Hostel II - Review

Hostel 2 is the first horror movie sequel that I have seen in a very long time that actually thrilled me more than the original. If you haven't seen the movie, you may not want to continue reading this article. Beware there are spoilers ahead! I feel that I must tell you why I though this movie was so much better than the first.

First we better recap Hostel(the first movie)- Hostel was a movie about a secret society in Slovakia that is intracately connected to human trafficking for murder. The country has a dark secret and everyone seems to be in on it, except for the unsuspecting male tourists that are lured in by the appeal of drugs and sex. Anyone in the world can pay a price on the tourists and kill them in any manner they choose. The torture is probably the most unsettling thing about the whole movie, second to the characters portrayed by the so called "hunters". Brutal and Intense are the two words I would use to desribe Hostel 1.

Hostel 2's opening scene takes off immediately after the first movie. You see the main character, Paxton, from the first movie sitting on a train in Prague passed out against the train window. He suffered a loss of three fingers in the first movie and by all rights he should be passed out by this point. What you don't expect is a dream sequence...or should I say nightmare sequence at the very beginning of the movie. Unfortunately, Paxton does not make it past the first five minutes of the movie. (Sorry guys and gals...he's a gonner). Really, what horror movie is really a horror movie when people survive? So now we find ourselves needing a new lead character, who just happens to be a young woman, heiress to a fortune. This time around, the stakes for the hunting club are a bit higher and the gentleman participating in the torture and muder of innocent people actually bid on their unwilling participants. This puts an entirely new spin on the movie. The highest bidder always wins in this game.

Beth, the lead character, is a very beautiful young woman who seems to have her head on straight. Things go terribly wrong for she and her friends after they are lured to a spa retreat in the same Hostel as the young men from the first movie. The first girl in the trio dissapears the first night in town, lured by who she thinks is a true gentleman. Later she finds out that she has been tricked, but it is too late. The first scene of torture can be historically linked to a torturess in medievel times that hired maidens for her castle to help clean, and act as servents. She tortured, mutilated, and bathed in the maiden's blood. This is basically what happens to the first girl. This scene is very graphic with blood spatter, and a naked woman covered from head to toe in the young woman's blood.

Friend number two fights back against her captor, biting the nose off of one of the women in charge of cleaning her up for the "client". But she meets a sad end when she takes a saw to the head that just happens to slip out of the "clients" hand. Her captor is so freaked out by the whole ordeal that he actually tries to leave because he is so appalled at what he has done. Unfortunately for him, they don't allow you to leave unless your victim is finished off and they set a group of hungry dogs loose on him. You can imagine how that turns out.

Back to our heroine, Beth. Poor Beth is now in captivity at the mercy of a man she had met the evening before during a harvest festival. Turns out he chose her because she looks just like his wife. At the beginning of the scene he is not sure about killing her and actually tries to calm her down. Then something clicks inside his head and he basically goes wacko on her and she ends up manipulating the situation, playing to his ego to keep him from hurting her. He eventually coaxes her onto the floor and she is able to get away from him and forces him into the torture chair. When it is all said and done, Beth is able to bargain her way out of the place-since she is a multi millionaire. Not only that but she has to fulfill her contract by killing the guy who intended to kill her. By the end of the movie, she has no problems leaving him to bleed to death. Beth actually transforms through the movie and by the end she gains a sense of power and has no fear. It is quite a transformation and I think her charachter shows the true reality of the situation...anyone would be willing to kill, given the right circumstances.