Movie Review Hostel 2

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'.

Movie Review: The Stepford Wives

The Stepford Wives (2004) 

Directed by Frank Oz 

Written by Paul Rudnick 

Starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Roger Bart, Glenn Close, Christopher Walken

Release Date June 11th, 2004

Published June 12th, 2004 

The troubles of a troubled movie project tend to go public long before the movie itself. Such is the case with the remake of the 1975 domestic horror movie The Stepford Wives. The signs of trouble began with gossip about onset bickering between the stars and director Frank Oz. Then, when the film ballooned from a three-month shoot to a six-month shoot, the gossip turned to outright fact. Finally, there was the kiss of death, the announcement of reshoots to change the ending.

Whatever chance the film had of reaching blockbuster status went out the window when the reshoots were announced. Now the best that the producers can hope for is that the editing, which when added to the time spent shooting brought the project to more than a year's worth of work, could salvage something salable, or even moderately watchable. That they did a little better than that is a miracle.

Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick star as Joanna and Walter, a married couple who also work together at a television network. Well, Joanna works, she's the head of the network, Walter works for her. However after an incident with a crazed reality show contestant, Joanna is fired and Walter quits out of sympathy. After Joanna recovers from a minor nervous breakdown, the couple take their kids and move to a gated community in Connecticut called Stepford.

Right off the bat, the place is weird. It's too neat, too orderly, too...clean. Not just clean but frighteningly clean. There is more weirdness as the family meets the Stepford welcoming committee in the form of Mrs. Claire Wellington (Glenn Close). Picture Martha Stewart on a serious caffeine bender. While Walter is shuttled off to the Stepford men's club, Joanna joins Claire at the Stepford day spa where the women of Stepford work out, though not in a way any normal woman works out.

Though her husband takes quickly to Stepford's ‘50s country club feel, Joanna is not completely alone in her alienation. Also new to the neighborhood are another pair of transplanted New Yorkers, Bobbie (Bette Midler) a cynical, slovenly, Jewish writer and Roger (Roger Bart) an outré fashion conscious gay man and well-known architect. Bobbie came to Stepford with her schlubby househusband Dave (Jon Lovitz) and Roger with his barely out of the closet lawyer Jerry (David Marshall Grant).

Being the only three normal people in all of Stepford, they commiserate over the oddity of the woman in Stepford. They all dress like housewives from 50's TV ads. They bake like it were their only job in the world. And strangest of all, these gorgeous woman are all having amazing sex with their doughy, dopey husbands, as the three accidentally witness on an uninvited visit.

Things only grow weirder though when both Roger and Bobbie disappear and then reappear in the Stepford mold with all of their personality sucked out. All of this oddness has something to do with the Stepford men's club and especially it's founder Mike Wellington (Christopher Walken), also Claire's husband. Though most of you know the film’s secret, I don't want to ruin it for the uninitiated. Needless to say, the film comes down to a battle between Joanna, the men's club, and indeed her own husband.

The biggest surprise about this film is not it's twist ending but rather how good the film is until that twist. There are a number of funny moments in Stepford Wives and most come from Kidman, Midler and Roger Bart whose biting comments about the woman of Stepford are very funny. The best scene in the film is when the three attend the Stepford woman's book club where the book of the week is all about Christmas ornaments.

Glenn Close turns in a performance that rivals her turn in Fatal Attraction for it's over the top lunacy. It almost goes without saying that Christopher Walken is good. Yet again, Walken has another of those speeches that only he could deliver. It's not as good as his tooth fairy bit in The Rundown or his masterpiece of death speech in Man on Fire, but for sheer Walken inspired lunacy it's a real highlight.

So what went wrong? Up until maybe the last 15 to 20 minutes Stepford Wives was a pretty funny comedy and then it flew completely off the rails. In his effort to distance this film from the original director Frank Oz makes a decision that is such a complete departure from the original film it's mind-blowing. The twist ending of the original film was what made it so memorable, it's why the film existed, for that one moment of shock. Obviously, that shock isn't going to be as good a second time, but the change made is so radical and so obviously tacked on that it ruins the entire picture.

Nothing of the first 50 or so minutes of the film’s run time makes any sense at all once the twist is introduced. This is a horribly misconceived change that I can't tell you how bad it is, you really have to see it for yourself to see what a garish and obvious mistake it is. So bad you wonder how a major studio and a professional director could make such a mistake.

The original Stepford Wives is a pretty good horror film. It's also very of its time. It's a social satire that drew from the burgeoning women's rights movement and the societal changes that were happening so quickly in the 1970's. When you look back on it this is not a film that should inspire a remake. The new Stepford Wives is not just filled with mistakes in its creation and final product. The idea to make it was probably the biggest mistake of them all.