In Hostel Part II Humans Can Turn on a Dime.
| Tweet | |
|
|
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!
Horror Queen Says: Bloody Thumbs Up!
Questions or comments about Hostel Part II? Contact us!
Take me to Horror Movie Reviews!
Horror Movie Freaks is the FREE eZine from Best-Horror-Movies.com that will give you the new horror releases, the new horror news and the new horror reviews that you CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT!!
Subscribing is easy, painless and free.
Do it NOW!!
