First let me tell you that I ACCIDENTALLY watched this turkey instead of a different movie of the same name, from the same year, and the same genre. Somehow I ended up downloading this piece of garbage by mistake instead of the other movie, and I didn't realize this until after I completed this mega-stinker. (I generally read the synopsis weeks or months before I watch the movie hence I rarely know which plot I'm supposed to be getting.)
Why would there even be two movies called "Host" in the same bloody year?! Efffing hell. There should be some kind of International Cinema Treatise agreeing NOT to allow same-titled movies within the same calendar year - and of the same genre. The other "Host" is supernatural horror, unlike this crap. A good movie too, I might add. (I watched it a week later.)
I checked the profiles of the users who posted 9 and 10 rated reviews for this dross, and at least 90% of them are single-review users. Unfortunately, this seems to have become the norm, hence why you need to prioritize reviews from "prolific" reviewers, if you are to at least get a measure of honesty. Most "prolific" reviewers have horrible taste and write boring and/or pretentious reviews, but they can at least be trusted... a little more than than the one-review androids assigned to hype a bad movie by posting a ridiculous praise-review.
A laughably convoluted mess, and not in a good way, at all. TH keeps piling up new characters and new sub-plots for half an hour, making you wonder "how the hell is all of this connected". It isn't connected, at least not in a logical, intelligent way. The movie starts off as a gangster thriller, then turns into an incredibly dumb serial-killer "Psycho" knock-off (with a gender reversal to make things triply absurd), then - and this is the funniest part - it actually finishes as a gangster thriller. It actually goes back to its initial genre. Does a full circle.
Let me explain. I swear, not making anything up.
A dumb London gambler who wants to steal his boss's wife owes money to the triads so he has to deliver a suitcase in Amsterdam. On the way there a DEA agent approaches him about helping nail the gang.
So what happens next? The triads want to kill him? No. You'd never guess. Don't laugh...
He ends up in a "hotel" run by Anthony Perkins's Dutch sister, a woman that cuts up all of her guests and sends the meat IN BUCKETS to her friend who runs a shoddy motel / restaurant. This moron picks up the buckets in broad daylight and carries them off to his place nearby. This sadistic girl is as sweet as can be, looks nothing AT ALL like a sadistic butcher, yet she is cutting up people - and for no reason whatsoever.
Ever hear of a real-life case of a WOMAN butchering people Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre style? Of course you haven't, because no such women exist, certainly no gorgeous, wealthy young women exercising such a preposterous hobby. Women her age like to shop, do their nails, gossip on Instagram: they don't go around cutting up bodies in torture chambers. That's what sadistic men do.
Someone wrote that this script was written by a meth addict. I assure you that the average meth addict has it far more together upstairs than this writer, and I hope meth addicts have already organized a lawsuit against the reviewer who defamed them by comparing them to this amoeba.
This thriller is so dumb, it wants us to seriously believe that a DEA agent would get threatened with ARREST by a Dutch police chief just because he wants to investigate the disappearance of two people in a house! The chief's reasoning? "They are the most powerful family in Holland, I order you to stay away from them". How idiotic. Are we to believe that Holland, and western Europe in general, is full of wealthy families that butcher tourists for fun and the cops cover up all of it? Is that what this amoeba script is suggesting?
Whoever wrote this trash clearly knows nothing about the real world, knows zip about beautiful young women, or about countries like Holland which are not run like ultra-corrupt Third World banana republics. He knows zero about writing movies, otherwise he wouldn't attempt to stick a gangster plot into a brainless serial-killer thriller. Or to stick a serial-killer plot into a gangster movie: it's tough to tell where the priority here lies. A laughable mish-mash of genres that is beyond amateur.
Now, you'd assume that the butchering madwoman of Amsterdam would be the principal figure here? Wrong! Her arrest isn't in the finale, she's barely even part of it, aside from her bizarre return in the brief, extremely dumb last scene. Once she is captured the movie actually reverts back to focusing on the Chinese gang, as if the audiences could possibly give a hoot about such comparatively trite matters as the arrest of a drug kingpin after they'd been subjected to Amsterdam's house of sadistic horrors. That would be like opening a rock festival with The Police and closing it with an obscure local teenage band - and expecting the crowds to stay.
Cut to the first epilogue (which is an extension of the prologue): an utterly ridiculous scene in which the victim's brother gets advice from a shrink. Too stupid for words. Like a scene from a bad soppy drama. I fail to understand why this scene even exists, except to justify the prologue in which the shrink opens this dumb "story".
Sudden cut to the second epilogue, and legendarily idiotic final scene: we find out that the butcher lady of Amsterdam is actually FREE, as is her murderous assistant. This loser of a writer wants us to believe that a serial-killing butcher would be released without a day in jail just because they are politically well-connected... So the butchering of tourists is legal now in Holland? (Why not, they've legalized everything else...) Dutch voters wouldn't mind a serial-killer being freed without a trial? Sure...
I repeat: Holland is not a banana republic. The writer probably randomly picked a European country, eenie-meenie-miney-moe style, very likely doesn't even know where Holland is located on the map. Or perhaps this dilettante heard somewhere that Holland was a "very liberal" country and concluded stupidly that this meant that Holland allows serial-killers to slay random tourists. It would have made much more sense to set the plot in Nicaragua, for example.
Suffice it to say, one of the most idiotic thrillers ever made. For sure top 30 material, and there are easily 100s of moronic thrillers out there.
The less said about the stilted, silly dialog the better. Or the pedestrian acting. Or the silly flashback we get from the Chinese spy woman - at that point a totally irrelevant character whose childhood traumas suddenly become the focus of the dumb script.
Meth addicts and amoeba could write better scripts. I am sure of it.
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