Hostel: Part III (2011)

Directed by Scott Spiegel [Other horror films: Intruder (1989), From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999)]

Hostel has never been a film I considered amazing, but it’s a pretty solid film. Hostel: Part II is even better. It’s just a damn shame that Hostel: Part III is such shit.

My primary issue – actually, scratch that. I have more than one main issue, which is obviously problematic. Among them being the location switch, organization set-up, deaths, and ending.

In this film, they switched locations from Slovakia to Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s not a super gritty, dilapidated factory anymore – it’s a clean-cut room of torture with implements laid out and spaced beautifully. It doesn’t have anywhere near the atmosphere of grittiness that the Slovakia setting held, and it’s hard to take seriously.

It’s also hard to take the organization seriously. It’s the Elite Hunting Club, sure, but now it’s not just people who pay huge sums to torture people, it’s VEGAS, BABY!!!!!!!!!!! which means gambling. See, the victims are in a room with a giant glass window so the wealthy can watch them get tortured and killed, all while placing bets on how long it takes and also hoping to spin a Wheel of Misfortune.

If at this point you think this movie is a parody, I couldn’t blame you, but it’s not, God help our souls.

As for the deaths, there’s only one I sort of liked, in which a guy’s face was cut off. It didn’t look great, but it was at least brutal. Otherwise, we had a woman suffocated by cockroaches, a man who got his arm cut off (you could barely see anything, though), a guy shot via shotgun, a guy getting tased to death, a woman shot in the spine, a guy who was stabbed. There’s very little in the way of torture in this film, and though the first Hostel didn’t feature a ton of gore, it was so much better than this amateur hour.

Oh, it also did that thing I really, really, really love, where there’s some bloodshed, but the blood gets on the camera, because that’s so cool it’s like i;m actually there OMG BLOOD>>>>W>E>FW

In all seriousness, fuck that shit, brah.

The ending was terrible. There was a twist. The twist was illogical. I hated it. It sucked as much as the rest of the movie, though, so consistency, AMIRIGHT?????

As for performances, I did like seeing Kip Pardue (Sunshine from Remember the Titans, also in films such as The Wizard of Gore and Stag Night), though the character was pretty bad. It’s the same for most performances, such as the lead Brian Hallisay, and others, such as Chris Coy (Rogue River, The Culling, Deliver Us from Evil), John Hensley (Teeth, Campfire Stories), Skyler Stone, Thomas Kretschmann (2004’s Frankenstein, Dracula 3D, Discarnate, Rohtenburg, Open Grave, The Stendhal Syndrome), and Sarah Habel.

Well, to be fair, Habel’s character is okay, but at the same time, her character amounts to virtually nothing, so it doesn’t come to much.

I’ve seen Hostel: Part III once before, and I didn’t care for it then either (which I can’t imagine comes as a big shock). I wasn’t that hopeful seeing it again would lend any more pleasure, which was a good perspective, as this movie is just as poor as I remember. Pretty much an insult to the first two movies, this just isn’t a sequel I’d ever recommend. I’m sure some out there would have a fine time with it, but that’s deff not me.

4/10