In Hostel Part II Eli Roth makes the point is
that humans are weak domesticated animals who can turn on a dime into
brutal killers. Does he go too far?
Written by Horror
Queen June 12, 2007
Release:
2007 Written and Directed by: Eli Roth
Starring:
Lauren German as Beth Roger Bart as Stuart Heather Matarazzo as Lorna Bijou Phillips as Whitney Richard Burgi as Todd Vera Jordanova as Axelle
I’ll say it right out. Writer/Director Eli Roth's
sequel is as compelling as the original Hostel,
both in its shockingly vile content and underlying message that man
left to his own devices is nothing but a violent beast. In Hostel
Part II by “man” we mean men, women and
children.
The film opens where we left off two years back – Paxton, the
main character from the original Hostel who managed to escape the
Slovakian human hunting club “Elite Hunting”, is
back in America and living in fear, apparently for good reason as he
bites it early on in the film.
We half expect
Paxton’s girlfriend or someone related to any of the dead
travelers from the first Hostel to go to Slovakia
and look into the matter. But apparently no one cares or maybe
it’s just too long a flight. So the human hunting
continues…
Cut to Europe where we meet a new cast of young travelers –
this time women. Whitney is the aggressive party girl and Beth has a
little more sense and a huge inheritance. Lorna in contrast,
personifies the word "geek" with her big head phones, tears of
homesickness and obsessive journaling (just like the character this
actress played on the TV show Roseanne –
one of Horror Queen’s guilty pleasures)
Enter the beautiful Axelle, the Eastern European goddess who models
nude for the travelers in an art class and eventually lures them to the
“spa” in Slovakia. It’s funny how
everyone in the Hostel films drops their
site-seeing plans to go directly to Slovakia. Who knew?
Back in America, we meet two Elite online-auction winners, Todd and
Stuart. Both are financially successful, egotistical businessmen with,
of course, the desire to kill for fun…or at least one of
them has the desire. Stuart’s character is clearly struggling
with the whole torture/murder thing and appears to be coaxed into it by
his friend Todd. We wonder – in Hostel Part II
will Stuart’s conscience win out? Will he end up saving his
bound and gagged victim Beth and maybe even bring down Elite Hunting?
Or will his wife find a bank statement
somewhere…”Honey what happened to
Junior’s college tuition?”
Roth’s
point is that humans are weak domesticated animals who can turn on a
dime into brutal killers, and that even the best of us are capable of
succumbing to our innate evil tendencies. In the original Hostel
good-guy Paxton is faced with his own violent nature as he
catches himself almost strangling a child out of anger, and
has no trouble slitting the throat and causing the toilet-drowning of
his perpetrator. In Hostel Part II we see sweet Whitney
bite off the nose of one of her captors, and our heroin Beth calmly
pierce a man’s eardrum before removing his genitals and
ordering others to “let him bleed to death.”
So
consider in Hostel Part II that there are no
victims. And maybe women and children have just as much capability of
violence as men. Case in point the female Elite client who purchases
young Lorna so she can skin her alive and bathe in her blood. And
let’s not forget the group of children cheerfully playing
kickball with a decapitated head.
Has Roth gone too far in Hostel Part II to make
his point? He definitely makes us think. Whether it’s on a
battlefield in a remote corner of the world, in Abu Ghraib or in a
horror film – perhaps man is nothing but a violent beast!
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Cut to Europe where we meet a new cast of young travelers –
this time women. Whitney is the aggressive party girl and Beth has a
little more sense and a huge inheritance. Lorna in contrast,
personifies the word "geek" with her big head phones, tears of
homesickness and obsessive journaling (just like the character this
actress played on the TV show Roseanne –
one of Horror Queen’s guilty pleasures)
Part II we see sweet Whitney
bite off the nose of one of her captors, and our heroin Beth calmly
pierce a man’s eardrum before removing his genitals and
ordering others to “let him bleed to death.”
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