Gone is director Eli Roth, the desolate European location and a major theatrical release, but that didn’t stop Sony Pictures from developing a third entry in the semi-successful but uber-popular Hostel series.
Ingeniously titled Hostel Part III, the terror comes to America with a setting in none other than Sin City itself – Las Vegas, where a group of guys get together for a bachelor party only to have their week-end fun interrupted by events of torture and extreme misfortune at the hands of the Elite Hunting Club.
The ‘fun’ begins when one of the four bachelor party friends is abducted from an out-of-control party. He is taken to some remote yet high class facility that has state-of-the-art torture rooms equipped with classy looking tables and display walls filled with random torturing tools. Outside the room watching behind a large glass pane are a group of high class business men and women who use hi-tech betting equipment to play ‘Wheel of Misfortune’ – a gambling game where they can bet on everything such as what a tortured individual might yell out when at the height of their pain.
Meanwhile, the remaining friends begin a desperate search to find their missing companion. A search that will land them in the same torture room subjected to the gruesome effects of the sadistic game.
Directed by Scott Spiegel, Hostel III has no resemblance to the previous Eli Roth creations. The new setting might bring the series into a more modern world, but it was the dark, dungy backdrop of Slovakia that made Hostel that much more frighteningly believable.
Screenwriters attempted to fill Hostel III with rudimentary twists in an attempt to try and out-smart their audience, but they were generally unnecessary and hardly OMG material. Couple that with some extremely unfunny lines (“Is this a joke?” one about to be tortured man screams answered by “Oh yea, and the punchline is a killer”) and characters that as wooden as an Ikea bedroom furniture set and you get the gist of this unworthy third entry.
Of course, billed as a horror film, it is the torture (or torture porn) and bloodletting that will make or break the film with franchise fans and Hostel III can’t hold a candle to the two Roth installments. Even with a state-of-the-art torture facility, the kills are truly uninspired and lacking in any true ‘I can’t watch’ scenes of extremedom (I just made that word up). And nudity? Well, let’s just say that Hostel III can border on the PG-13 edge of nudism.
With an opening scene that did nothing more than offer a chuckle to an ending that was just plain stupid, Hostel III proves that the franchise is now dead and those that have been tortured the most are us saps that paid money to soothe our curiosity with Part III.
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