Director: Eli Roth, US, 18, 95min

Stars: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Jennifer Lim

On general release


Roth’s follow-up to Cabin Fever is another 1970s-style horror picture, with the 21st- century addition that its US youngsters are now terrorised not in chainsaw Texas but in more far-flung destinations.

Hostel opens like a sinister Eurotrip, with two American teenagers and their Icelandic pal lured to a hostel in a Slovakia famous for its willing women and luxurious accommodation. Unfortunately for our trio, their new hotel has been set up to provide a regular supply of victims for the fee-paying torturers.

Roth has a knack for hitting on interesting concepts and raising good points (ignorant Americans set out to have consequence-free high times only to wind up treated as disposable commodities just as they have treated the hookers in Amsterdam), but his dislikeable heroes are hard to spend time with even before the nastiness starts. And once the first chained-to- a-chair-and-tortured scene has played out there is nowhere for the plot to go.

Hostel is nasty but less gruelling than the tougher and more measured Wolf Creek, or the comparatively bloodless but cleverer Saw.

BACKGROUND

• Hostel: Part II

• Hostel: Part II - Sunday Times review

• Hostel

• Festival: If you go to the woods

Here’s blood in your eye

Eli Roth’s movies revel in disgust, but the director proclaims himself the ‘horror Borat’

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers