Tension bad, torture good in 'Hostel 2'

What level of violence does it take to get an NC-17 rating these days? A newborn baby getting eaten by a pack of jackals? A faucet-cam view of some guy's arm shoved in a garbage disposal? Ninety minutes of people's heads exploding, and a bunch of monkeys finger painting with their brains?

All that would seem like an "Elmo's World" episode compared with several of the gorier scenes in "Hostel: Part II," a movie from a filmmaker who clearly lives with darker thoughts than the rest of us. Without giving away any major plot points, three different species appear to dine on human flesh in this film -- and that's just an appetizer for the carnage to come. One scene of full-frontal depravity is so graphic, that one has to wonder if the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board saw a completely different movie before it awarded this one an R rating.

Whether the above is a good or bad thing is up for individuals to decide. Personally, I welcome the renaissance of exploitation movies, even if it means critics have to start placing all of our warnings at the top of the review. This movie contains nudity, gore and drug use -- often in the same scene ...

Now that we've established that "Hostel: Part II" is basically torture porn, the question remains: Is it good torture porn? The sequel is definitely better than the average splatter flick but gets penalized for similarities to the first "Hostel" and an overall lack of tension. Writer-director Eli Roth proves once again that he's a very effective horror filmmaker, but it's probably time for him to move on to something new.

"Hostel: Part II" is a true sequel, beginning with a quick sequence that wraps up a few loose ends from the first movie. After that we meet Beth, Whitney and Lorna, three students who end up on a train to Slovakia, where the torture factory introduced in the first movie is still in business. Beth (Lauren German) is the sensible friend, Whitney (Bijou Phillips) is the skank and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) is the dork. All of them are pretty much screwed.

Without the element of surprise this time, Roth fills in the blanks from the first film, showing rich guys (and a couple of women) across the globe bidding on the rights to slowly kill the three victims. He closely profiles a couple of the psychos -- including "Desperate Housewives" creep Roger Bart -- and their journey from eating breakfast with their families to dismembering strangers in a chamber of horrors.

The additions to "Hostel II" have mixed results. While the details surrounding the killers are frequently interesting, humanizing the homicidal maniacs only serves to dampen the horror, as we learned in "Saw III." Ax murderers are always scarier when something is left to the imagination (unless you're Rob Zombie, whose "The Devil's Rejects" is the modern exception to the rule).

The victims are lured in almost the exact same manner as the guys in "Hostel," causing the first part of the movie to drag. But the lopsided pace of the film is part of what makes it original, and Roth is a good enough writer to keep the slow parts from becoming too boring. Even if you hate the rest of the movie, you've got to like how the killers get coaster-shaped pagers like the ones chain restaurants use to let them know when their victims are ready.

At first, the blast of gore in the final third of the movie looks as if it will be repetitive as well, but "Hostel II" throws in a few entertaining twists. Making up for some lapses of realism in the plot are the completely believable makeup effects, which look as authentic as they do in your worst nightmares.

The movie is almost totally devoid of suspense, which is one of the marks of a true exploitation film. Why waste time with a bunch of false scares and tension, when you can go straight to the pain and suffering?

-- Advisory: Let's try this alphabetically (spoilers ahead): This movie contains adult language, decapitations, drug use, eviscerations, gore, involuntary castration, massive head wounds, massive leg wounds, massive torso wounds, more gore, nudity, sexual content, severe beat-downs, torture and other assorted violence.

source : /www.sfgate.com