Hostel Part 2

Much like the first Hostel, Hostel 2 also has a trio of tourists who are each led into a torture chamber of horrors. The three main female characters here are just as much of a bland, underdeveloped group of caricatures as the trio of male horn dogs from the first film. We have Beth (Lauren German), the sensible girl who worries about everything, Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), the prim and proper nerd, and Whitney (Bijou Phillips), the wild party chick who lives only for the moment. Which one of them survives? Horror movie fanatics should easily guess that one.

But then again, anybody would be able to predict what happens every step of the way, thanks to a mind-numbingly unoriginal storyline that, with the exception of a gender change for the main characters, apes the first crappy film. I usually give a brief description of the film's plot in my reviews, but with Hostel 2, there's no real story to speak of; since the whole driving force of the film is to get each of the women into their respective torture chambers, where director Eli Roth lovingly shows every gory detail--starting with the first unnerving torture scene, which depicts Heather Matarazzo (a former child actor best known from Welcome To The Dollhouse) strung up like a side of beef.

Up to this point, the story--if one could call it that--is still the same lame deal as the original, with stupid people doing incredibly stupid things--all while ignoring warning signs that are so obvious, they flash with all the subtlety of the red alert klaxon on the Starship Enterprise. But forget about making sense; as I've stated before, Roth’s simple-minded tale needs to get these babes in that torture chamber, pronto! Nothing else matters! And once they are taken--one by one, just like in the banal original--the discomfort the viewer feels is more for the stomach-churning scenes of torture, but not from feeling compassion for the character’s plight. Because I wasn't made to feel or care for the cardboard cut-out characters, I couldn't wait for Hostel 2 to be over.

The only real change that Roth makes in the second film is that he tries to show the inner workings of the sadistic group of torturers, including a "kind-hearted torturer" (isn’t that term an oxymoron?) played by Rodger Bart, which makes the sequel even more stupid and lame than the original (which is a pretty impressive feat in and of itself). Filled with lurid, over the top gore and violence (the cat licking the stump of the beheaded body at the beginning was so over-the-edge ridiculous that it almost made me shut the movie off right there), there’s absolutely nothing to recommend about Hostel 2. But there is one saving grace about this film: it was a bomb at the box office. Hopefully the cinematic torture porn trend has finally met its own grisly end. --SF

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