BODY SHOP: ONE LAST LOOK AT HOSTEL PART II

Truth be told, I didn’t really want to like Hostel Part II. It would have been easier if I could have just dismissed it with a wave of the hand, or with a wave of nausea, as just another offensive, fumble-footed horror homage, along the lines of director Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever and Hostel. In fact, Hostel had a promising premise—ugly American backpackers for sale to the highest bidder as victims in an underground Slovakian murder ring—which never transcended its basic outline because the characters we were meant to identify with were painted with such broad strokes of derision, strokes equal to those with which the amoral, venal flesh dealers, and the blood-lusting murderers themselves, were rendered. Roth demonstrated a talent for building dread—we all knew what lay in store for these poor, horny, tactless bastards, and each mysterious new encounter with all-too-eager Eastern bloc babes or smirky desk clerks sporting glances that lingered a beat too long brought us closer to the charnel house with a satisfying turn of the screw.

But once inside Eli’s Body Shop, the air quickly leaked out of Hostel as it became more apparent that there were no more clever tricks up the director’s sleeve. The tenuous connection to any real world situation vis-à-vis the tarnished perception of the American presence overseas, and the extreme, violently rationalized reaction to it, is a circumstance with which the movie could claim association by proximity only. It certainly never felt imposed on the narrative or engaged with in any meaningful way by screenwriter-director Roth (despite his overactive spin control in pre-release interviews). He’s there in that filthy dungeon of dismemberment for one reason only: the dirty thrill of turning said screw until it bursts through and pierces flesh. When it became clear that the movie could only indulge in a series of gratuitous set pieces (featuring a whole bunch of people screaming and begging while decked out in ghastly-silly makeup appliances meant to gross us out) before trying, like the unlikely hero figure played by lone backpacking survivor Jay Fernandez, to wriggle out of the very difficult dead-end situation it creates for itself, it was hard for me not to give in to indifference.

The improbable escape and confluence of coincidences that allow Fernandez (and the audience) some measure of vengeful release for all the previously endured abuse finally tipped the scales way too far in the direction of absurdity, and Hostel turned out (not without some measure of relief on my part) to be an experience of much less intensity and effectiveness than I had imagined it might be.


So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Hostel Part II (Roth hopes that “part” will get you thinking more Godfather than Grease) grabbed hold of me in the much the same way that the first one did. We follow a trio of, again, obnoxious American backpackers—this time young women—as they’re led along the trail of bread crumbs that inevitably ends in a room in that darkened industrial warehouse where they will be separated from their dignity, their limbs, and their lives. These women are on a par with their male predecessors in terms of sheer, petulant obnoxiousness—frosty yet empathetic Beth (Lauren German), a trust-fund princess with a sense of decency just waiting to be splattered; earthy, lusty Whitney (Bijou Phillips), whose party-hardy philosophy and fundamental bitchiness make her a likely candidate for decapitation; and treacly sweet Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), whose overmodulated wide-eyed openness and vulnerability (a mistake on the part of actress and director) undermine our stake in her unfortunate fate, played out in the movie’s grisliest and most overtly stylized set piece.

Hostel Part II is no more a purposeful or reflective consideration of the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Darfur, or a finger on the pulse of post-9/11 anxiety, than was Part I. Again, the notion that a movie takes advantage of a premise involving an especially bloody and aggressive outgrowth of capitalism, spearheaded by characters that look like they could have come from deep inside the beltway of George W. Bush’s America, doesn’t mean that the movie profoundly engages with that premise on a political or sociological level. And hearing Roth pontificate in interviews about how he drew inspiration for the movie after pondering the aftermath of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina really is opportunism at its most shameless-- post-production rationalization designed to distract the mainstream press from the ghoulish play he’s really up to. No, Hostel Part II departs from its predecessor into the realm of a truly effective giallo-influenced thriller through sheer craft and skillfully achieved empathy for those pitiful specimens who find themselves in the death chair. Roth has become a better director, better able to take advantage of the dank creepiness of his locales, inside and outside of that slaughterhouse; better able to set up visual jokes that play upon-- and indict-- the audience’s desire to see more than even this plasmatic director wants them to see (late in the film, a guard at the warehouse obscures our view of a video monitor just at the point a particularly gruesome death is delivered); better able to convey far more storytelling skill than was on display in the previous gross-out. Roth’s happy-horseshit interview persona may be cynical, but his instincts for how to deepen the experience beyond a showcase for the talents of makeup wizards Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero have served him well in this sequel.

