Hostel is all blood and gore. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot – sex.

I admit, those things are fun to watch. But one and a half hours of nothing else is a bit boring, don't you think? Especially without an ingenious plot to tie them all together.

In EuroTrip, everything was about having fun. The plot may be a tad too ridiculous – going all the way to Germany to meet a girl you haven't even met before and has blocked your emails to boot? Are you crazy? – but it works.

In Saw, the scenes were as bloody if not bloodier than in Hostel. But in every victim, there is a sense of foreboding and dread. What makes these bloody scenes worth watching is the victims dilemma – maim myself or die?

Both films work because, one, they are fun, two, they have good (or ridiculously absurd) story lines, and three, they don't take themselves too seriously.

Hostel failed in all three.

The biggest mistake Eli Roth committed was that he stuck to his “real-world it-could-happen-to-you” premise to the letter. That killed any chance his movie had to be fun. Yes, I could one day be tortured by a criminal syndicate but where's the fun in that? Did it make the movie scarier? Considering the slim chance of that happening, no.

Since there is a negligible chance of an ordinary viewer being kidnapped and tortured, why play up the plausibility of the scenario?

Roth could have learned a lesson or two from the old-school zombie flicks. Zombies are not real – much like Hostel's premise – so the director does not insult the moviegoers intelligence by pretending that it was otherwise.

Bottomline: Don't waste your money on Hostel. If you want blood and gore, watch Saw. If you want sex, go buy yourself a porn video.