Hostel Part II (2007)

When the first Hostel movie came out in January last year, it surprised everyone by knocking Narnia off the top box office spot in the US; it was the little horror movie that could, with a little help from Quentin Tarantino. It was in the right place at the right time, tapping into the zeitgeist, and its success prompted a deluge of other low-budget, high-splatter movies.

Fast forward to the present and Hostel Part II has just tanked in the US. An opening night screening in London last night managed to boast maybe thirty cinemagoers willing to part with money to see it. It's difficult to say precisely why the two films, ostensibly very similar, should receive such different reactions -- maybe it's because the torture movie market is now saturated; maybe it's due to the fact that a high quality workprint of the film leaked onto the Internet days before its US release; or maybe it's really because Hostel Part II just isn't a good movie.

It picks up more or less where the last one left off: the sole survivor of Hostel is still running away, haunted by nightmares and paranoid that at any moment he'll be found and killed. Sure enough, he soon is, and it's onto the next set of helpless victims.

This time, the victims are all female - a nice girl, a bitchy girl, and a nerdy girl plan to take a trip to Prague together, but the train is full of threatening and belligerent men, so when a passing acquaintance mentions she's going to a Slovakian spa, they're easily persuaded to tag along. Guess who she works for? Before long, the girls find themselves in the 'Art Gallery' from the first movie, and ... er, lots of torture happens.

The only thing that's really different is that this time around, we get to spend more time with the torturers, rather than with the victims. In the place of the menacing Dutch Businessman are two Americans (both plucked straight out of the Desperate Housewives cast) - Todd, a mouthy and aggressive man who can't wait to get stuck in, and Stuart, who's quieter and more reluctant. We also get to watch the bidding war as businessmen around the world compulsively tap ever higher numbers into their Blackberries for the privelege of getting to kill some American girls. (They'd be shit at eBay - who raises a bid by $10,000 a time?) This should be interesting ... and you can just feel the impending "but" here, can't you?

Yeah, it's a big but. It doesn't fucking work. There are a lot of similarities between Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Hostel Part II: both take what the filmmakers perceived to be the best, or best-loved, elements of the first films and repeated them, with dramatically diminished returns. Eli Roth has all too transparently been reading his reviews; something which is never more evident than in a conversation between the girls about whether or not there's been a war in Slovakia recently. (In the first film, a character remarked that there were lots of available women in Slovakia because the men had been killed in a recent war, sparking critics to remark that Roth didn't know his world politics; something he seems almost desperate to prove here.)

There's much less sex in Hostel Part II than there was in Hostel; but there's a lot more gore. Or maybe that's not quite fair, but the handling of the gore is radically different. Whereas Hostel relied on the audience's intelligence and imagination, cutting away at the last moment so as to leave the nastiest bits off screen, Hostel Part II seems to feel it has to show you everything, lingering for endless minutes over girls screaming in terror and then agony.

I've argued long and hard with people who criticised Hostel, telling them that it was intelligent and provocative, and stayed just on the right side of being the much derided "torture porn." There is absolutely no way that even I, the most devoted Eli Roth fan you're likely to find, could defend Hostel Part II against those same allegations. The very first torture sequence presents a naked girl hanging upside down, with loving shots of her breasts. She's completely naked, exposed and vulnerable, while workmanlike men set up the scene around her ready for their "client." In a transparently obvious take on the Elizabeth Bathory legend, an older woman soon enters, strips, and proceeds to slash at the younger girl's skin till her blood spills everywhere, to the obvious sexual gratification of the client.

There are other moments, later, that are also supposed to draw on time-honoured myths and fairytales, but unfortunately, the film isn't clever enough to do it well. Instead, this scene is just two naked women and lots of blood - the camera, the client, and thus presumably the audience are supposed to be enjoying, or getting off on, the suffering of an innocent young woman. It's undeniably pornographic, and intensely difficult to watch, with absolutely nothing to redeem it later.

Every part of Hostel Part II feels clumsy. The return of Milda Havlas (the "desk clerk Jedi" from the first film) was something I was looking forward to, but it basically turned into the endless reruns of the "where's the rum?" joke from Pirates of the Caribbean: funny and spontaneous the first time, cynical and repetitive thereafter. See also: the return of the Bubblegum gang. Every plot development was obvious, to the point where you could almost see the notes in the margin unfolding onscreen: this scene is supposed to be character development, here's where you're supposed to be shocked, here's where your sympathies shift...

