If you remember, the original Hostel ended with one surviving character moving toward an uncertain future. It’s so uncertain that the new film, Hostel Part II, begins with a nasty evisceration, only to pull back and reveal that it was all a dream. Or was it? I can understand mind-games in a flick like, say, In the Mouth of Madness or Secret Window. Here, it starts the film on the wrong note, and, incidentally, an irrelevant one, since Hostel Part II isn’t continuation so much as redux.
Since the first Hostel came out, Eli Roth’s become one of the lightning rods of the controversial “gorno” subgenre, where the horror comes from brutal, graphically depicted torture. Eli Roth decided, with this sequel, to introduce a new group of naïve American students in Europe. He gets a fresh dynamic out of giving us three sympathetic women (played by Lauren German, Heather Matarazzo, and Bijou Phillips) who pick up a fourth lady (Vera Jordonova). The fourth lady recommends that they ditch lame old Italy and journey to Slovakia for some real awesome hot springs. Word.
While these four girls journey towards inevitably gory results, Eli Roth introduces a side-story involving two men eager to join the Hostel club. Todd (Richard Burgi) can’t wait to kill him some defenseless ladies. Stuart (Roger Bart) is a bit more nervous. The side-story plays like ironic commentary on the main story. The source of all this dread, pain, and suffering? Rich husbands who egg each other on like gym buddies.
The best aspect of the first Hostel was the underlying idea: rich people so desperate for new excitement that they kill. It’s not an entirely original idea (read “The Most Dangerous Game”), but it was fresh and creepy, and Roth gave the movie a good bit of style with the medieval get-up and the color-saturated settings.
Hostel Part II duplicates a good chunk of the first film’s structure, but, in its best moments, keeps things new by showing us the business side of the whole affair. One of the girls’ passports gets copied, and the picture pops up on a dozen different cell phones. Each cell is held by an affluent, upstanding member of society, and they all look sheepish and excited as they try to outbid each other on the lovely American girl.
These moments are welcome, but there aren’t enough of them, and a lot of the film’s success depends on the formula of the first film. This film has the advantage of less irritating protagonists, and, for better or worse, that makes their deaths all the more difficult to watch. What keeps the Hostel films on the right side of oh-so-very-wrong is that we’re never rooting for the villains, and Roth always makes sure that the opportunity for escape is possible.
Still, this amounts to the first half being a waiting game, and the second half being a peek-through-your-eyes affair. Roth tries to vary the amount of carnage we see from kill to kill, but, rest assured, they’re all nasty, and one in particular will have most people leave the theater clutching a vital part of their body. The first film was trying to say something about desensitization and the moral black hole that comes from wealth. But, since it’s been said, the second film can really only say it again, albeit with competence and craft. The film isn’t bad, and fans of the first should appreciate its little twists, but it’s not really Hostel Part II. It’s Hostel Again.
