Hostel (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Hostel |
| Original title | Hostel |
| Country of production | USA , Czech Republic |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 2005 |
| length | 90 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK no youth release (cut version), SPIO / JK: Criminally harmless (uncut) |
| Rod | |
| Director | Eli Roth |
| script | Eli Roth |
| production |
Chris Briggs Mike Fleiss Eli Roth |
| music | Nathan Barr |
| camera |
Milan Chadima Shane Daily |
| cut | George Folsey Jr. |
| occupation | |
| |
| chronology | |
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Successor → |
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Hostel is an American Torture Porn directed by Eli Roth from 2005 . The producer of the film is among others the American director Quentin Tarantino . The film opened in cinemas in the United States on January 6, 2006. With funding of approximately $ 4.8 million, it grossed $ 20 million on the first weekend alone, making it number one in the US box office. The film was shown in German cinemas on April 27, 2006.
action
The film is about the Californian backpackers Paxton and Josh, who travel through Europe with the Icelander Oli, whom they met in France and are not averse to sexual adventures with foreign women. In the Dutch city of Amsterdam, a man recommends a hostel in Slovakia , where local women are supposed to fulfill requests from foreign tourists. Once there, Josh, Paxton and Oli celebrate on their first night with two young women in a bar. When Josh goes out into the fresh air, he is harassed by a gang of criminal children. A Dutch businessman whom the trio met on the train ride to the town comes to his aid. The two go back to the bar, where they chat for a while in a friendly manner.
The next day, Oli disappeared without a trace. While the two friends puzzle over the whereabouts of their companion and look for him, the viewer learns that Oli has been murdered and dismembered by an unknown man in the meantime. The place of the event turns out to be a torture cellar; In an adjoining room, the perpetrator begins to torture a tied up Asian girl whom the three boys met the night before together with her friend Kana in the hostel. Josh and Paxton have another party the following night, and Josh has disappeared the next morning too. He wakes up in a basement room full of torture tools. The Dutch businessman, who was so kind to Josh before, cruelly tortures and murders him.
While searching for his friend, Paxton is lured by a girl into a dilapidated factory and learns what kind of cause he was involved in: In the cellars of this former factory, kidnapped tourists are tortured, tortured and killed by rich businessmen for money. Paxton is captured to also be tortured to death. First, he succeeds in delaying his torture, because he appeals in Spanish to the conscience of his Spanish-born tormentor (in the original English version, it is a German tormentor to whom Paxton appeals in German). Eventually, however, he is immobilized by a gag . When the torturer tries to torture him with a chainsaw , the latter injures himself through a chain of unfortunate circumstances. Paxton takes the opportunity to kill his tormentor with his own weapon. He frees himself from his handcuffs and now hobbles out of the torture chamber in the uniform clothing of the torturers, which he has taken from his tormentor.
On his escape through the factory building, Paxton is faced with one picture of horror after the other: in a chamber in which he has to hide for a short time, he finds a heap of body parts that are stacked on a trolley. These are burned in a factory furnace by a man whom Paxton eventually kills. Shortly afterwards he comes to a room that obviously serves as a changing room. A businessman enters and thinks Paxton is also a customer. Since every mastermind and customer has a dog tattoo on his arm, the man wants to see it at Paxton. However, since both are disturbed, Paxton can avert this. On his further escape, he rescues Kana, whom he met in the hostel the days before. They escape with a car that Paxton uses to deliberately run over two girls who serve as decoys for the gang, as well as the Slovak tipster he and his slain friends met in Amsterdam. With the help of the gang of criminal children, Paxton and Kana manage to shake off the men who are chasing them in another car.
The two arrive at the local train station. There the Japanese rushes in front of a passing train after seeing her disfigured face in a pane of glass. Paxton uses the resulting confusion to continue his escape and gets on a train. There he recognizes the Dutch businessman who murdered Josh. When he got off at a Vienna train station, Paxton followed him to the train station toilet. While the Dutchman is sitting on the toilet, Paxton slips a business card from the torture organization under the partition that he stole from the locker room in the factory. When he recognizes the card and grabs it, Paxton grabs his hand and uses a scalpel to cut off the two fingers that Paxton is missing due to the torture. Then he kills the Dutchman, gets on the train and drives away.
Alternative ending
The ending that was described as too gloomy in test demonstrations was revised by Eli Roth. He therefore shot a modified version that was also released in the cinema or on DVD. However, the original ending can be found on some DVDs (depending on the DVD variant):
The Dutch businessman is received by his young daughter in Austria. Paxton follows them to the toilets. The businessman washes his face. He looks towards the door, but nobody is there. When he sees a scalpel lying on the sink, he storms out and searches the ladies' room to find his little daughter, but she is not there. He calls for his child. Cut to Paxton on the train, who covers the screaming girl's mouth and drives away. The businessman does not notice this and remains on the platform, shouting.
On March 5, 2011, the TV broadcaster ProSieben broadcast the original version with the killing of the Dutchman in an 85-minute version (without the distribution opening credits and film credits).
criticism
The lexicon of international films wrote that the film seemed to “initially deal critically with the hedonistic attitude of its protagonists”, but “soon turned this approach into its opposite”. As a result, the “oppressive horror film” flattens into “banal action cinema that wants to attract attention with explicit scenes of violence”.
