graham_525 Review of Hostel: Part II

Hostel: Part II (2007)

Could have been great but in the end was just Hollywood

[5/10 · 29 September 2008]

I found the first Hostel genuinely disturbing and it really got under my skin. I watched the sequel with a knot of anticipation in my stomach. It started off fairly well with a sickening sequence in which the girls are auctioned to rich scum bags with families of their own. This could have been a film making a serious and quite profound statement about power and the human condition. When I watched the first Hostel I felt that it was believable that such things go on. Then it struck me that similar things did go in Europe under the Nazis. Murder and torture are the part of the history of Europe from the medieval aristocrats who tortured peasants for entertainment going back to the Coliseum in Rome. It was at one time the vogue for the landed gentry to invent torture equipment and try it out on poor unfortunates kidnapped from the local countryside. So it's reasonable to assume that some of the rich and powerful of modern times have similar appetites.

However the two rich protagonists just weren't really disturbing enough. They were a bit of a joke to be honest. I did like the idea though that when one of them actually saw the reality of sticking a saw into a girls face it completely freaked him out. Where this film really went all wrong though was the final interaction between Beth and Stuart and the way the Beth gets herself out of the situation. It turned the whole thing into Hollywood tripe for me and completely destroyed how deeply disturbing this film should have and could have been.