Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 10/28/2008 Run time: 95 minutes Rating: Ur

Amazon.com:
With repulsion levels at least comparable to Cannibal Holocaust, Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast, and other gory slasher landmarks, Eli Roth's Hostel 2 reconfigures ideas of violence to test how down and dirty a horror film can get. The film raises the stakes, leaving those who wish to make a sicker film out in the lurch for the time being. This sequel, like the first Hostel, is set in and around a Slovakian factory where European students are kidnapped, tortured, and killed by rich businessmen who pay enormous sums to experience death firsthand. An international elite, all tattooed with a bulldog insignia, bid on young people to slaughter in a mob-organized, high-end, sex-slave trade catering to those with a death fetish. In Hostel 2, three girls from Rome, Beth (Laura German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips), and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), are lured to Slovakia by a sultry, vampiric hottie (Vera Jordonova) who modeled for them in figure drawing class. Sidetracked and disoriented by some Pagan Slovakian festivals and luxurious hot springs, the girls slip away one by one, until the film moves inside the torture chambers. One client sits in a bathtub beneath her victim, who she slices with a scythe to bathe in blood, Elizabeth Bathory-style. Body parts fly as clients entering the facilities select their weapons of choice in a room full of knives, power tools, and rubber clothing. As ridiculous as it sounds, haunting soundtrack and cinematography set a disturbing mood. Morbid humor, for example when a chainsaw unplugs centimeters from a victim's face, pays homage to Hostel 2's schlocky predecessors. Fortunately, one survivor remains, providing an ounce of vengeful, and sexy, satisfaction. As in the best exploitation films, gratuitous sex and violence are the norm here. What will be a warning to some to avoid this gruesome movie will be to others a cue to head straight to the theater. --Trinie Dalton

Rating : - Smarter and more ominous than its predecessor
Short and to the point, Hostel II is creepy. Those who have seen the first movie know the basic plot: Gullible kids, mostly Americans, allow themselves to be tricked into vulnerable situations where they are kidnapped. Soon thereafter a rich person pays to torture and kill the helpless kid.

Hostel turned heads for its shock factor, with realistic gore, torture, and close ups of some really brazen death scenes. Eli Roth provides it all for the sake of pure horror. There are no ambiguities or false pretenses; people are going to be graphically tortured and murdered. If you don't like it, don't watch. Hostel II is no different in this respect; however, it is different in the build up.

Picking up where the first one left off, a few bits of unfinished business take place. Whereas the first movie didn't really suck me in, or make me like the characters at all, a better job was done this time to create viewer empathy (except for Heather Matarazzo, who I hate as an actress). Apathy, or possibly ambivalence, ruled the initial movie, but genuine terror oozes out of this session of tensely persuasive torture porn, especially during a depraved bathroom scene with a scythe that provides enough blood to make Carrie jealous.

With a subtle, contemporary tribute to the classic The Most Dangerous Game, it's a sickeningly sadistic look at morality, or the lack thereof in our culture. If not for the somewhat campy ending, there would have been a sustained uneasiness from beginning to end, and it would be a five-star horror flick.