Seriously, people.

I'm not kidding about this.

I blow the ending and the surprises and everything.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

Everyone gone who doesn't want to be here?

Good.

Hostel: Part II

There's no other way to slice it so I might as well lead off by saying it: Hostel: Part II is nowhere near as good as the original.

This is not to say it's a poorly made movie. Just like the first one, it's frequently, nearly always in fact, gorgeous to look at. During the Q&A that followed the screening I attended yesterday, Eli Roth said that his years of experience as everything from a P.A. to an A.D. on movies with budgets ranging from $100,000 to $100,000,000 taught him how money is wasted on movies before he ever helmed one himself. "I think I know how to spend the money on-screen," he said, and he does, from that breathtaking ruined-factory shot to the torture props.

And there are occasional--occasional--moments of great wit and intelligence, the stuff from which the first movie was constructed. The cryptic warning offered by the apparently sole decent human being left in the Slovakian town where the torture-factory is located was a knowing callback to horror films past, a creepy bit of foreshadowing like the drunk at the cemetery in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or the old man who warns Ned Beatty "you don't know nothin'" in Deliverance. There's an equally enjoyable Aliens shout-out at the beginning, too.

Gems on the movie's own terms can be found as well. The fact that female members of the "hunting club" receive the bloodhound tattoo on their lower back, party-girl style, is a welcome example of the first film's keen eye for the downside of modern-day gender politics. A set piece involving competing bids for the privilege of torturing American women to death, shown in quick cuts between an ever-widening network of wealthy businessmen and women the world over, elicited audible "oh my God"s from the audience as it conveyed the sheer scope of the torture operation, and hammered home the "no one is innocent" message. When you figure out early on that two American-businessmen customers of the torture factory will be our main characters alongside the trio of turistas, it seems that, as an exploration of man's inhumanity to (wo)man to rival the first film, this one's off to a good start.

But it doesn't go much further than that, I'm afraid. In the Q&A, Roth said that his motto for making the movie was "the next level," a raison d'etre he said was best served by making the film more "operatic," more "cinematic." "I wanted to let people know that hey, it's only a movie." Well, mission accomplished. The incisive sadness and genuine horror of the first has been replaced by gialli-by-way-of-Studio-City revenge plots, stylized murder set pieces, and splatstick as a substitute for character-based story resolution.

Ultimately, the believability of the characters in the first Hostel made the film frightening--think the Dutch businessman's speech about the closet to his future victim, think the German's horror at hearing his victim speak his language, think the almost elegiac scene in the dive bar when Paxton tracks down the two women who'd made his friends disappear, finding them half-drunk and shrouded in smoke, their make-up and glamor stripped away. In place of that, we have Heather Matarazzo playing to the cheap seats as a nerd straight out of a Disney live-action comedy, the alpha-male American stereotype from the first film stretched out to an unmanageable length, and a final girl who all but instantly morphs into a the kind of two-dimensional victim-become-victimizer who makes with quips before she chops people's heads off. You know how the basic concept behind the ending of the first film was easily the toughest part of the whole movie to swallow, but the spoonful of sugar, in the form of razor-sharp performances and cinematography plus a psychologically desperate tone, made it work? This one's a horse pill of artifice with nothing to help you choke it down.

The Slovakian setting gets infused with unreality, too. The wink-wink return of the hostel's desk clerk, best known for his behind-the-scenes origin as a local production assistant and Star Wars fan club president who ended up with the role when the professional actor bailed, is lingered on for far too long; "it's only a movie" indeed. Meanwhile, the village festival, handsomely shot though it may be, appears to consist more of half-remembered costumes from The Wicker Man and mondo movies than any real research into local customs.

And the ending! The most shocking ending EVAR turns out to be a guy's dick getting cut off and fed to a dog, followed by a woman being decapitated and her head being used by little kids as a soccer ball. Shockingly, I'm not describing the end of the new Toxic Avenger sequel! Because that's exactly how these things are filmed, folks--as a laff, complete with those quick extreme close-up shots that are Troma's trademark. (Think an even goofier version of the ending of Death Proof.) I definitely laughed and cheered and clapped--the way the film's set up, it's impossible not to, as impossible as not feeling repulsed by the torture scenes. But the sensation wasn't any deeper a satisfaction than laughter from getting tickled. When I told Roth that I thought the comedy element might not have been a good thing and asked him why he went so over the top, he said "I wanted people to leave the theater feeling good." Well, I walked away from the computer screen feeling good the first time I saw that hilarious fake trailer he made for Thanksgiving. But I wanted more than the gore equivalent of a knee-slapper for the climax to the sequel to one of the most powerful films I've seen in years, you know? At least two other should-be-huge character-rooted moments of violence are marred by rimshot-shots as well. Why bother, man?

The funny thing is that there are two scenes that are not funny at all in this movie, two scenes among the most unpleasant I've ever watched: the Heather Matarazzo bloodbath sequence and, in what I'm sure will be the most controversial scene in the movie, the execution of a child. Roth said that the former created the most trouble for the movie with the MPAA because the look of terror and pain on Matarazzo's face was so convincing. "Would it be okay if she gave a bad performance?" he asked them. "Well, yeah, actually," they replied. "Then don't punish us for doing a good job!" he argued, and won. And they did do a good job, so good that you spend those minutes, watching a nude woman hanging upside down, crying and screaming for help, while her skin is cut to ribbons, kind of wondering what the fuck you're doing here. The giallo influence Roth was mainlining is particularly strong in that sequence--velvet fabrics, candlelight, decadent naked Eurobabe, scythes, the aestheticized abuse of women. If we're just going end with yuks, what's the point?

This goes double for the murder of children. Another questioner really put Roth on the defensive about this, to the point where he was saying, "I'm not exploiting children here--plenty of movies have shown kids getting killed before." But we're not talking about City of God (which he cited), nor the handful of Italo-horror flicks he also rattled off--we're talking about this movie, one that ends with a dick joke and a soccer game with a human head. "Awful shit really happens," Roth explained. "I wanted to take the audience to that place where they're completely horrified. I wanted the stunned silence." Hey, hold a gun to a kid's head and pull the trigger (offscreen, admittedly, but there's a lengthy run up as the killer presses the barrel against the faces of every kid in the pack, and you see the body with blood running from it afterwards), and you'll get that.

But if "it's only a movie," again, why?

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 2:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)