Hostel: Part II
Directed by Eli Roth
I wish it were possible to defend Eli Roth. A suburban Jewish youth churned through the gears of Hollywood aplomb, Roth demonstrates authentic craftsmanship and genuine care for the filmmaking process. His indie debut, Cabin Fever, showed a willingness to take the horror genre at face value, generating real chills with methodical storytelling in addition to the expected gross-out money shots. (It’s the freakiest exploration of skin disease this side of David Cronenberg—or Paris Hilton.)
Roth’s sophomore production, Hostel, had the same tenacity in its embrace of genre conventions, and a nifty satiric hook: A trio of American hedonists, exploiting the pleasures of the European Union, find themselves detained at a mercantile torture chamber where their bodies are sold to sadistic types intent on ripping them to shreds. It’s a simple indictment of the global tourism industry, and Roth hypocritically backpedals in the final act. But the storytelling remains terse and engaging, allowing minor ideological components and the unsettling nature of the viewing experience to collude in a memorably gripping fashion. Roth’s recently expanded media presence reveals that he’s a smarmy bastard, but if the movies deliver, who cares?
Sadly, the director’s proven creative finesse has given way to boring self-imitation. Hostel: Part II gives us the same premise as the first film, changing genders and little else. Three rich American gals tour through Slovakia and wind up at the mercy of the same sickening business. Violence ensues. Structurally, Hostel: Part II is virtually identical to its predecessor, but Roth curiously adds a tonal shift to the plot, replacing dread with stabs at zany comedy and intentionally over-the-top ickiness. Sacrificing credibility for the sake of creating a maniacal cartoon, Roth demolishes his artfulness.
Of course, it has to be said that all of this is part of the “torture porn” resurgence, a cheap cinematic nouvelle vague that demands heaps of onscreen gore and little else. I suppose the sequel delivers the goods on that front, and the inevitable outcry from thousands of concerned parents only enhances its street cred. But those expecting rampant bloodiness enacted with Roth’s aforementioned skill will find the end result disappointing. Take the hotly contested scene that finds Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse) dangling upside down as a frightful scythe-wielding woman treats her prisoner like a piñata. It looks nasty, but the climactic moments are enacted with a sort of droll, procedural manner. Certainly, it’s gross, but within that framework, strikingly mundane. A castration scene that takes place later has more oomph to it, but in that case, the grotesqueness of it all veers into the hardly venerable realm of camp.
The idea that horror movies have to earn their subversive edge by carrying some sort of message is misleading. Brutality for the sake of brutality, when done well, has the potential to qualify as art. Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (but not his debut, House of 1,000 Corpses) does a magnificent job of combining elegance and fear. But the “Splat Pack” clique—a loose collection of young auteurs primarily comprised of Roth and the Saw guys—seem to bind together in praise of sloppiness. Essentially, if you’ve got the guts to deliver the guts, you’ve already won the battle.
Roth actually creates two dynamic characters in Hostel: Part II—Roger Bart and Richard Burgi as middle-aged American businessmen escaping their boring lives to spend their off-hours in the torture chamber—but the complexity of their madness and desperation devolves into crass thuggish mannerisms simply to help along the incredulous final act. The Spat Pack code of conduct seems to demand that Roth, et al give the people what they want, but they should really give the people what they don’t expect.
Hostel: Part II screened for critics as the inaugural event for the Museum of the Moving Image’s fantastic series “It’s Only a Movie: Horror Films from the 1970s and Today.” Running June 16 through July 22, the collection of classic and contemporary entries in the genre works as a worthy antidote to the flaws of Hostel: Part II. (Dawn of the Dead, Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Zombie’s Rejects are some of the highlights.) Intentionally or not, the MoMI series’ schedule carries a fascinating progression: Beginning with the Hostel franchise, it asks, “How did we get here?” And it leaves us dying to find out.
