Okay, I know I’m really late to the game on this one, since the movie’s been out for many months, but I finally watched Hostel 2 on DVD last night. I must say, I liked it quite a bit. I think it’s a great companion to the first movie, and is probably the better of the two. Once again I have a starkly different opinion than most of the other fellas on the site. For reference, here are links to Mat’s reviews of Hostel 1 and Hostel 2 (quick summary: he hated them both). So, anyway, for what it’s worth here are my thoughts on Hostel 2…

You could say that this is just the same as the previous movie except with young women as protagonists instead of young men, and you’d have a point. However, I think that H2 is more than just a crappy cash-in. I’m not saying that Roth didn’t strike while the iron was hot (and so what if he did?) but even so, H2 is pretty decent.

Right off the bat, the girls are far more likeable than H1’s very douchey “arrogant American” male leads. Yeah, Bijou Phillips’ character is trampy, but she’s more than tempered by Lauren German and Heather Matarazzo’s polite, nice girl characters. Maybe it’s just me as a guy feeling bad for pretty girls, but the leads in H2 were much more tragic than the guys in H1. You can come out of H1 and sort of say “Those dicks were asking for it!” but that element is nowhere in H2. Which maybe makes H2’s characters even less complex than H1’s, but that’s not what I’m trying to say.

H2 also features a subplot that follows a pair of clients, two American businessmen, as they travel from the U.S. to Europe for a pay-to-slay vacation. Their plot converges with the girls’ plot at the movie’s climax. I loved this part of the movie. There’s a little twist with these two guys that I probably should have seen coming, but I didn’t, and I thought it was really cool as it unfolded.

I dunno, I guess I shouldn’t go on too long here. I think maybe my sunny assessment of Hostel 2 is partly a reaction to the overwhelmingly negative things I’d heard prior to seeing it for myself. Mat has spoken often about how a big hype machine around a movie tends to repel him, and I think the opposite has happened here with me and Hostel 2. I’d heard so many negative things - call it “anti-hype” - that when I watched the movie and it turned out to be even a little enjoyable, then the result is me being very positive about it. Sort of like when we did the Uwe Boll special for Splattercast #50. Set against the hyperbolic things I’d heard, watching a Boll movie and having it not be a total black hole of awfulness left me with an even more positive view of the film than I would have had if I’d been able to go into it with a purely neutral frame of mind.

It’ll never happen, but I’d actually love to see a third and final Hostel film where the Beth character from H2 uses her fortune to hire some badass contract killers to go destroy the hunting club. I envision a sort of action-horror mix, heavy on the action. Tons of shooting, bloody squibs everywhere and with Beth winning in the end.

So, yeah, Hostel 2… I thought it was worth watching.

Filed under: Commentary, DVD, Movies