Review of Hostel: Part II (2007) by Nick O — 14 Nov 2009

A disappointing follow-up to an amazing horror film, Hostel: Part II makes the easy mistake of trying to kill two birds with one stone. Eli Roth, with whom I still have faith in, attempts to further go into the origins of the Slovakian-based torture clan in addition to creating another storyline involving three American victims and tie up the loose ends of the first Hostel's ending.

While I loved Richard Burgi and Lauren German in two of the lead roles, Heather Matarazzo and Bijou Phillips had no place in such a film as Hostel: Part II. Matarazzo's death scene (believe me, that's not much a spoiler) is mere sick pornography, which is something that Roth so wonderfully avoided turning the film into in its prime. (There's even a scene with German ripping a man's penis off and feeding it to a dog that just doesn't add anything to the movie.).

Some of the quirky bits of the first like the child robbers of Prague have some Tarantino/Roth-like bits (the kids playing soccer with a severed human head is a positive), but even they got old too quickly. What could have been a satisfying explanation of Hostel turned out to be a way-too-short bad version of art house horror classic Michael Haneke's Funny Games. This film too leaves an ending that needs to be explained, however if a Hostel: Part III is anything like this movie, I say no thank you.