I just finished watching Hostel for the first time. Looks like I owe someone an apology, and that someone’s name is Mr. Eli Roth.

Simply put, this was a remarkable and powerful horror movie, and I feel bad that I let the patness of Roth’s political read of the movie–and, if I’m being honest, just plain being scared to watch it–keep me from experiencing it until now. With everything so fresh in my mind it’s tough to describe why it connected with me the way that it did, except through a laundry list, but I’ll try to avoid that anyway…

For starters, it was actually quite sophisticated, politically or philosophically or however you want to put it. Horror movies have a tendency to beat you over the head with their deep thoughts, or what passes for their deep thoughts, or what they can get mainstream film critics to think are deep thoughts. But for all the ugly Americanism going on here on the part of the two lead characters, and for all the anti-Americanism on the part of anyone else, I actually thought it was played with a fairly light and deft hand. You never saw Paxton or Josh proudly proclaim their American-ness while beating someone up or sexually harassing someone or making wildly racist or xenophobic comments, which would have been easy (too easy) to have them do. Instead, it’s just kind of there–their distance from home, an air of privilege that they didn’t ask for and yet also take for granted, and all the values and prejudices they’ve inherited from their country and class and era and gender.

Obviously the latter category is enormously important. I can’t remember the last horror movie I saw that linked misogyny, pornography, and sadistic violence together this relentlessly and astutely, without seeming like an example of that link itself. And I don’t even mean the gorgeous, topless women they run into at seemingly every turn, but little moments like the revelation that their horndog traveling companion has a daughter, as does the slightly too friendly Dutch businessman they encounter on their way to the titular hostel. Watching the four men ooh and aww–sincerely, I don’t doubt–over the cuteness of the adorable little girls, then mentally contrasting that with their enthusiastic to the point of pathological quest for Pussy–which they discuss in the same acquisitive manner as one might a hot car or a cool new video game console, when they’re not busy pejoratively referring to one another as one…I was impressed, mightily so.

I know the movie has gotten a rap as homophobic, but I can’t see it at all. The characters are homophobic, again almost pathologically so, but that’s a critique, not an endorsement. (I certainly realize that the movie could be read by your average meathead opening-night horror-audience dude as FUCKING AWESOME, AND IF YOU DON’T THINK SO YOU’RE A FAGGOT, but in a weird way that’s a strength–it’s mocking these people to their faces and is smart enough to get away with it.) Again, it’s not just the constant “that’s gay, this is gay, you’re gay” bullshitting that makes the point: There’s that brilliant scene where the Dutch businessman tells Josh that making the decision to have a family was the right one for him, but that Josh should make his own decision. If one were to surgically remove (if you’ll pardon the image) that scene from this movie and plop it into some suburban-ennui indie flick, you’d have one of the most sensitive explorations of the closet and its lure I’ve ever seen on screen.

And then there’s the horror stuff itself, which is as strong as you’ve heard. It scared me, which is saying something. But it’s the stuff that surrounds each really graphic shot that gives the film its impact. Take, Paxton’s encounter with the German, for example: the German’s literally breathless excitement at getting to torture an American; Paxton’s use of German to beg the man not to hurt him (un-subtitled–a callback to an earlier display of idiocy by Paxton himself); the German’s subsequent, seeming reluctance to do so, only to be revealed as a pause to grab a ball gag; and, especially uncomfortable and uncompromising, (to quote Radiohead) the panic, the vomit.

Certainly that scene and many others are simply The Texas Chain Saw Massacre turned to eleven. Indeed, the whole movie could be read as a what-if: What if they actually showed all the violence you didn’t actually see in TCSM? The meathook going through the back, the chainsaw going through the bodies, and so on. Hell, the German even slips and drops his chainsaw on his leg–but in this case, instead of a gnarly but shallow wound, it chops his whole leg off. It’s in your face.

But back to the stuff around the gore. I think my favorite moment of the film was when Paxton, on the verge of escaping in a stolen car, hears the screams of a girl from inside the charnel house. He ends up turning around and going back inside, of course, as we expected given his earlier story about being haunted by the screams of a mother whose young daughter he’d seen drown when he was a kid. But there’s no bravery, no grim-faced resolution in his face, courtesy of a masterful performance by Jay Hernandez–there’s just an almost physical need not to bear the guilt of the girl’s suffering. He rushes to save her in almost the same way a nauseous person rushes to the bathroom to get sick.

But he’s a decent guy, which is the trick of the film. I’m not saying he’s a good guy by any stretch of the imagination. I see him like a cast member of The Real World. These young Americans aren’t murderers or animal abusers or corporate criminals–they’re simply “moral morons,” to borrow Flannery O’Connor’s term, people who can justify countless minor abuses of other people’s dignity and trust with a “hey, that’s just who I am” or an “I’m finding myself” or an “I deserve to be happy.” Paxton is a homophobe and a hedonist and a philistine and a misogynist pig, to be sure; but he likes children, he cares about his friends, he reaches out to a stranger when he sees she’s distraught, and he really does wish he could have saved that little girl. That decency beneath all the bullshit gets one final despairing expression when he rescues Kana, in two heartbreaking sentences: “What do you want me to do, honey? I don’t understand what you’re saying!”

And there’s more. The pressured-speech macho-asshole American businessman’s “Who wants this motherfucker!” The mirroring of the Amsterdam cathouse with the torture factory. The shots–of Kana’s face, of the multiple hit-and-run victims, of the two middle-aged ladies getting sprayed with blood on the train station–that prove Roth has a Troma Diploma hanging on his wall somewhere. Takeshi Miike’s cameo, and his one line of dialogue. The killer children. The fact that the professional killers’ one apparent remaining taboo–they’re not going to run over a dozen kids–is their undoing. Paxton’s quixotic attempts to hang on to his severed fingers. The electronica version of “Willow’s Song” from The Wicker Man during the sex scene. The most sympathetic, most thoroughly developed character not ending up being the main character. Even the very ending, by far the least convincing part of the film, works because of Hernandez’s and Jan Vlasák’s performances and its antiseptic savagery.

It’s a great horror film.

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