There's a couple of moments in each film that really demonstrate why (and how) one worked and the other didn't. In Hostel, there's a scene early on where Paxton and Josh, walking alongside a canal, talk about Paxton's childhood experience of witnessing a little girl drowning, and the way her screams stayed with him for years. It's a nice moment: it works, in context, as a conversation these two friends would legitimately have, and it also works later in the movie where Paxton again hears screams and knows he can't just ignore them this time. In Hostel Part II, there's a moment early on where the 'nice' girl offers to buy drinks and the 'bitchy' girl explains to the 'nerdy' one that nice girl is rich - "she could buy and sell Slovakia if she wanted." It doesn't work in context; the dialogue, usually Roth's strongest point, is awkward, and it flags up, instantly, what's going to happen at the end of the movie, because there's no other reason for that conversation to be there otherwise.

The characterisation, so spot on and realistic in Hostel, is entirely absent from the sequel. The girls are one-dimensional, conventionally pretty (though Lauren German really looks like she could do with a nice long sleep) but uninteresting; the boys in Hostel may not have been perfect, but at least they seemed like people. Crucially, all this stuff is boring -- and there's a lot (a LOT) of padding.

Honestly, Hostel Part II played like a first draft. Whereas Hostel was tightly plotted, tightly scripted and generally really bloody clever, Hostel Part II is slapdash and careless. Eli Roth mentioned on his MySpace blog that he's going to be taking a long break from filmmaking now, having been working solidly since he started making the first Hostel film; I hope he does, and I hope he gets to recharge his batteries and work on something he genuinely loves next. Because there's nothing in Hostel Part II that implies it was a film anyone cared about beyond the studio's desire to make more money.

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Torture Porn: Eli Roth vs The Grauniad

Porn has always been a difficult thing to define; it always comes back to that "I know it when I see it" pseudo-definition. So if we can't all agree on what, exactly, qualifies as pornography, it's harder still to agree on what might constitute "torture porn."

Which isn't stopping everyone and their mother bandying the term around haphazardly.

As a working definition, it would seem to make sense that torture porn is a sub-genre of horror in which torture (usually of young women) is exploited for the titillation of the audience. Recent examples include Switchblade Romance, Wolf Creek, the Saw series, Captivity and Broken - this kind of movie has existed for a while, and undoubtedly films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be slotted in under the torture porn banner, but it's also a type of movie that seems to be on the rise at the moment.

And though the box office suggests that the public loves this stuff, the Guardian really doesn't. I don't blame them, to be honest: I think this is one of the worst things to happen to the horror genre in a long time, despite the fact that ostensibly it's brought the genre more into the public eye.

But what I have to take issue with in the Guardian's coverage over the last couple of weeks is the way it seems to have made Eli Roth a scapegoat. Roth, and Hostel, are name-checked over and over again, in the article I linked above and in an interview with Quentin Tarantino over his currently-bombing 'movie', Death Proof. It's pretty hypocritical. Tarantino's movies are, by and large, mindlessly violent, and no amount of fawning will change the fact that they don't exactly treat women brilliantly -- this is the guy who wrote From Dusk Till Dawn, remember?

But then Tarantino has been wildly successful, and, oh, yeah, he doesn't make horror films (and certainly not in the gleeful, single-minded way Roth does) so he's somehow more respectable. What a load of utter nonsense.

But I'm straying off the point. The point being, Hostel is not, and should not ever, be considered torture porn. Sure, it's gory, sure, it's scary, and sure, there are some horrible, morally corrupt characters in it who enjoy inflicting pain on other people.

Crucially, though, the film itself doesn't savour the violence.

Hostel is actually a lot less gory than people tend to think. Whereas other films linger over the violence and gore -- take almost any sequence from a Saw movie, for example, particularly any of the death scenes from Saw 3 -- Hostel cuts away from the action, preferring to imply the violence instead. The most horrific scene, in which a girl's eye is attacked with a blowtorch till it's left dangling by a thread, just isn't dealt with in the way it would be in any torture porn director's hands. If you imagine, say, Alexander Aja tackling that scene, it would have taken a lot longer; we'd have seen the torch approaching, her skin burning, and she'd be screaming for a long, long time. And Greg McLean probably would have thrown in several misogynist expletives, too.

