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American backpackers Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (derek Richardson)
and their Icelandic friend Oli (Eythor
Gudjonsson) travel to Slovakia to fuck some cheap European pussy,
but after night one, Oli is gone. Josh and Paxton realize there's
soemthing wrong and want to leave the very next day ... but this night its
partying with their new girlfriends Natalya (Barbara
Nedeljakova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderabkova) - and they are both
drugged and pass out. When Josh wakes up, he finds himself strapped to a
chair, with some weird Dutchman (Jan Vlasák) operating on him - not out
of necessity, only because he enjoys doing surgery without having ever
actually learned it. Need I say, Josh dies soon enough.
Upon waking up and finding his friend gone, Paxton searches the whole
village for him, without any success. So he hooks up with Natalya who
claims she can lead him to Josh who is at an old factory - and soon
enough, Paxton finds himself tied to a chair as well, with some pervert
hovering over him with sharp knives and the like, soon enough cutting off
two of Paxton's fingers. Bzut somehow, Paxton manages to defend himself
and soon he can overcome his torturer ... and the guard as well.
After having seen the places body storage cum incinerator full of
corpses, Paxton can somehow sneak into the factory's locker rooms and
there he learns this is actually a highly illegal place where rich people
can buy themselves living humans to cruelly torture and kill. Paxton
steals some fancy cloths (obviously, despite missing two fingers he has no
problems binding a tie) and makes good his getaway ... almost, because
when already out, he hears a girl, Kana (Jennifer Lim), who is presently
tortured, scream, and so Paxton reenters the factory, kills her torturer
and takes her with him.
The couple's escape doesn't remain unnoticed for too long, which is
double problematic since the local police is on the organisation's
payroll, but somehow Paxton and Kana make it to the next trainstation ...
where Kana looks into a mirror, sees her face horribly difigured from the
torture and throws herself in front of the next passing train. (Now here
the film has completely lost me ... what ? This ungrateful girl just
escaped certain death, and now she worries about her disfigured face ? Who
writes this king of shit ?)
Paxton however takes the next train ... where he suddenly spots the
mysterious Dutchman. When the Dutchman exits the train, Paxton follows him
and when the Dutchman enters a toilet, Paxton is there too and brutally
murders him out of revenge ... which comes as kind of a surprise, because
in the preceeding film it was never established that Paxton knew about the
Dutchman's involvement witht he organisation ...
Oh boy, what a load of shit !!!
The premise of the film might be interesting, an organisation that
sells humans to rich people to torture and kill, the rest of the film
though is anything but. First off, the storytelling is totally off: The
film takes half an hour to establish just two things: that our heroes are
backpackers and go to Slovakia - now dear Eli Roth, I don't know if you
read this, but if you do, there is a more economic and less boring way to
do this: show the guys carrying backpacks and have a title saying Slovakia
... much cheaper and much less tedious. And even after everything is
finally established, the story does everything to not surprise the
viewer: When our heroes are drugged, you immeditately know something will
happen and the girls are somehow involved. And guess what, Josh finds
himself tied to a chair at the wrong end of a sharp knife, and a short
time later Natalya really sells Paxton to exactly the people who have
killed Josh. Later, Paxton somehow gets away from his torturer, but is he
looking for a way out ? No, he's looking for (and finding) the lockers.
Now that's actually quite a clever thing to do, but it's highly unlikely
that someone would have the nerve to act like that. Later, in perfect
disguise (including tie, actually), freedom is already in his immediate
reach, then he hears a girl scream and suddenly turns all-American hero
and saves her - and she later thanks him by inexplicably throwing herself
in front of a train.
So ok, the script of this film is atrociously bad, but the film could
have been saved by a decent direction job. Unfortunately, the director of
this flick is Eli Roth (who also made the atrocious Cabin
Fever), and he seems to avoid creating some badly needed creepy
atmosphere like plague, instead he goes for an uninspired mix of gore and
vomit (bot doesn't show a fraction of the panache Herschell Gordon Lewis
showed when showing gore) in indifferent shots as well as a few horror
icons like all kinds of knives and that old genre fixture, the chainsaw
(now why is everybody still so hell-bent on showing chainsaws when the
penultimate chainsaw film - Texas
Chansaw Massacre - was already made more than 30 years ago ?) ...
which all gets dead boring after a short time.And the finale, instead of
giving horror one last try, is just a tired and sloppily directed chase
scene, with a revenge-killing at the end - now that's not very inspired,
is it ?
All in all, don't watch it, there is so much better stuff around, and
only because the ads say Quentin Tarantino presents doesn't mean
it's any more interesting than your average teenage slasher - in fact it's
less so. Tarantino, it seems, doesn't care too much about his reputation
these days anymore ...
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