Hostel: Part II

[MacGuffin]

A queasy-does-it guy
Grown-up kid Eli Roth says his stomach-wrenching films tackle social ills too. Tell that to the usher cleaning the floor.
Source: Los Angeles Times

A gore merchant isn't born, he's made.

Consider the case of Eli Roth, whose gory, lucrative films are often described as "torture porn" or with an especially pungent new term: "gorno." This Friday, Roth's latest, "Hostel: Part II," will land in theaters with a splatter — the plot finds three nubile coeds trapped in an Eastern European sadism club where fiends on vacation pay to slowly carve up strangers. If the thought of watching that makes you nauseated, well, Roth can understand. He's been on the other side of that popcorn bucket.

Roth spent years vomiting in the middle of matinees; he threw up so often that the theater ushers near his home in Newton, Mass., would groan when they saw him coming. He was easy to spot too, because he was so young. He was all of 8, for instance, when his parents (a Harvard University Medical School psychiatrist and a New York artist) took young Eli to see a creepy science-fiction film called "Alien." In no time, the boy was racing for the lobby with his mouth covered. That also happened to be the day Roth decided that he wanted to be a filmmaker.

"That was the one, I left there and knew that was what I wanted to be when I grew up," he recalled as he cruised around the Warners lot in a golf cart. "It sort of took over my life." He started making Super-8 movies with brothers, friends and pets as stars and, by his bar mitzvah, he asked the rabbi to introduce him as a film director-producer ("I was already a hyphenate"). The cake was shaped like a director's clapper and, in case anyone thought he wanted to make romantic comedies, was splattered with red food-coloring.

All of this would be merely quaint if Roth wasn't making some of the most disturbing films in memory. He is at the forefront of a movement in Hollywood to not only resurrect the blood-and-breasts-style slasher films of the early 1980s but also take them to new heights of realistically based narrative. Many have drawn-out murders, usually of bound victims who sob, hyperventilate, shriek for mercy or (here's that word again) vomit. It seems audiences can't get enough: The three movies in the delicately titled "Saw" series cost a combined $15 million to make and have grossed $222 million in U.S. theaters.

The filmmakers are called the "Splat Pack," of course.

"We have a friendly competition, and we have to keep in touch while we're making the films just to check on what scenes everyone is doing," Roth said of the club. He added that he reworked the script of "Hostel: Part II" and a scene of a girl getting her stomach-piercing jewelry ripped out when the filmmakers of the upcoming "Saw IV" cheerfully bragged that they had already covered that creative ground. It was a shame, Roth said.

"I had been looking for stuff you could do to girls that would be awful but not so horrifying that you felt like you couldn't watch it or you felt like you had been kicked in the stomach. I want people to be scared and walk away upset, but I don't want them to feel like they need to take a shower."

It's a fine line — but that's "gorno" for you.

Best of the worst

HERE are some choice moments from the Roth highlight reel: A half-naked cheerleader on a trampoline does a leg split and lands, crotch-first, on a knife, in a spoof scene he contributed to "Grindhouse;" in the first "Hostel," a young woman loses an eye while she is being tortured with a blow-torch, but it still dangles from the socket — until her rescuer uses scissors to snip it off.

There's another scene in the faux trailer he made for "Grindhouse" where a young guy with fresh-scrubbed features is parked in a convertible with his gum-chewing girlfriend. He talks her into performing oral sex on him but a heartbeat later she looks up to see that his head has been lopped off. Oh, by the way, in that last scene, Roth himself played the bad-luck lothario. He kept the head prop as a souvenir.

Roth describes his films with the pride of a young man who has just won the science fair and can't understand why everybody is so upset. Understanding his movies and its audiences, he said, is as simple as understanding the difference between a merry-go-round and a roller coaster. "If you're going to see a movie like 'Cheaper by the Dozen,' at the end you're supposed to feel good. The point of a horror movie is you're supposed to feel terrible."

Mixing blood and lust is a trademark of Roth and his contemporaries, as it was for the 1980s splatter films that influenced them. That has made him the target of women's groups and media-content commentators.

