Elite Hunting: Hostel Review

Guys go off to backpack through Europe before returning and starting law school. They go to Amsterdam to get high and get laid. They get bored. A guy says there's a place in Slovakia where there is nothing but hot girls and since all the eligible guys have been killed in the war, they are super, ahem, friendly.

So the guys go to Slovakia. Check into the Hostel. They are just trying to get girls, right? Well, they have actually been sold. $5000 dollars for Asians. $10,000 for Europeans. $25,000 for Americans. Sold to do what? To be tortured to death. By rich folks looking for the ultimate thrill through a company called Elite Hunting. More thrilling than Six Flags? I guess.

Two of the three guys get tortured to death. The third guy gets away and helps a Japanese girl get away from the torture dungeon (not until after her eye is pulled out--but at least she was alive). The last guy eventually gets revenge on one of the torturers in a train station bathroom.

Very creepy movie. The backpack guys are paying to get high and get laid. The torture guys are paying to torture them. We are paying to watch the whole thing in a movie about it. Some good effects, some very real tension. One scene in particular, which is what I always look for in a horror movie, the one scene that stays with you, (and it wasn't the scene where the Japanese girl commits suicide by throwing herself in front of a speeding train and splattering everyone on the platform), was where the 3rd backpacker guy goes to the torture factory to look for his friends and as he goes through the hallway looking into rooms, he sees just heinous scenes of one human being doing horrible things to another human being. The scene is very quick but it sets a hook inside that gnaws on you and makes you want the last guy, as stupid and bad as he is, to get away from the torturers and get revenge. Which he does. Minus a few fingers.

Unless you've got a horror jones, avoid this one.