Hostel 2 (2007)
Directed by Eli Roth
Written by Eli Roth
Starring Lauren German, Roger Bart, Heather Matarazzo, Bijou Phillips, Richard Burgi, Jay Hernandez
Release Date June 8th, 2007
Published June 8th 2007
In the last three weeks I have seen the movie Waitress 3 times. In that time, I have been reading a terrific book about the movie The Big Lebowski that is soon to hit store shelves. I mention these activities on my part as examples of good things you could be doing rather than watching Hostel Part 2 a sad perverts fantasy of a horror film.
From the twisted mysoginist mind of Eli Roth comes another woman hating fantasy about torture and death. Was Mr. Roth simply was not hugged enough by his mother as a child? Did some woman break his heart in some unimaginably cruel way? Whatever the reasons for his misogyny, these are issues that would be better dealt with in therapy and not on the movie screen.
Poor misguided Lauren German is the alleged star of Hostel Part 2. I would call her a victim of Hostel 2 but I should save my criticisms for later in this review. German plays Beth, a rich American tourist traveling Europe with her friends, sexpot Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and introvert Lorna (Heather Mattarazzo, a long way from The Princess Diaries).
Together the three seek drinks and companionship and when the opportunity for some pretty scenery and cute guys on the cheap comes their way they can't resist. Enticed by their new friend Axelle (Vera Jordanova), they travel to an exclusive little European getaway that happens to be the site where tourists are captured and sold over the internet to rich guys for the purpose of torture and death.
What a bummer.
I am being flippant because writer Director Roth makes clear with his dull dialogue and sloppy takes that he doesn't care about these characters, he is merely setting them up for slaughter. Surprisingly, it takes a little while before the gore sets in but once it does, Roth's ugly misogynist side comes out in every way you would imagine.
I can't say I was surprised by any of the awful things that Eli Roth puts his actresses through in Hostel Part 2. The first film made quite clear his feelings about women, why would having females lead the cast of Part 2 change anything. If anything, as evidenced by Heather Mattarazzo's brutal death scene, hanging upside down nude and having her throat cut as a naked woman basks in the viscera, his hatred of women has only deepened since the last film.
I told a friend after the first Hostel, and left it out of the initial review, that I honestly felt that Eli Roth makes movies in order to keep himself from piling the bodies of real women in his basement. Again, I'm being flippant, I don't wish to be. I honestly believe Eli Roth is a very troubled soul. What other impressions are we to take away from Hostel Part 2. The awful things he does to his female characters, the callous treatment of life and death, the casual context free nudity. These seem to be the actions of a sociopath rather than a filmmaker.
Aside from the Hostel films, look at his work on Quentin Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse. Roth contributed a fake trailer to Grindhouse called Thanksgiving which features a scene in which a half naked female teen is jumping on a trampoline and is impaled through her vagina with a giant knife. Some might call that humorous since it is admittedly such a ludicrous death scene. But to have even conceived such a scene is a sign of a desperately twisted and perverted soul.
Roth does, I must admit, provide a few rather big laughs. Oh, not in his abysmal film. Rather, in the film's promotional tour during which he has claimed some sort of political perspective. Interestingly, I chastised Roth in my review of the original for skirting the edge of a political perspective before retreating to more nudity and gore.
Now, as he has further strayed from any point beyond his gore and shock, he claims that he has a humorous political point about how the rest of the world see Americans. Roth now claims that Hostel Part 2 is a metaphor for the attitude Europe has taken toward Americans in the wake of the war in Iraq. I would buy that argument if the point were made in a more satisfying way in the film itself, but to have Mr. Roth merely tell us this was his point, I'm not buying it. I watched the movie, I didn't find any point, political, metaphoric or otherwise.
Hostel Part 2 exists solely as Mr. Roth's masturbatory fantasy of torture. He has a twisted grudge against women and chooses to display that on film. I wish he would simply seek therapy, and save the rest of us from being subjected to the dark corners of his perversion.
Like the recent 28 Weeks Later, another mindless example of bloodlust for profit, Hostel Part 2 deadens the soul and steals a little of your humanity as you watch it. The excesses of the horror genre are reaching a critical mass and with filmmakers like Eli Roth being feted as innovators by true artists like Quentin Tarentino and being indulged for profit by movie studios like Lionsgate, there seems to be no end to this.
The MPAA is supposed to be the arbiter of such things but bestowing a mere R-rating on something so clearly in need of the NC-17 rebuke, they have tacitly endorsed the increasingly shallow depths of character left in this genre. Hostel Part 2 is sadly not the last but merely the latest in this increasingly degrading form of filmmaking so perfectly dubbed 'horror porn'.
