Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not as good as the first one, July 1, 2008
I just didn't think the storyline was as eerie as the first one. Maybe it's because there was more of a mystery surrounding the organization that was responsible for allowing these killings in the first Hostel. Now we get to actually see them do the bidding over these girls. It just looked really cheesy to me. The darkness and suspense that was present in the first film was no longer there.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as Terrible as People Say But Fails to Live Up to its Potential, January 20, 2008
"Hostel Part 2" picks up the thread where the original left off. After this effective opening chapter, director Eli Roth starts telling the horrifying tales again, about three American college students in Slovakia. For the sequel Roth changes the gender of the students to female (Lauren German, Heather Matarazzo and Bijou Phillips) and also includes the sub-plots of "buyers" or sadistic tormentors played by Roger Bart and Richard Burgi.
Not much can be said about the thin plot originally inspired by urban legends. "Hostel Part 2" like its predecessor takes it granted that legends are true. As a consequence all we have to do is to wait for the tortures to begin, and end. The sequel provides the gruesome tortures and slow deaths and is full of blood and screams. The extremely graphic film, however, is hardly called scary because it has no nuance or subtlety suggesting the horrors that are to arrive.
In fact the film does not attempt to hide the fact that terrible fates await the characters. There is no sense of suspense; what we don't know is the way how these unsuspecting students are tortured. But maybe two "Hostel" films are supposed to be like that. Roth is quite good at making the bloody torture scenes and the dark interior sets are impressive. The photography showing the countryside is also very good, beautiful and creepy at the same time.
There is another thing Eli Roth is good at and that is the casting. The main cast is very good (and they are all talented), but here I'm talking about the cameos. Ruggero Deodato, director of "Cannibal Holocaust" briefly appears, doing something I shouldn't mention. Milan Knazko (who was really Minister for Culture of the Slovak Republic) appears as "Sacha." To watch cameos and references to other films would be pretty amusing to me because they are virtually the list of the people Roth idolizes. Was there Quentin Tarantino? Yes, watch the TV closely.
However, I couldn't like the film very much despite (or because of) these "merits." From at certain point "Hostel Part 2" starts being too self-conscious. Should we take seriously the middle-aged lady taking a shower of blood, apparent reference to Elizabeth Báthory? Should we laugh when Roger Bart's character refers to one Disney animation character he played? The third act of the film almost becomes slapstick with gores.
"Hostel Part 2" with the structure that has been getting more and more repetitious since the original has surprisingly less scares than you expect, being emotionally detached from the viewers, almost cynical in its tone in describing the characters (good or bad, killing or killed) and their behaviors. The film is content with doing what it does, often disregarding the audiences who want to be scared or (if I may use the word) entertained.
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26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Didn't live up to its potential in any way, but still lots of fun., June 10, 2007
Hostel Part II (Eli Roth,2007)
The second film in the Hostel franchise is a difficult one to review, and that's pretty obvious given that reviews of the film have been split almost right down the middle. The problem is that while it's enjoyable (assuming you like that sort of thing), this is a movie that could have been so very, very much more than it was.
After a quick, and morbidly amusing, stop in to see Paxton (Jay Hernandez), the sole survivor of the first film, we immediately get back to teenagers in peril. This time it's a trio of American girls, Beth (A Walk to Remember's Lauren German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips, recently of Havoc), and Lorna (Welcome to the Dollhouse's Heather Matarazzo). You know what's coming. An alternating storyline also focuses on Todd (Richard Burgi), who buys one of the girls as a present for his friend Stuart (Roger Bart; both guys normally do time on Desperate Housewives). And that's where the germs of brilliance that could have grown into a full-blown virus lie in this movie-- the idea of taking the same scenario from the original and turning it on its head, giving us the dirt from the perspective of the killers. And we do get some of that, but it's not the focus of the film. That would have been genius.
The strongest point of the movie is that Roth dropped the softcore angle and went for the straight gore-- which has the effect, of course, of heightening the ugliness of scenes where sexuality does play a role. The greatest of these is truly brilliant, and displaces the infamous leg-shaving scene in Cabin Fever as the best single scene Roth has yet committed to film; you'll know it when you get to it, and it would be worth the price of admission alone. It is a profoundly discomfiting piece of filmmaking, and shows that Roth, when he brings his A game, is truly capable of being on the level of the guys he idolizes (another one of whom turns up for a brief cameo in this movie; I was floored, but no one else in the audience recognized him. Don't look at the cast list before you go, and see if you catch the cameo before the end credits).
All that said, the movie is rife with inconsistencies and plot holes, but that may be by design; from the opening scene, it's obvious that Roth intended this movie as a rather vicious parody of the horror film sequel formula; if you can look at the odd lapses as satire-- and Roth's own body of work, which is usually tight as a drum, lends credence to such an interpretation-- they're forgivable. The movie also contains a surprising amount of grim humor; it's a rare thing when an otherwise straight horror film has the audience walking out of the theater laughing hysterically. If the original Hostel was Roth's take on Takashi Miike's Visitor Q, this one is Ichi the Killer. with a dose of Flower of Flesh and Blood thrown in for good measure. Roth continues his one-man quest to drag Hollywood into the same space Asian horror filmmakers have been inhabiting since the late eighties, and he's turned in a movie in service of that goal that, while not living up to its potential, remains the most fun I've had seeing a horror film on the big screen in a whole lot of years. *** ˝
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