Sunday 17 February 2013

Hostel Part III (2011)




"He's alive!"

This is a rather puzzling film; Eli Roth seemingly has no involvement, and it isn't set in Europe. At last we have a film in this franchise which is free of the slightly disturbing "Europe is Godless, immoral and evil" subtext that has existed thus far. Indeed, there are two Ukrainians who are kidnapped and taken to Las Vegas for the usual evil purposes, and the scene introducing them is able to show a nice bit of misdirection.

This isn't as good as either of its two predecessors in that it doesn't really develop the premise, although the room in which the paying customers sit to bet on the carnage is a nice touch in that it strongly evokes the tackiness of television game shows. Our three identification figures, blokes on a stag do, suffer the usual shenanigans with the twist that one of them is a baddie. None of them are likeable, though, with their liking for horrible, sweaty clubs with awful, awful music and their disturbingly rapey attitudes to women.

The actual gore is... well, yeah, uncomfortable. The bloke getting his face cut off and used as a mask is rather unpleasant viewing, and this sort of thing is rather more disturbing when divorced from the cleverness we saw in the first two films. Here it's just gore for gore's sake. The scene with cockroaches is even worse, and we get glimpses of similar horrors going on in side rooms.

The ending has a couple of nice twists, I suppose, but this film is pretty empty and all about the gore. 

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