I'll never forget the elegant opening line of Roger Ebert's review of Halloween 2 (1981).He wrote: "It's a little sad to witness a fall from greatness," and that turn-of-phrase has stuck with me ever since. It's a fine way of expressing disappointment over an inferior -- though not disastrous -- sequel to a movie you love.
Which brings me to Hostel Part 2 (2007), the follow-up to Eli Roth's brilliant 2005 horror film. The original, by the way, I count as one of this decade's true horror masterpieces. I wrote a very positive review of it here, if you're interested.
The cliff notes version is that I praised the original as "scary, intelligent, occasionally humorous in a macabre way, and highly relevant to the times we live in." I defended the first film against charges of xenophobia and felt it was both transgressive and self-reflexive...and therefore highly impressive. I even credited the Roth original with an ingenious subtext in which it was "the system" that was the real bad guy.
Hostel Part 2?
It's a little sad to witness a fall from greatness...
This unnecessary sequel commences almost immediately where Hostel ended, with the last survivor of the Elite Hunting victim pool, Paxton (Jay Hernandez), returning home to the States. Hiding out at the home of his girlfriend's grandmother, the terrorized Paxton now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder because of the horrors he witnessed in Slovakia, including the brutal murder of his friend Josh.
Fortunately, Paxton doesn't suffer for long. When last we see him, Paxton is sitting headless at the breakfast table with a cute kitty licking blood from his neck stump...
After that preamble, we're off into a retread of an overly familiar story. This time, three female art students in Rome -- Beth (Lauren German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) -- are lured to the hostel in Slovakia by the beautiful model, Axelle (Vera Jordanava). She raves about the country's therapeutic hot springs.
This set-up in itself is a funny comment on gender, I suppose. The boys who died in Hostel did so on the promise of free and multitudinous pussy. These women of Hostel Part 2 just want to have a nice spa day...
Anyway, on the train ride to Slovakia, the trio of young women run afoul of several creepy foreign-seeming men. In fact, every non-American in this film appears overtly sinister, menacing, secretive and possibly murderous, a fact which makes Hostel 2 not merely xenophobic, but over-the-top too. One or two shots of suspicous-seeming Eastern-Europeans would have sufficed...
Then it's back to Slovakia where the cookie-cutter main characters are separated from one another with ridiculous ease and then dragged kicking and screaming to the familiar torture rooms. Inside, two girls meet their gory doom, and one survives...because she's rich and can pay her way out, another commentary on the worldwide ascendancy of American-style capitalism, I suppose.
From time to time, the delinquent street children of the original also re-appear, their loyalties uncertain. And every now and then, we return to the titular hostel (where Pulp Fiction seems to be on an endless loop. Again.) What I'm saying is that all the old ingredients you expect are here, trotted out a second time for your viewing pleasure.
My diagnosis for what ails Hostel Part 2 is simple: sequelitis. Here are the symptoms:
1. The element of surprise is gone. We already know where the protagonists are headed and what's going to happen to them once they get there. The movie therefore wastes unnecessary time on the set-up and first act. The sequel adheres closely to the outline of the first film, only this time, tension is absent because familiarity breeds contempt.
2. The characters this time around are far less interesting (and by my reckoning, far less intelligent), than their male predecessors. Whereas the boys of Hostel were smarmy, cocky, arrogant and nasty, they were -- at least --interesting, not to mention well-delineated by the appealing actors. The girls of Hostel 2 are barely distinguishable. It's a cliche, but these girls aren't people...they're officially Victims In Waiting.
For instance, once in Slovakia, shy Lorna goes off alone (at night) for a moonlit boat ride with a total stranger she meets at a party...one who doesn't speak English. Of course, he promptly throws a black sack over Lorna's head, tosses her in the water, knocks her out and abducts her. The guys of Hostel weren't that stupid...they were drugged.
Come to think of it, the bad guys weren't that stupid back in Hostel either: they went to some effort to hide their murderous activities, including sending cryptic text messages back to worried friends, and so forth. Here, everything's right out in the open for all to detect. The result: the movie has no sense of subtlety and therefore an essential quality of verisimilitude is missing.
3. The dread-filled, suspenseful (and somewhat realistic) murder scenes of the original Hostel have been replaced with what a character in Wes Craven's Scream 2 (1997) termed "carnage candy." In the original Hostel, we stayed in the torture room -- firmly planted -- as the boys (Josh and Paxton) were tortured and maimed. Much of the tension arose from the fear of immobility, of entrapment. There seemed to be no escape. Their torturers were average-looking workaday butchers...anonymous serial killers off in their own little perverted fantasylands. What you carried away from that film was the terror of the chair; of your life (and death) being in the hands of a stranger.