Given all this, you would expect Roth to be a creepy guy, but he isn't — which, come to think of it, may be the creepiest thing of all. Roth is 35 and comes off as a sunnier Ben Stiller, or maybe Carson Daly's perky brother. He is more film nut than nut job and more fan boy than bad man. He gets excited about going to horror-fan conventions. He also has some weird medical history: He endured a painful skin disease that flared up in his early 20s — it directly inspired the flesh-eating virus story of his first film, "Cabin Fever," in 2002. He doesn't live in a cave, though. Last year, the bachelor was named "fittest director" by Men's Fitness magazine and he has a horse named Bara that he keeps on a ranch in Iceland.

But to most fans his name is synonymous with grisly, sexualized horror. That's why a young woman walked up to him not long ago and rubbed her bloodied hand on his shirt as a flirty overture. "It was so disgusting," Roth recalled. "She said, 'You like blood.' I shouted at her, "I like fake blood, not real blood." I mean, c'mon. The bad thing too, she was really hot."

Even horror fans are divided. When "Hostel" hit No. 1 at the box office in 2005, movie critic (and self-proclaimed horror fan) David Edelstein wrote in New York magazine that he was alarmed by the flurry of torture films. "Some of these movies are so viciously nihilistic," he wrote, "that the only point seems to be to force you to suspend moral judgments altogether."

Rose McGowan, an actress who had a gun for a leg in "Grindhouse," surveyed the influence of the Splat Pack and spoke for many when she told Rolling Stone: "All they do now is think about ways to torture women, primarily. I don't really get that. What is this, a manual for young, budding serial killers?"

But to dismiss Roth as a hack would ignore the opinions of some impressive peers. "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson hailed "Cabin Fever" as "brilliant" and invited the then-unknown Roth to the New Zealand set of "Rings." Quentin Tarantino saw that same film, labeled Roth "the future of horror" and signed on as a producer for both "Hostel" films.

Young movie-goers are certainly buying in and, according to audience surveys, the crowds are split fairly evenly by gender. Hollywood is on board, and no company more so than Lionsgate, which is the brand behind the "Hostel" and "Saw" movies. A turning point for the company was "Cabin Fever," which cost $1.5 million to make and has grossed over $20 million in the U.S. alone. Its success led the studio to expand significantly and specialize in horror.

The men behind these movies have a club called the Masters of Horror. Roth is a member; so are filmmakers Alexandre Aja ("The Hills Have Eyes"), Darren Lynn Bousman ("Saw II," "Saw III") Neil Marshall ("The Descent"), James Wan ("Saw") and Rob Zombie ("House of 1,000 Corpses"). Each is young, well-educated, hyper-aware of film history and proud to the point of giggling that they have slightly tilted Hollywood away from big-budget action movies.

Roth says that his films are political commentary. On a Fox talk show he created a stir by blaming President Bush for the recent torture horror. He called it all art responding to a world of ugly violence and a country disdainful of other cultures.

In "Hostel," Roth said, the ugly Americans who get carved up (or carve others up) are purposeful examples of "consumption in our culture." The slow-rip murders are also meant to help us deal with the blood of the real world. "You look at the war, you look at 9/11, the tortures at Abu Ghraib, the things going on down at Guantanamo — these are real horrors and we are all scared. There's no place left to scream in public. I think these films help people deal with the real world."

That presumes quite a bit. Look on the Internet at the chats of Roth's fans and geo-politics and cultural angst are not exactly frequent threads. Roth shrugs that off.

"There were things I saw in movies that resonated with me later, like in 'Night of the Living Dead,' the fact that people were killed and turned into zombies and just by habit went to the mall and just look for living things to consume," he said. "It was about American consumption and dehumanizing effects of technology and corporate America."

Sitting next to little Eli through most of those horror films were Sheldon Roth, the noted psychiatrist and professor, and Cora Roth, a well-regarded painter. The filmmaker's father dismissed any guff he took from other patrons as "that bourgeois sensibility.... We knew Eli was a good boy." The thing he remembers is seeing the passion in his son's eyes for the stories he witnessed there in the dark.