And she probably would have been naked.

Actually, that's not entirely fair, because there's little or no nudity in Wolf Creek. But the scale of the violence and implicit hatred towards women in that movie puts it in a whole different league from Hostel. If anything, Hostel works as a commentary on those women-hating attitudes: the film begins with young men merrily objectifying women, and ends with the gender politics swapped around, as the women exploit them, and the boys find themselves objectified in a far more horrifying way. Hostel is well-written and well-thought out, rather than just being a straight-forward enjoyment of violence.

To take it further, Hostel is even a sort of condemnation of society, of people, and of our inability to empathise with our fellow humans. The businessmen carrying out the torture have become so jaded that the only way they can get their kicks is by buying another person, and doing all sorts of unthinkable things to them. These men are certainly not sympathetic characters, and the audience is never invited to do anything but fear them.

Lumping Hostel in with torture porn is lazy thinking. And it also misses the point - and misses those films that actually might be dangerous. Because it is worrying, isn't it, that there are so many films being made (and becoming successful) that have nothing more to offer than 90 minutes of a woman screaming?

Interview with Eythor Gudjonsson

Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further: Eythor Gudjonsson is the coolest man on the planet. I’d say “the coolest man in Iceland,” just to get that slightly too obvious pun in there, but that would be unfair to him.

Eythor’s done a lot of different things in his time: from being a champion athlete, to breaking records as a marketing manager for Disney, then breaking more records at his pizza franchise, plus about a million other things most people would consider themselves lucky to achieve in a lifetime -- including a show-stealing turn in Eli Roth’s sophomore movie, Hostel. It’s not just that incredible list of achievements that makes Eythor cool, though. It’s more that coolness just emanates from him; he’s fun, interesting, and intelligent; and lest you think I’m eulogising the man too much, he managed to take time out of his hectic schedule to meet up with me in London recently, and he is just that awesome.

Running four different businesses meant that he took his time getting this interview back to me, but I really can’t hold that against him. So without further ado, let’s see what he had to say for himself.

Oli is undoubtedly everyone's favourite character in Hostel, so, first off, congratulations on that! Eli Roth said that Oli was written specifically for you -- how did that come about?

Eli came to Iceland to promote his first movie, Cabin Fever, met his man there and that lead us to the big screen. :-)

Would you say you’re as, shall we say, fun-loving as Oli in real life? Where does Oli end and Eythor begin?

I do hope so. Eli wrote this part for me and said to me "we need to express your endless happiness and fun to the rest of the world." Other parts of the character are based on pure fiction. Then we added all kinds of silly things that came up in our mind before and during shootings. It was great to be able to have some influence on the movie, and I think this is one of the major advantages of Eli as a director, i.e. letting his actors change the dialogue if they want and to come up with different suggestions into the script. He then, of course, said yes or no, if he liked it or not.

There must have been some interesting and/or crazy times on set for Hostel, are there any entertaining stories you'd like to share?

It was a mysterious time, filled with horror and hard work! :-) No, seriously I think I cannot take one thing out of all the funny and memorable moments we had. It was seven weeks full of fun, work and great friendship with other great people.

Where does one find the hottest girls in Europe?

In Iceland, of course my horse :-)

You've done a lot of different things: from your IMDB profile alone, you've been an athlete, marketing manager, pizza franchise owner, run animation and real estate businesses, and appeared in adverts before your appearance in Hostel -- that's a lot of achievement for one man! What's been your proudest accomplishment to date?

Short and simple - To have kids and to create a family :-)

Are you going to be doing more acting?

To be honest, I don’t think so. To begin with, I think I am a horrible actor; and besides that, I have my hands full of interesting projects going on today. I also think it will be hard to work with someone other than Eli.

You’re not a horrible actor, by any means! Weren’t you sad that Oli got killed off? And was it creepy, having a prosthetic severed head resembling you hanging around?

No, I am not sad Oli got killed. I knew about it from the beginning. The head part was a bit creepy, yes; I cannot describe the feeling that I felt inside myself when I took my head out the box when it came in from L.A. It was incredibly well done by Howard Berger, Kevin Wasner and their team.

As you may have noticed, we're all horror nuts over at Living Corpse; do you like scary movies?

Who doesn’t ? :-)

Ding! Right answer. Your MySpace profile says you're a "proud parent" -- LivingCorpseRon would like to enquire whether or not the picture of Oli's kid in Hostel is in fact one of yours?

