Hostel: Part II

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on June 13, 2007

I should preface this review by saying that Eli Roth, who directed the original horror hit Hostel and who came back for Hostel: Part II, is not a guy who is in the business of making bad slasher pics. He clearly cares deeply about the horror genre and you can tell from his body of work that he wants to raise the genre to another level. Roth directed Cabin Fever, among other movies, and also provided a hilarious fake movie trailer for the Grindhouse feature, for Don’t. It was one of the best parts of that whole movie. So we are not talking about some hack here, we’re talking about a quality filmmaker.

Certainly his Hostel franchise—and it is a franchise now— is inspired in a lot of ways by the horror films we have seen out of Europe, going back to the Hammer Films days. You can tell Roth is influenced by these old flicks, right down to casting cult icon Edwige Fenech as the art class instructor in this latest movie. Roth is usually very good at adding his own unique style to the movies he makes. He adds a bit of fun and humanity to his blood-filled gore fests. As if to say to the audience “it’s only a movie, don’t take life so seriously.”

This was why Eli Roth’s original Hostel was such a guilty pleasure and an inspired piece of work. It had some sympathetic characters and its fun moments. In that film you had these three “ugly Americans” hitting Amsterdam looking for cheap thrills, who wind up lured to Slovakia where they are meet some sexy Eurobabes. They stay in a creepy hostel complete with Quentin Tarantino movies playing on an ancient-looking TV; there’s a creepy guy at the front desk (Milda Jedi Havlas). They are tormented by the Bubblegum Gang street kids, and they are eventually lured to a creepy, abandoned factory where the fun and games begin. Sure, it was a gory movie with lots of torture. But you had genuinely memorable scenes and characters. The kids on the street and the Eurobabes at the hostel gave that movie a unique character and style, and those American college kids were kind of funny. It was not just another horror flick.

Hostel: Part II has a very different vibe to it. Sure, the Eurobabes are back again; the creepy street kids are back again; the hostel in Slovakia is back with the same old TV with the same Tarantino movie on it; the same creepy guy is at the reception desk; the same abandoned old factory is still there. This time, though, the unsuspecting victims of this sequel are not three goofy guys, but three American girls out to have the “European experience” (played by Lauren German, Heather Matarazzo and Bijou Phillips). Beyond that, it’s the same plot as before, with people going missing and ending up at everyone’s favorite Slovakian torture chamber. What is missing, though, is the balancing act between the lighter moments and the gruesome torture sequences. There’s not enough of the former and too much of the latter.

The main problem is that it’s a very different movie when the victims are girls (as opposed to three stupid guys that you don’t feel sorry for in the least).You just don’t want to see these women get hurt in any way. Worse, these girls clearly aren’t having a good time at all in Europe. These poor women are being hit on and freaked out by these bizarre Euro guys they meet. Those of you hoping this sequel will once again provide plenty of amusing scenes of young people having sex or getting high on drugs can forget it. You wonder why these women don’t just go back home to the USA. Instead, they become duck soup for all the depravity that is about to happen. It’s kind of a double-edged sword for the director. This movie has sympathetic female characters, but it makes it that much more excruciating to watch what happens to them. You just feel sorry for them from start to finish, and the torture scenes involving them are very hard to swallow.

Granted, they do balance it out by showing them fighting back, and there are lots of scenes of guys getting tortured. In fact, those were the goriest scenes in the whole movie. It’s nice to know Eli Roth believes in equal-opportunity bludgeoning, but it doesn’t make this movie easier to watch. There is twice the gore and more torture in this movie. You see more blood, decapitations, body parts being carved up, every excess imaginable. It’s worse than last time, or better, depending on your point of view. These bizarre scenes took a lot of imagination, there is no doubt about that. You get the feeling that Roth was doing this to see how much he could get away with, how low he could go. Pretty low, as it turns out.

I find torture scenes difficult to take at the best of times. If they were going to load up this movie with torture scenes the least they could have done was balance all this with more lighter moments elsewhere in the movie. At least, give this movie a moral compass! You didn’t get that here. This movie was unpleasant from start to finish. It wasn’t scary either, just gross.

The worst part is there is little mystery to this movie. At least last time there was the element of surprise as to what was going on. Here, you know exactly what these American women are in for, every step of the way. You sense almost immediately that the model who befriended these women at that art class in Rome (Vera Jordanova) is bad news, and so is every guy they meet. It gets frustrating to see these women make the same mistakes that doomed those guys in the first movie, going out on their own late at night and so on. And of course they all wind up at that torture chamber in Slovakia. What a surprise. The only difference is that this time you get more of an idea about what this torture chamber is about and about the “exclusive club” that is involved in running things there. There’s a storyline involving two guys who successfully bid for the right to go to Slovakia and kill people, and they add a new element to the movie because one of them seems to want to chicken out. But why would anyone want to pay big money to go to Slovakia to kill people to begin with? Wouldn’t Interpol hear about this?! And doesn’t it seem like a waste of money? A lot of what went on in this movie defies credulity. You get lots of strange things happening in the second half of the movie— people disappearing in broad daylight, people getting shot for no reason, a lot of crazy stuff.

After watching these Hostel movies the message is loud and clear: “don’t go to Slovakia”. Though I will say you’ll probably still have a better time visiting Slovakia— or the Czech Republic or Iceland or these places where this film was actually shot— than you would visiting your local movie theater to see Hostel: Part II.

This just isn’t as good as the first movie. It isn’t fresh anymore and the fun is gone, and the torture scenes are way over the top and disgusting. The words “guilty’ and “pleasure” do not accurately describe Hostel: Part II. Two other words are more fitting: (a) “preposterous” and (b) “sick.”

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