Hostel: Part II [Unrated Director's Cut]

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I spend nearly an entire weekend sitting down with Eli Roth´s "Hostel" and "Hostel: Part II." The two Blu-ray releases featured hours of bonus materials and I easily sat through both features and then picked through a number of scenes to validate my feelings on the audio and video. It then took me nearly three hours to write my review for the first film. After so much gore-porn and with Thanksgiving just a couple of days away, I´m not sure I can sit down for another three hours to review the second of Eli Roth´s "Hostel" franchise. If it feels that I´m shortchanging the entertaining and slickly done sequel, it is not because I felt lesser of this picture or simply wanted to skim over it. There is just not countless hours in a day and after three days with the Eli Roth films, I´m ready to move on to a little lighter fare. "Tremors" and "Hot Rod" are sitting near my HD-DVD player and I´ll be more than happy to enjoy the two relatively light-hearted movies.

"Hostel: Part II" continues the story that started with the first "Hostel" and unveils more of how the Elite Hunting club works and turns the table by providing three female victims for our viewing pleasure. Oddly, one would expect a few of the seemingly prerequisite lesbian love sequences and a great deal more female nudity with a "Hostel" movie that focuses an a quartet of women. You certainly expect the gore and violence to be amped up, but the red-blooded male in me expected this to be the ultimate horror movie for men to sit back and enjoy. Eli Roth chucks male viewers the finger towards the end of the film and the most horrendous scene imaginable is presented to Roth´s male audience. I cannot remember a more unsettling castration scene than what nearly wraps up "Hostel: Part II." It was violent. It was gory and to make it all the more painful, a man´s private parts are then fed to a dog. This was unsettling and unexpected and pained me far more than anything I´ve seen in the past few years in horror movies.

I´m going to spend a couple of short paragraph´s discussing the plot. I perhaps went overboard on the first "Hostel" and will try to even things out by touching on the happenings of this sequel. The film begins with Paxton (Jay Hernandez) surviving just long enough to supply his poor girlfriend Stephanie (Jordan Ladd) with a nice decapitation. In "Se7en" fashion, the head of Paxton is then delivered to the mysterious Sasha (Milan Knazko). The man behind the Elite Hunting Club is revealed to audiences.

Shortly after the beheading of the sole survivor from the first movie and a story arc that completely negated the director´s cut of the first film, three art students are introduced. Beth (Lauren German), Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) and the lovely Whitney (Bijou Phillips) are painting in Italy and a sexy model, Axelle (Vera Jordanova), poses for the three girls. After the painting session, Axelle approaches Beth and asks for a painting. She then tries to talk the girls into going out for some drinks. They refuse, but the girls soon meet Axelle on a train. The gorgeous model tells them about a hostel where the three girls can relax. Beth and Whitney look forward to sexual escapades, but the nerdy Lorna is reluctant.

At the Harvest Festival, Lorna meets a man named Roman and goes on a fateful boat ride. She is kidnapped and taken to the memorable slaughterhouse that we learned to know and love from the first "Hostel" film. There, she is tied nude upside down and another nude woman slashes her into pieces with a scythe in a bloodbath that is both frightening and erotic. Whitney is also captured and taken to the Elite Hunting facility. It takes some time, but eventually Beth is also placed into captivity. Whitney does not make it out of the building, but the wealthy Beth manages to talk her way out of her fate and turns the table on the client that had looked to slice and dice her for his own perverted pleasure.

As I mentioned earlier, "Hostel: Part II" takes time to look at the client side of the Elite Hunting experience. Two brothers are introduced. Todd (Richard Burgi) and Stuart (Roger Bart) are high profile business men who receive picture messages from the club and they bid to win the girls they aim to kill. Todd pays a large sum for Whiteny and he pays the fee for Stuart to kill Beth, who looks similar to the wife he would love to kill for her mistreatment of him. The bidding process, the contract and the remaining part of the process for Elite Hunting clients is shown. The moral and social questions that confront men who have paid to kill beautiful young women are shown. Whereas little was known about "Elite Hunting" after the first film, much is revealed in this second movie.

The decision to go to a female group of ´backpackers´ also distanced this sequel from the first "Hostel." Many of the circumstances are similar and even more of the workings of the hostel and their connection to Elite Hunting are shown, but their treatment towards woman and the manner in which Elite Hunting reels in women victims is interesting to see. Had "Hostel: Part II" feasted upon another group of horny young men, the film would not have been nearly as interesting as watching three young women victimized by the ultra-exclusive murder club. As I mentioned earlier, Eli Roth and his crew of filmmakers did not use the three women for ample more reason for nudity. He used it effectively for a different story arc and the second film was less friendly towards a male audience and when the castration occurs, male viewers are left squirming in their chairs.

I enjoyed the second entry in the "Hostel" saga, but I certainly feel that this should wrap up the franchise. The approach of looking at the workings of the Elite Hunting Club and focusing on female victims not only tied the picture to the first film, but provided a fresh angle towards the story that showed different facets of the snuff operation. There were certainly recycled elements in "Hostel: Part II," but these were almost necessary to show the similarities to how people are treated to see how the clients and victims relate to each other. This is another film that will never win any awards for its acting or storytelling, but "Hostel: Part II" again provides an above average experience for horror and gore-porn audiences. It isn´t a great film and when compared to a true masterpiece it would not even be considered a good film, but it is a dark form of entertainment that treats its niche audience well. It was dark and it was brooding, but I though "Hostel: Part II" was almost as entertaining as the first film. If it weren´t for the poor choice of dog food towards the end of the film…

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