No, it is not. It was someone’s kids in Prague. But I did put my sisters names in there; I have sisters that are twins and their names are Sunna and Eva. I therefore named my daughter in the movie SunnEva :-)

Speaking of MySpace, are you getting any hassle over there? Eli's had some hate mail; have you had anything nasty, or do you mostly get hero-worshipped? (Or is your inbox just flooded with messages from me, arguing over who looks best in that Sneepur Patrol shirt?)

I have had no hate mail or hassle at all, just positive messages from interesting and funny people. MySpace is therefore just fun and entertainment for me all the time :-) People are always telling me how much I look like Christian Bale -- so funny ! :-) -- but the thing is, I have much more talent as an actor than he does, and by far more sex appeal.

No argument here – some of us actually suffered through The Machinist! So what's it like being the new most-famous-person-in-Iceland?

Well, I think I cannot say Hostel has made me the most famous person in Iceland, it has attracted some attention from some people, but not all. Some people think I live in L.A. and are very surprised when they see me in Iceland. I have felt some jealousy from some people but most people think it’s great that I got the chance to go through something funny as this was.

Finally, will you be the best man when Eli Roth eventually comes to his senses, realises I'm the perfect woman and marries me? ;)

I am ready whenever! I will arrange your wedding on the top of the Europe´s biggest glacier Vatnajokull in Iceland and be your best man!

You heard it here first, kids. Now maybe someone should let Eli know…

IMDB link

Interview originally published at LivingCorpse.com.

Hostel (2006)

I'm not even going to pretend this is a real, impartial movie review. If you're reading this website, you probably already know that any movie with the name "Eli Roth" attached to it is going to get me all kinds of over-excited. It's difficult for me to be unbiased, but actually I'm probably harsher on the film than your generic random cinemagoer. I had butterflies in my stomach before I saw it, because if Hostel sucked -- if it was dull, badly written, or full of plot holes -- I was going to have to answer to everyone to whom I've sung Eli Roth's praises in the past three years.

Luckily for me, Hostel is awesome. It's a well-made, well-thought-out, as-near-as-dammit-perfect horror movie (the perfect horror movie being, of course, Takashi Miike's Audition). While that's not an unprejudiced remark, it's a considered judgement nonetheless. I had thought I probably shouldn't write formally about Hostel at all, though I've had long and drawn-out email correspondences and message board debates about it, but since I've come across several very negative reviews lately, most of which completely missed the point of everything, I feel obliged to write something just to balance things out a little.

Let me preface this by saying that I don't generally enjoy torture movies. Any movie that gets too sadistic, too cruel, or too realistic makes me want to go home and hide under my duvet until the world solemnly promises not to cut me up the moment I set foot outside my door. Switchblade Romance made me want to give up horror movies, it was so thoroughly joyless; House of Wax, ditto, and I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so mind-numbingly awful as Wolf Creek in all my 22 horror-saturated years of life. So the hype surrounding Hostel was, if anything, a little bit off-putting. Even now, having seen it multiple times and discussed it to death, I still think it's about a hair's breadth away from being too disturbing. Happily, though, it's ever so delicately perched on the side of being awesome; possibly because it's just that little bit different, and that little bit cleverer, than all the other recent splatter-fests.

The first half of the movie follows the adventures of Josh, a cute, ambiguously gay, likeably responsible wannabe-writer; his best friend Paxton, a foul-mouthed law student; and Oli, a random Icelandic drifter they met in Paris, as they negotiate their way through the drug-fuelled excesses of Amsterdam. Dope, alcohol, and sex: Amsterdam is, after all, the sex capital of the world -- and with enough money, you can pay to do anything. The only problem is, there barely seem to be any actual Dutch people in Holland: almost everyone is a tourist, and those who aren't, are resentful locals. Things almost turn nasty when the boys miss their curfew one night, but they're rescued by Alex, a weaselly-faced pimp who tells them that if they want to go somewhere really cool, they should head to Slovakia: the girls there are ridiculously hot, and, more importantly, easy -- particularly for Americans.

