Let’s see…tits, blood, vomit, men making funny simulated sex faces, screaming, lots of off-screen torture, a little on-screen torture, and a pack of chimp-like children who demand candy or else they’ll beat you up and fling poo at you. Or something.

With all that, how can you possibly go wrong? Hostel will show you how….

What you’ve basically got here is a ‘let’s make a movie so we can get girls to take their shirts off’ type of movie made by people with enough money that they don’t actually need to make a movie to get girls to take their shirts off. And there weren’t even any zombies, for fucks sake….

I suppose there were a couple of good scenes, but it was, overall, the biggest waste of cinematic blood since Mel Gibson’s “Half my budget went for food colouring and Karo syrup, so let’s beat the Jesus like it’s going out of style,” thing.

What the hell were they trying to do here? Scare me out of cheap cross-Europe vacations with stories about people who’ve opened a business that’s the freakish fuck-maggot of a canned hunt and an S&M club that forgot the safeword concept? Or was it really more of an excuse to gather up all the discarded and mostly-rusted surgical implements of the world in one Silent Hill-ey warehouse, dress up like Leatherface’s Dream Date and decide to play with the shiny gun instead?

Perhaps it was just an ultra-high-budget chainsaw-safety video? “Remember, kids, when you’re in a foreign abattoir, always keep your workspace clean and free of carelessly discarded fingers, or you might slip and the chainsaw you inadvertently freed your American with might cut off your leg! Then where will you be? Flopping on the floor like some deep-sea creature washed up by a tsunami, that’s where! Keep it clean, keep it safe!”

And what the fuck was that shit toward the end with the asian chick, huh? An homage to TubGirl, perhaps?

“Oh my god he’s burning off my face and my eye is hanging out! Aaaah! Aaaugh!”

“I’ve shot him! I am your hero! Now hold still while I quail about, or I might hurt you more with these teeny scissors. I am going to cut your eye off, because that is the thing to do right now.”

Mr. Hero cuts eye off, and magically bumpy fresh-burn-scarred over area where the eye used to be spurts mustard.

Nevermind the unconvincing makeup artistry, why the fuck is she spurting mustard? Is it supposed to be optic-nerve juice? Some as-yet undiscovered fluid that sprays out directly from the brain when you cut out someone’s eye? Do we all have packets of cheap yellow-brown mustard in our heads, just waiting for the day when Mr. Three Fingers comes along to snip off our badly makeuped hanging eyeball so it can spurt gloriously and turn our face into a new take on Yellowstone’s better-known attractions [whatever they may be]?

I really wish I’d gone with my first instinct and made liberal use of the ‘make movie go fast skip chapter find interesting stuff’ button on my remote five minutes into this…thing instead of actually sitting through it.

People complain about their tax dollars being wasted. Fuck that shit, what about my fucking movie dollars?