Hostel: Part II (2007)

I’ve been reviewing the various Saw and Hostel movies more-or-less chronologically for Saw-mhain. Granted, Hostel came out before Saw II, but they were the same year and I didn’t want the second entry in a month focusing more on the Saw franchise to be something else. But we’re in the area of 2007, so it’s time for Hostel: Part II, a continuation of Mr. Eli Roth’s vision of decadence and ultraviolence. And like the first film, it was better than expected! Not a masterpiece, but still.

We open with Paxton, living in fear after the events of the first film. Hey, he’s still alive! Oh wait, no, he’s just been decapitated by the nameless organization, never mind. We then jump to our new protagonists, Beth (Lauren German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips), and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo). They’re in Rome, but a meeting with sexy model Axelle has the trio heading towards Slovokia, unaware they’re gonna get murdered. But shaking things up we see the other side of the criminal organization, focusing on two Americans who won bids to kill the girls: alpha male Todd (Richard Burgi) and nervous beta Stuart (Roger Bart). Stuart is awkward and focused on Beth, while Todd just wants to get his murder on. Soon enough the girls are captured, with Lorna being chained upside down over a bathtub so a woman can slice her up and bathe in her blood. Huh, didn’t know Báthori Erzsébet was in this movie. But the twist comes when Todd cuts Whitney and freaks out over seeing blood, trying to quit the whole thing before the organization kills him. You can’t leave without killing someone, it turns out. Meanwhile, Stuart is actually a little sociopath who wants to torture Beth because he can’t kill his wife. But Beth plays him, eventually leading to a standoff with the organization. But thanks to some awkward exposition earlier we know Beth is super rich and she buys her way out of the murder warehouse, cutting Stuart’s dick off to satisfy the requirement of killing someone. The movie ends with her lopping Axelle’s head off and the terrible Slovakian street kids play soccer with it. Sorry, this is Europe, playing football.

I had a couple ideas lined up for the post-summary part of the review, but I kept getting hung up on how nasty Bijou Phillips apparently is in real life. In 2017, Daniel Franzese (Damian from Mean Girls) came out and said that Bijou viciously mocked him and his sexuality while filming Bully around the year 2000. Shortly after this, Heather Matarazzo shared that on the set of this film Phillips choked her, threatening that she’d make sure the then-sober-for-a-year Matarazzo would relapse on pills. Bijou apologized for those incidents, but wait! There’s more! Her sister accused their father of rape, but Bijou came out and said she was wrong. But then again she probably has real bad takes on that, since she was–until recently–married to now convicted rapist Danny Masterson. Girl, your life is a mess. Probably for the best you haven’t been in a movie since 2013.

But I don’t want to end this post on that note, so… uh… Cameos! Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino had brief cameos in the first movie, while Ichi the Killer and Audition director Takashi Miike had a small part with a line. In this movie we not only see a prop of Roth’s severed head, but Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato has a scene where he plays a cannibal eating the legmeat of Miroslav (Stanislav Ianevski, AKA Viktor Krum from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). Also while looking up those little cameos, I learned that Roger Bart was the singing voice of Hercules in Disney’s Hercules, and the character of Roger Davis in Rent is named after him. The more you know!

Previous: Hostel (2005)
Next: Hostel: Part III (2011)