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[Image](2007) ****

I recommend reading Johnny Sweatpants's review if you haven't already, both for plot points I'm not going to mention here and because he captures quite well the love/hate reaction these movies evoke.

I have to admit, the original Hostel has haunted me since I watched it last year, more than I would've thought. The reason is a fairly specific one: that I'm...how do I say this? I'm no stranger to the erotic potential of physical restraint. And many a time my fanciful mental wanderings have had the fun bleached out of them because I suddenly remember the character of Josh cuffed to that chair in his underwear, hungover and confused and rightly terrified. As I mentioned in my review of Hostel last year, I think the Amsterdam S/M scene in the early part of the movie is presented as a deliberate counterpoint to what happens later; there is nothing sexual about raw, ugly violence, and the violence in Hostel isn't just ugly, it's hideous.

That's part of Eli Roth's achievement, an achievement that shot him straight to darling status in the world of horror. Horror flick history has provided scenes of the human body subject to unwanted attention by all sorts of implements, from kitchen knives to hot tubs to basketballs. But the setup in Hostel allows the killers to draw out these horrible acts, to observe them and refine them. And that's still not the whole nasty picture, because then you have to absorb the soul-crushing idea that these torture/murders are paid for, which is itself a twofold horror. There are the clients, people who might never go Michael Myers on the world but who will commit vile atrocities if it only means spending money. And there's the providers of the service themselves, who come from a standpoint so brutally cold and sinister you can't help but regard their souls as more grotesque than any lighting or makeup effect could manage. Horrible, horrible stuff, and I have to give props to a movie that's so unflinchingly effective.

It was with a great heap of dread, therefore, that I watched the sequel. I was prepared for an even worse time of it, since I knew the victims would be pretty young women this time and therefore the chances were even greater that the pesky sex/violence borders in my mind would be messed with. I was, it turned out, far more worried about it than I needed to be. And here's where I start with the spoilers, which will be heavy. If you've declared that you'll never see these flicks, here's where you can find out what happened.

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I think what happened is that Eli Roth is himself a bit appalled by this whole business. He does a great job sequelizing the first movie: he expands the scope of the story and shows us sides of it we hadn't seen before. By watching the story from the clients' perspective as well, he explores the rotten urges that propel these people, and then performs a deft reversal. Todd, the gung-ho member of the pair, the one who has talked up the entire event as a life-changing victory, becomes completely repulsed by all of it the moment he draws blood. He tangles Whitney's hair in a handheld power saw, causing ugly damage and thankfully rendering her too senseless to scream any more. He leaves her alive in the chair, and while alone in the elevator is wracked with the horror of what's happened. Maybe he's meant to be disappointed in himself, but I don't think so; I think he's simply overtaken with a rush of true humanity. It does him no good, of course, for leaving your victim alive is a breach of contract, and when the elevator doors open they loose vicious dogs on him.

Whitney's wounds are the only ones caused by rough hardware, which is another departure from the first movie. Poor Lorna's demise by blades is the main gory set piece of the film, which is nasty as heck but something I've seen plenty of times (they call them slasher films for a reason). And while that scene was well-acted and gruesomely played out, I didn't find it quite so personally horrifying as the first movie's gore. Hung upside down from the ceiling over a tiled basin, a woman cuts into her back a few times with a scythe, then cuts her throat with a sickle so she can bask in the resulting shower of blood. I suppose there's some intended sexuality here, as both women are nude, but a vampiric episode of sex and death is a far cry from the out and out torture of Hostel. You get the impression that Josh's tormentor took a long time. Also missing is the gritty realism of the original. It looks to be the same factory, but the hallways are darker and moodier, with a much higher-tech system of surveillance and automatic doors. It makes sense that they'd tighten things up after Paxton's escape, but the slicker, more stylized setting made it easier to take somehow. The bloodbath sequence is particularly operatic (and perhaps slightly silly), and as such it didn't really bug me like I worried it might.

I'm talking all big because the flick didn't gutpunch me like the original did, but in truth I was still pretty geared up for Beth to possibly escape. I figured the mention of her vast personal wealth was a notable plot point, and I was right. She's Todd's gift to his friend Stuart, who has his hosts dress Beth like his overbearing wife. Stuart's enthusiasm about the event is iffy for the whole movie, but then he has the reverse epiphany that Todd had and finds the killer inside after all. It doesn't make him smart, though, and Beth manages to reverse the situation and get him chained up in the chair. Poised with a gun at the door and Stuart's goodies between the blades of some garden shears, Beth negotiates with her captors for her release. When she's told the contract requires that she kill someone, she closes the shears and throws what comes off to the dogs, strutting out the door with a "let him bleed to death." In the last scene we see Beth decapitate Axelle, the girl who lured them there in the first place. Clearly Axelle's usefulness to the bad guys could be outbought.

The world of the Hostel flicks is a grim one indeed, a moral landscape as black and blasted as a burnt forest. Human life and dignity is nothing in the face of making money, survival is solely the venue of the super-rich, and even then it's not guaranteed. These movies are excellent examples of the horror craft, but I can't say I'm too disappointed that Hostel Part II's weak box office play is being heralded as the death knell of torture porn. When done with skill, it's worthy and intriguing to explore things too far, but...but sometimes it's simply too far.