Movie Review: HOSTEL PART II
When discussing the Cult Favourites subsection of my DVD collection in my weekly Off the Shelf column, I described – bound by a self-imposed 100 word limit – Eli Roth’s Hostel as follows:
“… Roth’s problem is he should shut up and stop over-hyping, subsequently disappointing less people. This isn’t the “goriest, sickest movie you’ll ever see” or the “greatest modern horror”. It’s a poor-man’s-From-Dusk-Till-Dawn, melding two genres together (here, comedic sex romp with OTT horror) for a mindless ride that does exactly what’s expected, until Roth starts selling it as something different. Yes, he goes gore obsessed at the expense of the sense of dread and tension created rather well in early scenes. More of the latter, less of the former and he’d have made a film more superior to what he actually thinks he has!”
The first film was one that was essentially missing a second act. It was laid out as forty-five minutes of set-up against a further forty-five minutes of pay-off without anything in between. To advance further on what I said in the Cult Favourites issue, Roth’s film was less then what the man-behind-it-all was selling – a bit like buying a Russian bride off the internet and then facing the reality of finding out your purchase wasn’t at all like the online photo.
Second time out, Roth has made exactly the same mistake again; hyping his “Part Two” as the “sickest shit possible” and setting himself up to face the wrath of cinema-goers once more. It’s gory in an entirely excessive and gratuitous manner but we’ve become so desensitised to this “gorenography”, controlling the horror genre of recent, that even my girlfriend went in nervous at whether she would “cope” and came out asking “Is that it?”
But let’s get down to it – Is it actually any good?
What’s really surprising about Hostel Part II is that, stuck in amongst the gore and the naked women (Roth’s shooting of wanton nudity nearly makes tits boring – and tits are NEVER boring!) and some horrendously clunky dialogue, there’s a rather clever story trying to be told about the day-to-day business of the “murder farm” we first encountered in Part One. On top of that there’s a neat attempt to follow the behaviour of two clients (nicely played by both Richard Burgi – you may remember him from Season 1 of 24 – and Roger Bart – most memorable to me personally from the remake of The Producers) who’ve just bought their first “experience”. However, Roth has boxed himself into a corner with his run-away hype about the “gore” and the “sick shit” that what’s most interesting about the movie is under-developed and submerged behind the real driving force – that aforementioned “sick shit” – which turns out to be the most uninteresting.
That’s right… In a film allegedly driven by its thirst to visualise torture, pain and wounding, those very things turn out to be actually detrimental. A naked perverted lady bathing in the blood of a virgin? A young child being shot? A man being eaten by dogs? Someone losing the side of the head to a power drill? A nose being bitten off and, who could forget, someone having their penis sliced away and the wound tore open? It didn’t shock me. It didn’t sicken or disgust me. It did none of the things that Roth obviously hoped for. It made me sigh, shake my head and think “We’ve come to the point where this is entertainment?”
The fact that Hostel Part II has allegedly “flopped” (which is a nigh on impossibility considering its current take-home against the cost-to-make ratio!) is said to spell the end of this overlong fascination with “gorenography”. Until Saw IV or The Hills Have Eyes 3 or the inevitable Hostel Part III (because Roth is clearly going to push for a ‘trilogy’ regardless of whether there’s a story to dictate it). If this is the end of this current “fad” within the horror genre then I, for one, could not be more grateful. Having watched the wonderful David Moreau and Xavier Palud film, Them (which, I’ve been disappointingly informed has an American remake with Liv Tyler under the name The Strangers winging it’s way to screens this year, although it looks more like a dire rip-off of Them rather than a remake!), I’ve experienced the joy of being scared witless without the need for exposed entrails and decapitations and, having done so, I don’t want to go back.
I’m making the film sound worse then it actually is though. The film’s main plot (three backpacking females get ensnared in that same trap we saw the boys encounter first time round) is, whilst the most uninteresting, commendably performed by – Bijou Phillips aside – Lauren German and Heather Matarazzo (‘Dawn’ from Welcome to the Dollhouse has a wonderful pair of boobs but you’d really need a paper-bag over the face if you’d want to fondle them!). The attempt to wrap up the tribulations of Paxton (Jay Hernadez) from the first film falls flat in a Scream-esque pre-Act-One homage, but the commendable attempts to go “behind the scenes” of the ‘business’ / look at events through the eyes of the “customer” (although the revelations as to “why” our particular customers are motivated to do this do not convince at all!) are flawed but interesting.
The climactic revelation – no, not the penis-slicing – involving our lead character and the “owner” felt a little clunky to me. My girlfriend liked it and thought it worked well and it was this, not the gore-soaked torture sequences, that took up the majority of our post-film conversation. That and my explanation as to how I pretty much guessed the entire movements of the third act before act one had concluded (my guide to you, on this particular subject, would be to look at Roth’s attempts to throw you off in the first film by having the likeable protagonist [Derek Richardson] murdered and the obnoxious one take the lead and, when it comes to Richard Burgi and Roger Bart’s “customers”, simply reverse it!)
Roth does an excellent job of cramming so much (essentially four different plot strands if you want to be pedantic) into such a short running time (94 minutes by my watch!) and he shows skill in areas where he builds a sense of tension and foreboding, as was the case with his first chapter, developing it further and to a better extent here. It’s just a shame he wants to smother such abilities with all that blood and guts rubbish. Considering this is a film that comes with a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” title-card, maybe the man behind the wonderfully-suggestive ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs could have taken his protégé aside and gave him a masterclass in the power of “suggestion” against the easy route of throwing it all out to see. Then again, Roth wouldn’t have the safety of his “sick shit” hyperbole if he were to do that would he?
So what it comes down to is this – Is the film worth your time or not? If you get a sensation in your undergarments from seeing the likes of a young virgin hung upside down whilst sobbing and calling for her mother (probably the only scene – fantastically played by Matarazzo – along with that aforementioned shooting of a child that I came close to struggling with morally!) or severed limbs, exposed human innards and women being violently degraded then yes, most definitely. This shit is undoubtedly for you. If you liked the first one and wanted to know more about how a man (and in a brief glimpse, a woman!) can don the costume, go down into those corridors and do that sort of thing then, yeah, it’s definitely worth a look. Hell, if you want to see a rather tension-soaked first act undone by ‘all that gore’ then give it a go.
Yet if you’re going into this on Eli Roth’s own word alone, expecting the “sickest shit possible” then you’re going to walk out hugely disappointed.
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