Hostel 2 (Blu-ray Disc, 2007)

This movie picks up where the original story left off and expands on the fictional kill-for-profit industry in Slovakia. This time, the backpackers are women instead of guys. Another interesting new twist is that we get to follow closely the stories of the rich American businessmen who pay to torture and kill these victims. If you're looking for more of the gore and torture so prevalent in the first film you will not be dissapointed. But where Hostel falls short of attaining the heights of the classic original, is that this time we know from the first frame what's going on and roughly what will happen next whereas the original had a mysterious plot that unfolded in shocking manner. Definitely to be watched if you liked the first film, just don't expect this one to be quite as good.

I went to go see "Hostel: Part II" in the theater because I was interested in seeing what it would be like to watch one of these torture/horror films in a situation where you cannot push the pause or stop button on your remote. I had only seen "Hostel," "Wolf Creek," and other examples of this particularly grizzly little splatter flick genre at home and I do not think the experience is ever as intense. The only horror films I have seen in theaters in recent years have been the "Saw" trilogy, and as bloody and gory as those get they are really not the same genre as what you have with this film. However, it turns out my little experiment was doomed to failure because Eli Roth's sequel is certainly not "worse" than the original in terms of the scenes of torture and killing, which should be a major disappointment to fans of the first because there is nothing here to rival it.

This perception is colored somewhat by the fact that in addition to things being more gruesome in the original there was the underlying question of what the hell was going on that added to the horror. That element is removed in the sequel because we know immediately when the "recruiter" for the hostel shows up to lure the victims to their respective fates. This time instead of three guys it is three gals: Beth (Lauren German, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre") is the good girl, Whiteny (Bijou Phillips, "Havoc") is the bad girl, and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo, "Welcome to the Dollhouse" is the weird girl. They start off in Rome but quickly make their way to Slovakia. Of course the second time around we know what is going on, so this time Roth shows us the other half of the story, with rich people bidding on the girls to win the right to the kill and laying out the key elements of the all-important contract that the winners have to sign before they get to have their fun. The focus is on a pair of Americans, the over excited Todd (Richard Burgi) and his more reticent friend Stuart (Roger Bart). We also get to meet the man who is running the whole operation.

After seeing this movie I have had to rethink what happened in the first one because it now appears clear that Roth is more interested in the twists that the terror, because I now consider that to be the biggest common denominator between the two films. Again, if you come for the blood and gore, you are probably going to be quite disappointed, because Roth is more interested in surprising you with what is really going on than getting you to consider losing your popcorn. I caught Roth in a television interview where the talking head asking the questions literally gave away the final scene of the movie, and the writer-director was talking about the political sub-text of this film as having to do with why the rest of the world hates Americans. After all, the Americans are boring and unimaginative amateurs compared to the Europeans who clearly have developed a taste for these blood baths. The victims are not required to be much more than victims, somewhat culpable in their own deaths, but that does not strike me as being primarily because they are American girls.

I did like the "twist" at the end, because it appeals to both my sense of justice and my love of irony. However, the set up was not really elegant and the element of complete surprise, so important to the original, ends up getting lost. I mean, come on, when you get a hold of passports to copy the photos and send them around the world to your potential clients how hard is it to do a quick check to make sure you are not causing yourself problems? Plus there have to be easier ways to get the girls to the factory. Then there is the cinematic commonplace of the bad guys talking rather than shooting at the critical moment and how quickly the movie gets to the end credits once the twist is revealed. Also, it seems to me that the bidding for these victims was rather low, but then clearly I place a higher value on human life than the characters in this film (hard not to).

Actually, the scariest thing when I saw this film in the theater were the guys behind me who declared the heroine to be a "bitch" because she would not let her friend go off with some strange guy when she was falling down drunk. I worry about guys who would think that was the most upsetting part of the movie, especially since buying some six packs or spiking a girl's drink with Rohypnol to get "lucky" happens in the real world even if paying thousands of dollars to torture and kill them for fun is only something that happens in movies and their less than satisfying sequels. I suppose the urge to turn this into a trilogy will be irresistible, but I will not make the same mistake twice. Instead I will find a whole bunch of new mistakes to make and will wait to see the next one on DVD, which is how you should see this one.