Media echo and effect
Roth purposely wanted to keep his film shocking and "realistic". He himself likes the Saw films, but does not consider a man with cancer who wants to show others the joy of life through almost hopeless situations to be very realistic. With “Hostel”, on the other hand, he wanted to create a realistic picture of our society, since it is quite conceivable that rich, bored business people, who otherwise have everything, torture other people to death and pay money for it.
In fact, "Hostel" caused quite a stir because of its extremely explicit depiction of violence. For example, in one scene Paxton has to cut off a hanging eye of the young Japanese woman he wants to rescue from her torture dungeon. This scene won a prize at the Scream Awards in the “Holy Sh! T” / “Jump-From-Your-Seat” award.
The culture SPIEGEL published a multi-page article for the film in which it is found to be good in the end, because of the absolutely controversial effect on the viewers. Just as the film draws an image of the young people on the one hand, which is expressed in the viewer either in sympathy or - due to the sexually oriented behavior of the protagonists - antipathy, so he will experience a reversal of his feelings in the second half of the film.
backgrounds
Age rating
In the originally filmed version, a few individual images (so-called violent peaks ) had to be removed in order to get the age rating R from the MPAA in the USA . However, entire scenes were not removed. In Germany, the film received the age rating no youth rating from the voluntary self-regulation of the film industry . The German theatrical version is identical to the R-rated version from the USA. However, the DVD has also been released as an approx. 90-minute extended version - the uncut version , with the SPIO / JK rating , but is only around 9 seconds longer than the FSK-KJ version and may also only be given to adults. In it, a few of the brutal scenes have been slightly expanded; For example, the passages when a torturer's leg is cut off with a chainsaw, or the infamous "eye scene" have been slightly extended. An indexing application for the SPIO / JK-tested version was rejected by the Federal Testing Office with reference to the only slightly shorter FSK-tested version.
Film template
The message "Inspired by true events" appears in the German preview. This is a Thai website allegedly discovered by Eli Roth's friend Harry Knowles, on which "murder vacation" would be advertised. Knowles sent his friend the link to this website. For the sum of 10,000 US dollars, interested parties would be brought into a room, given a loaded pistol, and could kill another person. According to Roth's report on the website , the creators had jointly developed the plot for the hostel .
This official representation is probably a PR gag, as such a website is currently considered non-existent.
Political reactions
Slovak politicians and other critics complained that the film portrayed Slovakia in a bad light. The country is portrayed as run-down, corrupt and brutal. The Slovak Tourist Office invited director Eli Roth to really get to know the country, which he refused.
The German film scholar Florian Evers dedicates a separate chapter to Hostel in his book on Holocaust iconography in post-classical science fiction and horror cinema "Picture Puzzles of the Holocaust". He describes hostel here as one of the most unpleasant experiences a cinema viewer could have in 2005, and regards Eli Roth's film as the post-traumatic work of cinema on the violent images of political reality.
Locations
From the moment when the tourists were in the east, the film was shot in the Czech Republic rather than in Slovakia, as is to be assumed. The Torture Museum is located in the Bohemian town of Český Krumlov .
The train station shown at the end of the film is Prague Central Station . In the film this is shown as a train station in Vienna . When the train enters the station, you can see the words "Praha" ( Prague ) mirrored on a station sign in the train window . You can also see advertisements in Czech a few times. a. from Coca-Cola or the headline on the men's room "Kabinky". In addition, the locomotives and their attached passenger cars are rolling stock from České dráhy .
Trivia
- Roth hired real street children to play the street gang.
- The email address on the torture club's business card ends with “@ gang.rus”. In the Internet but none exists top-level domain called ".rus"; Russia uses ".ru".
- The "Execution with the drill" depicted on the cover of the film poster is not included in the film.
- For the movie meat and blood, pork and blood were used to make the scenes seem more believable.
- The film talks about what it would be like "after the war" in Slovakia. Indeed, there has never been any armed conflict in Slovakia in the wake of the political changes in Eastern Europe in the late 20th century.
- The scene when the trio comes to the hostel for the first time shows Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction on a television .
TV premiere
The film was broadcast as a free TV premiere on ProSieben on March 5, 2011, almost five years after its German theatrical release .
Sequels
The sequel Hostel 2 opened in US theaters on June 8, 2007. In Germany, the film was supposed to be released in cinemas under the title Hostel 2 on June 14, 2007, but since the film was not approved by the FSK, the release date was postponed to July 5, 2007.
At the end of December 2011, Hostel 3, the next sequel, was released, directed by Scott Spiegel and no longer Eli Roth .
Web links
- Hostel in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Hostel at rotten tomatoes (English)
- DVD forum, hostel 3
- Comparison of the cuts No youth release - Spio / JK , Unrated - Unrated Director's Cut from Hostel at Schnittberichte.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for hostel . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , February 2006 (PDF; test number: 105 042 K).
- ↑ Bruce F. Kawin: Horror and the Horror Film . Anthem Press, London 2012, p. 165.
- ↑ Hostel. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 6, 2017 .
- ↑ Daniel Sander: Calm Blood , Culture SPIEGEL 4/2006 (March 27, 2006)
- ↑ Florian Evers: Picture puzzles of the Holocaust . LIT, Münster 2011, p. 137 ff . ( Preview in Google Book Search).