Back before the interwebs, pornographic films were actually movies and not just two-minute clips. The formula for a porno movie was standard: ten to twenty minutes were spent introducing the viewer to the cast and setting. Then there's sex. Sex concludes, and there's a teensy bit of plot before more sex ensues. As Hostel: Part II begins, it appears that Eli Roth is breaking the rules of porn (and before you mention it, yes, the first Hostel is porn. It might be horror as well, but it's still porn). Since this is "part two," not a sequel mind you, it's mystifying that Roth is spending so much time on plot and characters before he gets to the gory, horrifying action. We know it's coming. We know what happens to these rich, young white people as soon as they appear on screen. But by the time Part II is half over, just a brief forty-five minutes out of ninety, it hits you that this isn't just more of the same. It isn't playing by porno rules anymore. Eli Roth is actually making a real movie.
I loathed the first Hostel. It was a stupid, mean movie, little more than a slide show of brutality. It wasn't that it was offensive or too extreme. It was just brutish. Which isn't to say that Part II isn't brutish. There's just a great deal more to support the brutishness. As in the original, the main characters are a trio of Americans — this time college girl clichés of whore, mousy artiste and wise brunette instead of stock fratboys — who descend into the dank Slovakian village where they will ultimately be sold to the highest bidder looking to kill them for kicks. The twist is that an equal amount of time is spent on two of the killers, following them from the point of sale up to the conclusion, when our dual sets of protagonists meet. Todd is a frothing alpha-male wanting to know what it's like to kill a person and Stuart, played expertly by Roger Bart, is the reluctant tag-along, not too sure he wants his sadistic fantasies to come true.
Hostel: Part II isn't redeemed. It is still stupid and mean; a ten year-old boy is shot in the face for no particular reason. But it's hard not to be impressed by Roth's skill and craft. David Lynch's well-publicized influence on Roth's composition is more apparent here than in his other two movies. Every scene is an expert play between light and shadow, awash in vivid color, be it the reds and golds of a harvest festival or the muted greys of a dilapidated factory. And when it comes time for Stuart and Todd to claim their victims, Roth cues slightly slowed scenes of the two selecting their tools, dressing in rubber smocks and skullcaps, and walking toward the iron cells where their victims wait. All of this is soundtracked by a sweeping Italian aria. The blunt poetics of this sequence are so unsettling and grotesque that the actual scenes of torture feel cartoonish. These murderers seem real and horrible.
I might not like Hostel: Part II, but I have to concede that it's more than porn.
— John Constantine