Hostel Part 2 utterly blows it by introducing a gorgeous super-model butcher (a woman...) who promptly disrobes, slices open a naked girl (hanging upside down...) and then bathes exploitatively in a bath of her blood. The killer erotically and sensuously massages her ample titties as she does so. I realize this sequence represents a variation of the Bathory legend, but the industrial, grungy quality of the Slovakian torture rooms is sacrificed when the equivalent of a hot porn star takes center stage and performs, essentially, a "routine." There's nothing real about this.
4. As I mentioned before, the xenophobia in the sequel is ratcheted-up to absurd, nutty levels. So much so that it becomes a joke.
5. Hostel 2 promptly becomes an exercise in convention, rather than innovation. The first scene of the film -- in the traditional style of the slasher paradigm -- involves killing the last survivor of the first movie. I have to wonder why this is necessary. A clever writer couldn't have found a way to incorporate Paxton as the lead? Or simply gone in a new direction, leaving him out of the picture all together? As it stands now, the scenes with Paxton are the best in the film because the audience feels invested in him and his survival. We know what he's been through; we've taken a journey with him. When the action shifts away from Paxton to the three cookie-cutter art students, all interest in the characters evaporates.
Hostel Part 2 also feels more stereotypically misogynist than its predecessor. Since when did Elite Hunting become an all-girl (victim's) dormitory? I realize Roth attempts to inoculate himself from this charge by featuring a castration scene in the last act, but this unkindest cut of all is too little too late.
6. Situational logic gets thrown out the window. Take for example the fate of one of Elite Hunting's high-powered, rich American customers, played by Richard Burgi. Todd (Burgi) decides he can't go through with the murder of a girl, and backs out. Rather than solve the issue diplomatically, the thugs at Elite Hunting unleash ferocious dogs and the canines disembowel him.
You tell me: is that good business? Note to Elite Hunting: You don't stay in business long if word gets out to your customers that you will very likely kill them. The resolution of Hostel Part 2 hinges on the fact that Elite Hunting is a business first (killing ground second...) and that money talks while bullshit walks. So why -- in that setting -- kill a perfectly good customer?
It makes no sense whatsoever, especially given the resolution of Beth's dilemma later. It's like a prostitute murdering her john because he can't get it up. More likely she'd say, "it's okay dear...come back next week...oh, and no refund."
Despite all these problems, I should be clear: Hostel 2 is not a terrible movie. The subplot involving Burgi and Bart (as Todd and Stuart, respectively) -- two rich Americans on "vacation" at the killing grounds -- is worthwhile and compelling. For instance, Roth utilizes split-screens during a brief montage to show us the process of "bidding" on victims. We see "respectable" men playing golf, in the board room, at home with their families, casually checking their blackberries and -- under the nose of those around them -- bidding for a chance to kill.
This sequence worked amazingly well because it concerns the long-lived horror trope of the "underneath," the darkness that walks side-bys-side with normality, often undetected. Todd and Stuart obviously feel neutered by a PC, feminized American society, and so decide, with a surfeit of machismo, to re-claim their god-given roles as "hunters." Stuart goes to Elite Hunting because, as he tells Beth, he "can't kill his wife." In Slovakia, his "rage" can find expression.
This is quality, subversive material and it grants the largely suspenseless, mostly mechanical Hostel Part 2 a real lift.
In the final analysis, however, it's not nearly enough to make this sequel more than an average horror film. If I were rewriting Hostel Part 2, I would have begun in America with Todd and Stuart, and followed these characters along their entire journey. I would have introduced their wives; and depicted the men at home and at work. The art students (the eye candy...) and the regurgitation of the original Hostel storyline are entirely unnecessary and off-point. The real meat of the story is a commentary (somewhat satirical) on "civilized" American family men and what they do during their "hobby time." Had that been the steady focus, Hostel Part 2 would have been a worthy sequel to Roth's transgressive original.
Yep, Hostel Part 2 is a fall from greatness, all right.
Still, permit me to give the devil his due: Hostel Part 2's very last scene is some kind of delirious, inspired, over-the-top act of cinematic genius: a masterpiece of absurd grand guignol that elevates the film to some weird, oddly whimsical terrain. I wasn't sure whether to scream or laugh my ass off, but I tip my hat to Roth for his outrageous finale.
It's a remarkably confident and unconventional note to go out on, and one that makes the rest of Hostel Part 2 seem even more mundane and conventional. If Roth had this much cheeky ingenuity up his sleeve, why not unfurl it much earlier?
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