CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 06/08/07

Tortured

By nick randall

Hostel: Part II

Eli Roth (also directed)

Give writer-director Eli Roth credit for not making the exact same movie over again. Unfortunately, much like Hannibal Rising and the Star Wars prequels, the script for Hostel: Part II tries too hard to fill in holes from the first film and loses what made it scary in the first place. Like the original, three young Americans, this time females Beth (Lauren German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips), and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), are backpacking through Europe when they're lured to a hostel in Slovakia that is supposedly heaven on Earth, but is really a front for an underground organization that kidnaps the girls and subjects them to horrific torture at the hands of wealthy sadists. First off, I like that Roth tells some of the story from the perspective of the killers and tries to show that they aren't just psychopaths. They're fathers and husbands, business leaders, and even mothers, too. However, the script shows so much of the inner workings of the ominous organization that there isn't any mystery left. We know how they pick the girls, how they contact the bidders, and even who is running the show. The result is a film that tips its hand way too much and just isn't very scary. Even the torture scenes that were so shocking from the first film are surprisingly brief and unsatisfying because we're never quite rooting for the girls to escape, nor do we believe they have a real shot at doing so. And when the film isn't trying to gross you out, it's grasping for laughs in all the wrong places, leading to a third act that is much more comical than it is frightening. If Roth really wanted dig deeper into the minds of the killers, then the script needed to explore their choices in more complexity. Hostel: Part II isn't a complete waste of time, but it doesn't measure up to the simpler and scarier original.

Hostel: Part II
Lionsgate Films
Rated R; 94 min.

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Nick Randall received his MFA in Screenwriting from Loyola Marymount University in 2006. He currently works as a story analyst in Beverly Hills and spends his days reading many, many screenplays.

Hostel: Part II courtesy Lionsgate Films

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