HOSTEL PART II... it's not very good

First of all let me apologise if, rather than reading this on the main blog, you're reading it via the site feed. I've been updating labels on old posts (in order to be able to have similarly-themed posts easily available) and thus any old post that I update appears in the feed whenever it refreshes. Apologies - it'll keep doing that until I'm finished, so sorry for all the old posts that are going to keep reappearing. If you've no idea what a site feed is or what I'm talking about, just ignore me, the blog is still the same.

So I finally got round to seeing HOSTEL PART II a few nights ago. Oh dear. I'm beginning to wonder if this whole "torture" fad is actually a reference to the people in the films or the poor sods who pay their money to sit through them.

I was assured by the young lady who sold me the ticket that it had scared her something awful. I am doing my best not to sound really patronising or up my own ass, but honestly, if this is something that can genuinely be called scary by even the most casual of viewer, then the quicker this subgenre of horror dies, the better.

It's not scary. It's not even close to being scary. It falls into the class of horror that seeks to provoke a reaction by revulsion and disgust, not by generating scares. Scary films? BLACK CHRISTMAS, THE INNOCENTS, CARRIE - they're all films that generated scares with the slightest of touches, not loud noises and the removal of body parts. And in case you think I'm just railing against modern horror in general, I'm not - I'd also point to that moment in the original Asian version of RING (you know the bit I'm talking about - with the telly) as being something that is genuinely scary in a creepy kind of way.

HOSTEL II on the other hand is just a mess, with no inkling about horror at all. Director Eli Roth is too keen to prove his love of 70s horror that he forgets that even in some of the most banal of video nasties there was still a story, some interesting characters, something to make it work. Roth just thinks that gore and tits will be enough and to be honest it's not like he even delivers much of that.

Sure, there are some graphic scenes, but not as graphic as you might think given that a lot of it happens off screen. Then there's the fact that it's all chucked in amid snippets of half-story, a dull retread of the original movie that is populated by two dimensional stereotype characters, characters that Roth attempts to make less stereotypical by having them all suddenly change personality at the drop of the hat. Ooooh, how unexpected! Except when I say "unexpected" what I really mean is "utterly pish".

One of the highlights of the film, featuring a joke that about 0.5% of the audience will understand, is when CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST director Ruggero Deodato pops up in a cameo as a cannibal - but as amusing as that scene was to me, it also highlights another of the flaws in Roth's constant "homage" to 70s horror (in CABIN FEVER, he lifted a significant portion of the soundtrack from LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT... subtle). If you're going to keep throwing in people like this (Eurocult icons Edwige Fenech and Luc Merenda also pop up) it can only have two outcomes. Either the audience has no idea who they are, in which case it's pointless, or else the viewer knows exactly who they are and are only reminded how much better the films of these guys were compared with the bobbins that's on screen at the moment.

Think HOSTEL II is scary? Watch one of the other films I just mentioned. Think it's gory? Watch an uncut version of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or CANNIBAL FEROX and prepare to vomit. But just don't, whatever you do, go and pay your money to see this. If you ignore it, sooner or later this little area of horror will die off and the next big thing in horror will arrive sooner. Hopefully it'll show a bit more imagination than this tosh.