Hostel Part II (2007)
Zombos Says: Very Good
I wanted to take a long hot shower after watching Hostel: Part II. I felt dirty. The horror genre is a distasteful, discomforting one to begin with; that’s what sustains it. It’s supposed to both titillate and frighten us at the same time with shocking images, unpleasant sounds, and extreme, sometimes disgusting, subject matter. But then there’s Eli Roth’s Hostel series, rolling up all those elements into a nice and tidy puke-ball of horrifyingly intense and nauseating brutality. The problem is that he does it so convincingly well.
Unlike another, albeit less gruesome, torture-flick, 1970’s Mark of the Devil, there are no gimmicky vomit bags to be handed out here to lighten the experience, though now’s the time they’d come in handy. Time was, you went to a horror movie to be grossed-out, but in a fun way. Thrills and chills, and some red spills, but ha-ha, just make believe your sick and keep that vomit bag pristine because it makes a wonderful souvenir.
Of course there are many horror films, from grind-house to art-house, that do their best to make you upchuck your last meal or your complacency, but Roth’s fictional Slovakian village, filled with menacing townspeople—including the children—pushes your complacency right out the window, then stomps on it’s fingers as it desperately dangles from the windowsill trying to avoid that long fall downward.
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