They're on the train the next day. And Bratislava initially seems to be everything they were promised it would be: the next few scenes are awash with hot naked girls. The boys seem to be heading for some kind of sensory overload: drugs and sex are both almost too readily available as Hostel turns briefly into one of those sex-comedies that never quite seems to be as fun to watch as to be in. (It's probably nowhere near so funny if you haven't been subject to Eurotrip at some point in your life.) Before it manages to outlive its welcome, though, the whole thing twists, seemingly on a pin; in case everyone had forgotten about the frankly rather grim opening credits sequence, one of the boys is kidnapped and brutally murdered by a cheerily whistling man. From that point onwards, the film descends into an ever-darker, gore-filled nightmare, though actually most of the bloodshed is left to the audience's imagination as the camera tantalisingly cuts away at most of the crucial moments, focusing instead on bizarre parodies of medical instruments, with only excruciating screaming to fill in the blanks. This is one of many ways in which Hostel constantly sets up horror clichs only to thwart them so thoroughly it almost takes one's breath away: Eli Roth's first feature film, Cabin Fever, did much the same thing, though not quite to the same extent, and while I'm a huge fan of that movie, something has evidently changed in his filmmaking since then. Loath as I am to admit it, Cabin Fever was flawed; Hostel is far, far more polished, and, in a way, more grown-up.

Although the film is a proper adrenaline-pumper while you're watching it, Hostel's real triumph is the way it sticks in your mind afterwards. The concept is so bizarre and yet so terrifyingly plausible that it lingers in your imagination; whether it's based on true events or not is, as Eli Roth himself has pointed out on numerous occasions, not really the point: it's that someone, somewhere, would think up this idea, and that other people would then buy into it. The film isn't straightforward and doesn't have any easy morality; our protagonists, likeable as they are, are no saints; they're believably real people, warts and all, and though their own attitudes contribute in part to their ultimate fates, they're really not deserving of what happens, and it's impossible not to feel pity for their situation. Something I find more disturbing than anything in the film itself is the average audience reaction: many, many people have reacted badly to the amount of female nudity in the first half of the film. Considering this is a film in which people are graphically and horribly tortured to death, you'd think a few breasts were the least of people's worries -- but no, nudity is apparently the most sinful thing ever. And this is something people will argue in the same breath as claiming that there wasn't enough violence, that the gore wasn't graphic enough, and that if there'd been more torture and death, it would have been a better movie.

(Aside from the fact that those are just horrible standards to have, it's notable that these people have completely missed the point: the sex and the violence mirror one another, the boys paying for sex is a direct parallel with the jaded businessmen paying to kill people; the film demonstrates that the "pleasures of the flesh", as it were, are very accessible, and are very extreme, mooting the possibility that eventually these won't be enough to sate society's appetite for depravity -- it's not even a subtext that's in any way subtle, the lines are very clearly drawn, but I suppose people will only see what they want to see.)

I'm not sure that it's not deeply wrong to enjoy this movie. I've thought about going to see it again and leaving after the first half, before everything properly goes to hell in a handbasket, but that would be missing the point. I'm not entirely sure I know what the point is anymore, but I do know that all the reviewers denouncing this film as not scary enough, not shocking enough, or not clever enough, are glossing over everything that makes this film so disturbing, focusing on the purely superficial elements of it (which is fair enough in a way, because it's such an utterly polished and perfectly-turned out movie; it's not so stylised as a Tarantino movie would be, though his influence is hard to miss). There are so many ingredients that are smartly combined to make this film work on many levels: the homages and references that so many people objected to in Cabin Fever are a little less high-profile this time, though they're still very much there for anyone who bothers to make the effort to notice.

It would be stupidly pretentious and probably quite delusional to say that Hostel is making an important enough point that it'll go any way towards changing the world. But it's not an ignorant, pointless film, either; it's not political, really, because it's too busy being funny and sexy and scary and generally brilliant, expertly manipulating the audience's every reaction, so I guess I'll stop talking now, and leave it at this: Hostel is an awesome, awesome movie. Go and see it -- but not with your mother.

(Post script: I'm finding it ridiculously fascinating how different people react so completely differently to Josh's character. I have absolutely no theories on why some people like him and some don't, but I'm loving debating it anyway, to the point where I think my friends are going to, very soon, impose a ban on the words "Hostel", "Josh", "Paxton", and "Eli Roth" from ever leaving my mouth again.)

(Post-post script: Having seen Hostel, I'm even more convinced that Greg McLean is a talentless hack. Ha!)

IMDB link