eli Roth's first film Cabin Fever (2002).
Top and Above: Josh is tortured by the sadistic The Dutch Businessman (Jan Vlasák), while Paxton encounters the German Client!
The interior of the slaughterhouse was filmed at a functioning mental hospital in Prague built in 1910, in a wing that had been closed for over 50 years. Building 10, where many of the scenes were filmed, was where the craziest patients were taken. The basement was so creepy that Roth had a string quartet playing classical music to make it feel cozier while shooting. To apply Lim's "burned face/dangling eye make-up" took over four hours to apply - the make-up was so realistic that when she looked at herself in a mirror for the first time after it was applied, she began to cry. Lim later said that she would understand why her character would commit suicide after seeing the effects of the torture done up on her.
The original ending in the script ended with Paxton kidnapping the Dutch Businessman's daughter, then as they leave on a train he covers her mouth to prevent her from screaming (it's unclear whether or not he is helping her or if he is going to hurt her). This ambiguous ending was changed for the film because test screenings thought the ending was too dark and not satisfying enough. Roth then re-shot the ending that made it into the final cut (Paxton killing the Dutch Businessman), although the alternate ending is on the DVD.
At the very first screening of Hostel at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, two ambulances were called due to people having such extreme reactions to the film. A man left the theater during Josh's torture, fainted, and tumbled down the escalator, a woman asked for paramedics, believing she was having a heart attack during Paxton's torture scene. Both patrons were okay, and local media thought it was a publicity stunt by Roth. However, Roth claims to know nothing of the incidents, as he was in the theater watching the film, and only found out after when he was told by the festival staff of the chaos that transpired. On it's wider release in January 2006, Hostel received mixed to positive reviews from critics, with 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."
The original ending in the script ended with Paxton kidnapping the Dutch Businessman's daughter, then as they leave on a train he covers her mouth to prevent her from screaming (it's unclear whether or not he is helping her or if he is going to hurt her). This ambiguous ending was changed for the film because test screenings thought the ending was too dark and not satisfying enough. Roth then re-shot the ending that made it into the final cut (Paxton killing the Dutch Businessman), although the alternate ending is on the DVD.
At the very first screening of Hostel at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, two ambulances were called due to people having such extreme reactions to the film. A man left the theater during Josh's torture, fainted, and tumbled down the escalator, a woman asked for paramedics, believing she was having a heart attack during Paxton's torture scene. Both patrons were okay, and local media thought it was a publicity stunt by Roth. However, Roth claims to know nothing of the incidents, as he was in the theater watching the film, and only found out after when he was told by the festival staff of the chaos that transpired. On it's wider release in January 2006, Hostel received mixed to positive reviews from critics, with 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."
TRIVIA: The actor playing the taxi driver in the scene where the travelers first enter Bratislava was so drunk on the morning of the shoot, that the crew replaced him with a sober stunt double.
Top: Writer/director Eli Roth with actor Keiko Seiko;
Above: Roth on location in Prague
Hostel's release was accompanied by strong complaints from the country of Slovakia, and also from 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, fearing it would "damage the good reputation of Slovakia" and make foreigners feel it was a dangerous place to be. 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. 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.", also arguing that despite the many films in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, people still travel to Texas.
Although Roth did ask the President of Iceland for an official pardon for making Icelanders look like drunken sex maniacs with the character of Oli. The president laughed and gave Roth the pardon, saying it represented a side of Icelanders not shown in movies, and later Roth (and Tarantino) were made honorary Vikings at Viking Village, in a ceremony arranged by Eythor Gudjonsson. Roth's Icelandic name is Eli Sheldonsson, and Tarantino's Icelandic name is Quentin Conniesson!
Hostel turned out to be the first a trilogy of films to be released, with Hostel II in 2007 - starring Lauren German, Roger Bart, and Heather Matarazzo - and the direct-to-DVD Hostel III in 2011 (this time moving The Elite Hunting Club to Las Vegas instead of Eastern Europe). Unfortunately, neither sequel matched the box office success of the first Hostel movie, nor received the same critical response, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 44% and 60% respectively.
Although Roth did ask the President of Iceland for an official pardon for making Icelanders look like drunken sex maniacs with the character of Oli. The president laughed and gave Roth the pardon, saying it represented a side of Icelanders not shown in movies, and later Roth (and Tarantino) were made honorary Vikings at Viking Village, in a ceremony arranged by Eythor Gudjonsson. Roth's Icelandic name is Eli Sheldonsson, and Tarantino's Icelandic name is Quentin Conniesson!
Hostel turned out to be the first a trilogy of films to be released, with Hostel II in 2007 - starring Lauren German, Roger Bart, and Heather Matarazzo - and the direct-to-DVD Hostel III in 2011 (this time moving The Elite Hunting Club to Las Vegas instead of Eastern Europe). Unfortunately, neither sequel matched the box office success of the first Hostel movie, nor received the same critical response, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 44% and 60% respectively.
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 61%
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