NIGHTMARE HOSTEL

STOP IT. JUST STOP IT AND GO AWAY. CONTAINS SPOILERS.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the increased affordability of film-making equipment has enabled a far greater number of incompetent fanboy dunces to make bad horror films than it has allowed talented and imaginative tyros to make good ones. The fact that you can buy an HD camera for a few hundred quid and your mates will happily run around pretending to be zombies does not, repeat NOT, make you any kind of Director worthy of a capital D. Your brother Jimmy might have a keyboard that can produce some atmospheric drones and thuds, and you might be able to download a bit of editing software from the web, and it will all mean nothing unless you have a vague speck of talent somewhere. I can buy a set of paintbrushes very cheaply from eBay but that doesn't make me Caravaggio.

Case in point: Jeff Broadstreet, who utterly bolloxed up his 3D Night Of The Living Dead remake. I'm not suggesting that zombie movies are easy to make, but that wasn't even on the level of Zombie Nightmare or The Zombie Diaries. Hell, it's not up there with the more nonsensical Italian zomb fare such as Nights Of Terror or After Death. Broadstreet's other genre feature, Nightmare Hostel, is frankly no better. Here, a taxi driver faces jail for beating up a wino in the street but instead goes into a rage research programme run by an obviously unhinged doctor which involves injecting him with luminous yellow serum (a nod to Re-Animator, which really highlights the discrepancy between what Broadstreet thinks he's doing and what he's actually achieving). But the doctor has some kind of monster locked up in the basement forever watching bumfight videos, as well as a habit of surgically removing livers....

Broadstreet may have managed to get such genre fixtures as Andrew Divoff (the poor man's Robert Englund) and Karen Black (if she'll do House Of 1000 Corpses, she'll do absolutely anything) but it doesn't make things any better to have a couple of familiar names on board. The whole movie is supposed to take place in a research clinic but it's blatantly a disused Los Angeles warehouse, and the subplots about our hero's father issues and some kind of lawsuit with a genetics technology company just get in the way of the mad scientist stuff (he even has a halfwit assistant). The acting is pretty terrible as well - given that the supposedly hunksome star Stephen Polk is also the screenwriter AND the producer, one suspects it was all an elaborate scheme for him to snog and bonk his leading lady on camera - and the whole thing isn't nearly as exciting as it needs to be. Instead it gets very dull very quickly and the gore effects in the final confrontation arrive too late. And the gore isn't even enough to get the film an 18 - although the DVD carries an 18 certificate that's solely because of the extras.

What it needed was a better cast, a better location, a better script and better effects. In other words, it needed some money spent on it to either buy better, or to hire better. Instead they tried to do it on the cheap and, without any talent and imagination to make up for the lack of resources, they botched it. If they can't afford to make a half-decent movie, they really shouldn't bother trying. This is just rubbish.

*

Here's the link to buy the damn thing, but don't come crying to me: