Hostel: Part III, 2011.
Directed by Scott Spiegel.
Starring Kip Pardue, Brian Hallisay, John Hensley, Sarah Habel, Skyler Stone, Zulay Henao and Thomas Kretschmann.
SYNOPSIS:
During a bachelor party in Las Vegas, four friends are invited to a private party way off the strip where they become the subjects of a perverse game of high stakes gambling.
The Hostel series isn’t one of the most lucrative out there but has had moderate success. The original Hostel was a fairly decent thriller despite it being part of the “torture porn” genre and Hostel: Part II was essentially the same movie, only not as good and with girls as the leads. Now we get Hostel: Part III, the only one in the series to not get a theatrical release. How well does it hold up compared to the first two?
Scott (Brian Halisay), Carter (Kip Pardue), Justin (John Hensley) and Mike (Skyler Stone) are all going to Las Vegas for Scott’s bachelor party. They plan on having a great time gambling, drinking and hopefully hooking up with a few strippers. Two escorts Nikki and Angela invite them out to a party just off the Vegas strip. At first this doesn’t look like a great place and they aren’t sure if they can trust these girls, but once they get inside everything seems fine and they have a great night. When the guys wake up the next morning they discover that Mike is missing and later find out that Nikki is also missing. What they don’t know is that both of them have been taken captive by a secret organization that kills people in sadistic ways and whose members can bet on certain aspects of the killing. The guys must come together along with Angela to find out what happened to their friends and, hopefully, make it out alive.
In the beginning Hostel: Part III was, dare I say, not too bad actually. I was going into this not expecting much at all and I was surprised when it started out pretty decently. Certain things would happen that were not the norm for these type of movies. Characters who looked like they were obviously the ones involved with the sadistic group turned out to be the good guys, and even though the main characters are your typical horror movie types, the acting wasn’t too bad. It was however too good to be true, because once it gets past the middle point it just starts to get worse and worse.
The third act of this movie is what really kills it. Things just become overly predictable and everything just starts to get silly. I wanted to see if these guys would make it out alive or not but once it kept going I honestly could have cared less because all of them became completely unlikable except for Justin, who remained the only redeemable character. None of the acting here is particularly great but it’s not bad. The best comes from John Hensley (Nip/Tuck), who plays the nice guy in the group who has to walk around with a crutch because of a bad leg. Brian Hallisay (The Client List) and Kip Pardue (Remember the Titans) are okay but their characters become way too over-the-top towards the end.
Die hard horror fans are probably going to be disappointed by the torture scenes. While the first one isn’t too bad the rest are utterly forgettable and should have been a lot better. There actually aren’t very many torture scenes, which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. The sequences in the first two Hostel movies work a lot better; not only did they look better but the actors made you feel like they were really being tortured, which I can’t say is the same this time around.
Hostel: Part III starts off better than expected, but gradually gets worse and ends terribly.
Flickering Myth Rating: Film ★ / Movie ★
Jake Peffer
Originally published August 10, 2012. Updated April 11, 2018.
