getmygoat

My goat and I finally got around to watching the Hostel movies. If you haven’t seen them yet, I recommend you skip this entry and come back tomorrow.

Okay, are they all gone now? Don’t blame me if I spoil it for you (or make you sick, if you intended not to watch, but I’ll try to keep this PG-13).

I love to travel, which is the main reason why I avoided seeing Hostel when it came out (I believe Part II actually came out while I was in Greece, but I could be mistaken). At any rate, as someone who would be a prime target for the torture/murder ring depicted in the film, I avoided it. Now that I’m broke and stuck in America, I thought it was time to see them.

I won’t write another article about violence and the media and OH, THE POOR CHILDREN. That’s been done, and my goat hates redundancy. But I will share with you how I read the movies, which actually gave me a better experience than your run-of-the-mill slasher flick (although I truly love those).

I noticed an interesting juxtaposition (within both original and sequel) of the whore house and the torture house. When Josh walks down the hall in the brothel, catching glimpses of men who paid to do “whatever they want” with women inside various rooms, it’s a foreshadowing of when Pax looks through the torture rooms (where you can literally do whatEVER you want) looking for Josh. In some ways, Hostel has a moral about taking for granted that you can rent bodies for a time; the boys were more than somewhat piggish in their “pussy tour” through Europe, but misogyny doesn’t warrant death…

Or does it? In Hostel Part II we follow two female Americans on an excursion which is just as doomed as that of the young men we met in the first episode. As females traveling without chaperones, they need to stick together and avoid sketchy people. Whitney isn’t very good at that,  which gets the ladies into a few uncomfortable situations, but by the end of the film Beth finally gets to do exactly what she wants to a guy who uses the dreaded C-word.

My goat and I are always intrigued when the hunter becomes the hunted, and we saw that theme in both movies. We also thought that the format of Part II added a little something special when it introduced us to the would-be killers early on in the plot (and not just as “Creepy Guys 1 and 2″). The first movie made me wonder what type of person would pay thousands of dollars to hurt a stranger; the second movie told me in explicit detail.

If you can withstand the graphic violence (my goat managed to obtain unrated director’s cuts), these movies are worth watching. And if you’ve already seen them, I’d love to hear what you have to say about them. Did you notice any good stuff that I missed? Which characters did you relate to? What would you have added or edited?

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