The biggest chance Roth takes is affording a sobering, satirical glance at what might underlie the impulse for a rich businessman to get him or herself tattooed and travel halfway around the world for the privilege of running a Skilsaw over someone’s screaming face. The movie intercuts the travels of the female protagonists with those of two American executive types who have won an intense bidding war over the right to disembowel our heroines. Roth introduces them in a very sharp split-screen montage sequence which shows us a vast pool of CEOs and other outwardly reputable types surreptitiously consulting their buzzing cell phones during business meetings, family breakfasts and, of course, golf matches. We might mistake their multitasking behavior as typical hard-core white-collar breadwinning, until we get a glimpse of those cell phone screens with images of Beth and Whitney, and those ever-escalating dollar figures. The privilege of stress-relieving, no-questions-asked murder falls to a type-A middle management asshole (Richard Burgi) who imagines the bloody experience as the ultimate extreme sport, one that will give him an inexplicable aura and edge (Eye of the ripper?) when he returns to the competitive business world. Along for the ride is another suit and tie (Roger Bart), a far more uncertain and reticent one who harbors an unstable sense of decency that will do him absolutely no good when the heavy doors of that abattoir slam shut and he realizes that someone must die. Roth teases us in clever ways as these two strands of the story dangle ever closer to each other, and they give Part II a definite psychological edge that enhances the squirm-inducing dread, the fear of the moment when steel meets, and rends, flesh, a fear that Roth unashamedly exploits for all the suspense and audience identification he was unable to locate in the first movie.

There has been some debate as to just with whom the audience is meant to identify, however. Many of the folks eager to chime in on the movie before they’d even seen it seemed convinced that, by making a movie about a torture-and-murder-for-profit organization and placing young, relatively attractive people in it, the movie was somehow advocating actual torture. (The tone of some of these arguments suggested to me that these detractors didn’t realize the horrors of Hostel Part II were the product of movie fakery.) At the very least, was Roth positioning the movie as some sort of vicarious geek hard-on, advocating bloody vengeance against all the pretty folks who, in the world outside this grisly fantasy, wouldn’t give said geeks and nerds the time of day? Some have even suggested that this misapplication of sympathies—with the perpetrator of evil and against the innocent victim—is the standard M.O. of horror, as if to say that we all identified with Freddy Krueger instead of Heather Langenkamp or poor Amanda Wyss. But that’s a tack (one seen coursing through a lot of the comments beneath David Poland’s well-publicized reaction) that’s as dishonest as Roth claiming the Hostel movies are some sort of cultural corrective to Gitmo. A casual glance at the plot mechanics, and a more observant consideration of the general tone of the film’s arterially-sprayed set pieces, ought to be enough to reveal that while Roth’s point of view is clearly not one of repulsion, neither is it one that suggests we should in any way be identifying with the impulses that spur these wealthy murderers on along their crimson-stained vacations.


We are, however, invited to identify with the transgressive frisson of being taken into a pact with a skillful and, yes, occasionally irresponsible director and shown some very ugly things in the service of what can only be described, with or without shame, as a successful genre entertainment. And, folks, it happens all the time. Individual sequences in movies as disparate in subject matter, quality and chronology as The Witchfinder General (a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm; 1968), Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), Lamont Johnson’s Lipstick (1976) and Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) all contain imagery and/or sequences far more upsetting to me than anything in Hostel Part II, and that has everything to do with factors as variable as my own personal level of tolerance and repellence and, more to the point, the director’s seriousness of intent.


