Hostel Part II by Paul Bullock

If you look back into the deepest, darkest recesses of this website you'll find a rare commodity: a favourable review of Hostel. This time last year, when Eli Roth’s sophomore effort was released, we awarded it three stars, writing that while clumsy and riddled with all the flaws you‘d expect from a director making only his second film, it had substance enough to indicate that Roth had a bright future lying ahead of him. If this sequel is anything to go by though, we were wrong.

The biggest problem with Hostel Part II is that it’s almost exactly the same as its predecessor. We’re in the same country, with the same evil murderers and the same torture house run by internet business Elite Hunting. Only this time, the unsuspecting American backpackers aren’t boorish boys, but lairy girls: sensible Beth (Lauren German), bad-girl Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and nerdy Lorna (Heather Materazzo).

Of course, being one of the primary exponents of the newly-dubbed torture porn subgenre, Roth takes these women to hell and back during the film’s short, sharp ninety minute-running length. They’re chased, stabbed, hung upside down and generally abused in every conceivable way. However, being slightly more savvy than his peers, Roth never sexualises their agony and, unlike in the first film, keeps their breasts safely tucked up inside their bras.

Indeed, there are even slightly feminist elements to the film, with Roth showing us that these girls can just as annoying and obnoxious as the boys in the first Hostel. Beth is a spoilt daddy‘s girl who can buy her way out of anything; Whitney is a egotistical Paris Hilton clone (“Is he hot, or too Eastern bloc?” she asks of a possible sexual conquest) and the over-emotional Lorna is frustratingly needy. In a genre over-run by idealised girlies wearing skimpy tops, it‘s refreshing to see a film that presents us with such flawed and rounded women.

Similar subversion can be found in the treatment of the male characters, who, instead of being the victims as they were in the first film, are the torturers themselves. This proves to be the only new idea Roth presents us with in Hostel Part II - gladly though, it gives the film its most inspired moments. We see the inner workings of Elite Hunting and, in one chilling sequence, Roth makes effective use of intercutting by showing us glimpses of the girls partying while, unbeknownst to them, they are being bid on by businessmen around the world.

The two men who win that auction are good ol’ American boys Stuart and Todd (Roth's canny use of Desperate Housewives actors Roger Bart and Richard Burgi is one of several subversive jokes sprinkled through the script). Both men are hen-pecked husbands, suffocated by the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. For them, the promise of violence is a way to re-energise their faltering sense of alpha male masculinity and, in one apt line, Todd highlights the film’s themes of male frustration by comparing the thrill of killing to the thrill of losing his virginity.

Disappointingly though, such subversive subtext is undermined in the film's most overtly gory moment. Half-way through we see a young woman stripped and hung upside down above a bath in which her naked female torturer (named in the credits as Mrs Bathory) lies. Those well-versed in old-time serial killer stories or Hammer Horror films will appreciate the reference, but so much attention does the director pay to the fleshy viscera, that it feels like he‘s enjoying the carnage as much as the torturer is. Quite a problem really, for a film that argues such gore can only be enjoyed by a macho moron.