Hostel III

On what was supposed to be a fun bachelor party weekend soon descends into a nightmare when the prospective groom and his best buddies find themselves as potential torture toys for a club of sadists.
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Kim Pardue sure is a good prick, isn’t he? It’s effortless, really. So his being a member of the “Hostel Club” (their symbol a hounddog) in the third film (and the first not directed by Eli Roth) shouldn’t come as a surprise. In fact, he fits that mold rather comfortably. Seriously, doesn’t he have the kind of face you just want to punch? I mean, he’s perfect casting in a film like this because you just can’t wait (or at least, I couldn’t) to see him get it real good. It’s too bad this third Hostel film didn’t get the kind of budget Roth’s movies received because Pardue’s fate would have been a doozy to see shredded like toasted wheat.

Pardue is Carter, the best man of Scott (Brian Hallisay), taking him out for a night on the town prior to the wedding. Scott has no idea that Carter secretly plans to torture him in the Hostel Club which has selected victims suffering physical and psychological punishment for no other reason than rich folks like to harm/hurt people for kicks. The club is ran by a corporate-looking Thomas Kretschmann and his lackey who organizes "victim sweeps" (locating victims for the Hostel murders with a couple of brutes in gas masks or after he drugs them). The final thirty minutes is mostly within the club, the activities of those who operate it, kill, or watch, with Scott trying to get out of what seems like a no-win scenario.

Mike and Justin are the other two buddies joining Carter and Scott, meaning their doomed by association. A night in Vegas turns dour for all involved. Mike is the horny, outspoken, bluntly honest pal of the group, which indicates he’ll be bolted to the chair in some room with power tools first. Justin, disabled, is the nice guy that suffers only because his friend is Carter, and he’s a select part of Scott’s close-knit entourage. Carter sends these supposed friends of his to be slaughtered, with an agenda that dates back to high school…Scott’s fiancé.

Come on, don't you just want to smack him?

 

Hostel III follows the bachelor night and continuation into the next day until those associated with Pardue are to be sacrificed in the deadly Hostel murders. As was the case in the past few films, Hostel III allows the hero of the film to escape and get revenge on those who killed his friends. Pardue is on the shitlist of the hounds of torture (my nickname for them; those who are part of this secret torture society carry a tattoo of a hounddog on their arms) because he requests his victim be Hallisay instead of just a random nobody “no one cares about”, with the difficulties that come in regards to the “collateral damage” (that being the friends who tagged along, and the girls hired by Pardue for the bachelor and his friends if they want a night with call girls). The success of Hostel is that there’s no connection, personal or otherwise, between murderer and victim. Pardue’s request changes this tried-and-true method of Hostel held with such importance by those responsible for its creation. In a change in the norm, though, Hallisay is released from the chair and can defend himself against Pardue, ingeniously using the dog tattoo to get out of the cell (murderers’ tattoo opens cell doors; a perk, if you will). The remainder of the film is seeing how the Vegas Hostel folds when Hallisay (and another imprisoned victim grabs hold to a cattle prod and uses it on one of his cage guards) and Pardue both use whatever means necessary to get away, but not before killing when they have to. Pardue has it out for Hallisay, all the way to the end, but the roles will be reversed much to (most of) our satisfaction.

 

 

Transporting the “exclusive club” to the clean hostel in Vegas, to me, took away some of what gave the first two films that strong sense of nihilism and inescapable despair. Sure, victims are bolted into chairs inside a cell to be viewed by an attentive audience of elitists who take delight in the sadistic treatment of them, but it just doesn’t quite compare in potency in regards to being leather strapped in rotted chairs in the middle of deteriorating rooms located inside rat-infested old warehouses left to ruin in some godforsaken European hellhole. Some sickos with lots of green and a latent yearning for savagery can travel to Chavekslav, be free to light up a blowtorch, remain immune to the begging and “Oh, God, NOOOOOO!!!!” of unfortunate souls strapped to the aforementioned chairs in the middle of the rooms with rusting metal doors, damp floors, and walls of dilapidation, and just terrorize/destroy to their evil hearts’ content…the change of venue to a meticulously groomed cell with all the weapons of the trade on the wall in their intended slots, in order, organized, with the windows, walls, and chairs squeaky clean and in tip top shape just pales in terms of horrific surroundings. Of course, regardless of the locale, being locked in a chair while some cold-blooded fucker-- who probably has a well-respected practice in “normal society”—deciding how to peel your face off with a scalpel or dump beetles all over your body so they can herd into your mouth is rather unsettling and disturbing. What makes Hostel III unique is that it has the torture happening for a specific clientele who sit in theatre-styled seats, with computers for up-close-and-personal viewing, voting on the technique and weapons for which to kill selected victims! There’s the viewing audience of a select few who can afford it and those certain ones who pay to get their hands dirty by actually performing the bad deeds to innocent “people no one will miss”.

Because the victims in the first two films were away from home in a totally different country, that knowledge that no one knows where you are, could ever locate you, or retrace your steps to the degree needed to find you always carried some dramatic weight with me. Nothing seems more horrifying to me than the idea that once some wacko tortures and dismembers someone, burn away their body parts until they’re ash, with loved ones having no clue as to their whereabouts. That and victims sitting in that chair, unable to defend themselves against the onslaught about to harm them, having to endure the weapon-and-technique selection process with no options, it seems, available to them. Hopelessness, helplessness, and sheer terror; begging and pleading does no good. All the Hostel films have these elements in common, and I have to admit I respond emotionally to them. I would in no way want to be put in this precarious and undesirable spot…the films like Hostel establish how much this would really suck if we were. Being victimized for the entertainment of others, and knowing that death, imminent and closing in, is on the horizon because of the pleasure it brings to a group of people who derive a vicarious thrill in the agony and ecstasy of killing; this is horror, isn’t it?