50 Infuriating Horror Movie Characters We All Secretly Wanted To Die
13. Hostel - Paxton Rodriguez, Josh Brooks & Óli Eriksson
Eli Roth's Torture Porn flick Hostel is a classic display of how unlikable characters can derail an entire movie. The lead characters who fall into the hands of Elite Hunting - an organisation that kidnaps tourists so that rich people can pay to torture them to death - are so repellent that few people are actually going to be invested in their survival.
Paxton Rodriguez (Jay Hernandez), Josh Brooks (Derek Richardson), and Óli Eriksson (Eyþór Guðjónsson) are a trio of reprehensible, misogynistic frat-boys who spend their time disrespecting women, getting into fights, dropping homophobic slurs, and generally treating everyone around them like s**t. Josh is slightly nicer, yet he's still too underdeveloped to really care for, and the subplot about him possibly being a closeted gay man goes nowhere.
They're also intolerably stupid, which makes them even harder to care for. They go to this obscure corner of Europe just because some drug dealer (who's secretly allied with Elite Hunting) says there are loads of beautiful, easy women there. Sure, that's totally normal decision-making, right? They continue doing foolish things once they arrive, and these actions lead them right into the torture chambers.
Óli and Josh are tortured to death, and though Paxton survives the original, he's the first casualty of the sequel. It's impressive in a bad way that, even after everything they went through, it's still so hard to care about the trio. All three actors did very well in their parts, but they couldn't quite lift them past the bad writing.