The fact is, it was entirely within my range of response to the movie’s most notorious scene, the Elizabeth Bathory-influenced evisceration of Lorna at the hands of a sexually gratified female assailant, to find it simultaneously horrifying, disgusting, a clever infusion of giallo-influenced imagery (films which often achieved a similar level of seemingly indefensible ghastliness), and an opportunity to face up to my own negative feelings about Heather Matarazzo’s performance and the way Eli Roth apparently directed her to once again channel Dawn Wiener, only heavily sugar-coated this time and turned up to 11. Facile genre subversion aside (it’s usually the dowdiest of the group that ends up standing in for the audience and making it to the end of a picture like this), I think this scene, the locus of David Poland’s emotional response to the movie, probably has to be added up to a directorial misstep, a grossly overindulgent moment in a movie admittedly full of them that, ironically, was made more endurable for me by just the kinds of aesthetic disconnects mentioned above, disconnects that viewers like David Poland were unable to achieve. (By the way, Poland reviewed the movie off of a bootlegged DVD made from a work print, and he reports Matarazzo screaming pathetically for her mommy in the version he saw. Unless my ears completely failed me, Roth apparently decided against this bit of business, because I never heard it.) I don’t, however, think that Roth can be held accountable if a certain sexually inexperienced and/or disturbed element of the audience gets its rocks off on watching a woman writhing in ecstasy beneath a cascade of blood, any more than I believe that Martin Scorsese should be held accountable for supposedly encouraging John Hinckley to shoot a gun.

However, the vilest scene in the movie, from a directorial point of view, is not the Matarazzo murder. Roth, during the course of the action, reintroduces us to the pack of young (average age, about 10) street thugs from the first film that serve as the director’s roving visual reminder of the anthill scene in The Wild Bunch. These are formerly innocent children driven by poverty, disease and lack of proper adult guidance to spend their time robbing and harassing the unlucky tourists that cross their path. At one point Beth, attempting to escape the clutches of her murderous captors, stumbles upon the children and is nearly beaten to death by them before being “rescued” by the steely-eyed CEO of the killing corporation. After carting Beth away, the man holds a loaded gun to the forehead of each of the boys (and one girl), before one boy is pushed to the forefront and coolly capped in full view of the rest of the gang. We do not see the spray coming out of the boy’s head; we see only the slumped, lifeless body in the foreground as both the killer and the children depart from the scene. I’m at a loss to imagine how this scene adds anything to our understanding of the brutal economic web by which the killer, his victims and these children are ensnared. Nothing gets thrown into stark, painful relief by this callous act except the director’s compass momentarily spinning completely out of control.


The movie got its claws right back into me, though, and held its grip throughout an extended sequence of carnage and, yes, even some pitch-black comedy once we finally return for one last tour through the charnel house. It’s here that the red-meat American businessmen come face to face with the fulfillment of their sickest fantasies, and, of course, the unexpected psychological short-circuit that comes along with it, and it’s here that the movie achieves the kind of grindhouse glory that eluded the first movie in its haste to pace through its third-act plot points. Say what you will about Eli Roth’s motivations and the audience’s relative lack of health for wanting to be subjected to the final result, but Hostel Part II has, along with a coarsely underground sensibility that suggests that a wide release for this bucket of blood was never the way to go (it’s why no one ever called for the heads of Mario Bava or Lucio Fulci), the simple courage of its twisted convictions. Maybe we’ll look back in 20 years and see more clearly that Hostel and this sequel were part and parcel of a communication between a movie and the culture that surrounded it, in the way that movies like Night of the Living Dead and The Wild Bunch, to name just two, were informed by and reflective of the tragedy in Vietnam. I suspect probably not, and that’s okay—there are plenty of good, nasty movies in this genre that have gotten by simply on their good looks (irony alert), and there ought not to be any shame in enjoying them as such. Instead, when we look at Hostel Part II in 20 years I think we’ll see pretty much what we see now—the work of an over-hyped hotshot director who, if he and we are all lucky, will have fulfilled some of the promise that he finally got around to indicating in the dank, moldy hallways of this ruthless, surprisingly effective shocker.