Hostel 2

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Last night I had the mis­for­tune to watch this film. I haven’t seen the ori­ginal and frankly don’t want to. My brother hired it and I was semi-forced to watch. The film has a real repu­ta­tion for open­ing a new can of worms as far as hor­ror is con­cerned. How­ever, the gripes I have with this movie are not par­tic­u­larly over the Guignol but rather the hor­ror movie cliches/rules that were being adhered to religiously.

Take the three chicks, you know imme­di­ately which ones will be killed; I.E. the one’s that try/succeed in get­ting laid. Sex = death in hor­ror movies. Then you have the wafer thin por­trayal of east­ern Europeans. Are Amer­ic­ans that afraid of Slavic types? Here they are, across the board, char­ac­ters straight out of a 1950’s vam­pire movie. Includ­ing some very heavy eye­brows, sexy yet evil thin model type chicks, local straw haired inbred’s, etc.

Unlike the ori­ginal, the main killers’ back stor­ies are also high­lighted. Here the “rich” yanks are in Europe to chop up girls so that they get a thousand-yard stare when on the golf course or tak­ing to the wife. Quite sad. Such stares often come from you being the per­son sur­viv­ing ordeals, not the one caus­ing them.

Any­way more cliches abound when they actu­ally get to the murder acts. It seems the yanks just don’t have the balls for this job, in con­trast to the smil­ingly evil Europeans who make a real meal of their work in the most shock­ing of ways (you have to see the film to under­stand how many jokes were in that last sen­tence). So whilst the poor girls do die in gory, bloody and frankly unima­gin­at­ive ways (espe­cially the one in the poster who I last saw in Devil’s Advoc­ate), it is all so unreal­istic in set­ting that it effected me about as much as, say; Blade did. Ridicu­lous evil is not actu­ally fright­en­ing only gross. Much like the ter­rible Jeep­ers Creep­ers, where, once I had real­ised that the bad guy was simply a mon­ster, the whole thing stopped being fright­en­ing in any way.

Real fear comes from nor­mal­ity, The Wicker Man being a great example. Pass this one over, not scary, just sick. 5/10.

Basho

Tech­nor­ati Tags: hor­ror movie, hostel 2

Pop­ular­ity: unranked [?]

Related Posts

• No Related Posts