At his bar mitzvah, Roth talked his parents into having him cut in half by a nervous magician with a chain saw. Marvello the Magnificant was sweating bullets because he had never done the trick before, and his "victim" kept screaming that the blade was really ripping into him. Roth loves telling the story. "He kept whispering to me, 'Just hold still, for God's sake.' But I just kept screaming."

The father has a theory on why his nice-guy son is so good at peeling flesh. "It's as Plato said, 'Bad men do what good men dream.' My son puts his dreams on the movie screen."

But is there film life after all that blood? Filmmaker Roth has long modeled his career on Sam Raimi, who made "The Evil Dead" and other horror classics before putting the knife down and going into the crowd-pleasing "Spider-Man" franchise. Roth may do the same, but his next project, an adaptation of Stephen King's bloody novel "Cell," is certainly staying in his old familiar red zone.

These are good days but not perfect. "I feel like nothing really scares me anymore. I don't want to be jaded, I don't want to be bitter," Roth said glumly. "But not a lot of movies freak me out. It's sad, really."

[modage]

ugh.  if i never read the words "splat pack" again it will be too soon.  i dont think any person other than a lazy journalist would EVER EVER in conversation use that term to describe who they're talking about.  nope, not buying it.

[JG]

i didn't read the article, but this skull is great. 

[martinthewarrior]

What a dong. I love the Iraq bit he's throwing into every interview. Great way to encourage the complete right off of artwork with ACTUAL political content. God, this guy annoys me.

[MacGuffin]

Eli Roth in 'Hostel: Part II' Flirts Fiddly Line Between Tasteful Terror, Repugnant Repulsion
Source: HollywoodChicago.com

CHICAGO – "It's the difference between hunting a lion and a deer."

Eli Roth, director of "Hostel: Part II," articulated in an interview with Adam Fendelman that view of his "Hostel" men as weighed against his "Hostel: Part II" women. The tellingly revealing statement touches not only on his muse for the sequel but also his take on the female kind and people's darkest secrets.

The concept to calculatingly ferret and torture women was conceived from "Death Proof" – Quentin Tarantino's half of "Grindhouse" – because Roth so fancied Tarantino's violent femmes. Roth regarded the "Death Proof" girls as the new bar for females in horror films. Tarantino executive produced "Hostel: Part II" and Roth acted in "Death Proof" a week before shooting his hostile sequel.

Parlaying a threesome into his own ferocious film world, Roth – who as a horror director fears real blood – seized the opportunity to strike back and grow his successful empire. Undaunted by being dubbed as a masochistic misogynist and forever burdened to dangerously flirt the thorny line between tasteful terror and repugnant repulsion, Roth is a fiddly lad to tag.

On one hand, he's one of the most profitable directors in Hollywood. As the business is exactly that – a business – and as a business is in business to make money, Roth has a knack for translating relatively low-budget films into box-office surprises that send investors to cloud nine.

"'Hostel' was a total one-off movie that was supposed to be a little movie I did between movies," Roth said. "The average budget for a movie is now $80 million. 'Hostel' was made for $3.8 million. Even if it had only come out in a few cities and did $8 to $10 million, it would have been a home run. We didn't even know if it'd come out in theaters."

When "Hostel" opened at $20 million and knocked out "The Chronicles of Narnia," Roth says he was floored at the voracious appetite for his ideas. In total, "Hostel" has raked in $80 million in worldwide receipts.

On the other hand, you get the sense from speaking with him that he's either selling you an alternate reality or he's unaware of what his reality really is. He speaks of greatness he hasn't yet achieved and his dossier hasn't yet produced the timeless classics as he'd like to think.

"In 'Hostel: Part II,' I wanted an unbelievable climax," he said. "The last moment of the film needed to be a showstopper – the end all, be all of horror films – with a great kill and one of best endings ever in a horror film."

The groin yank was at least vile, foul, odious, sadistic, inhuman, malicious, malevolent, wicked, heinous, nefarious, sinful, fiendish – let's see – what other adjectives are there on Thesaurus.com for just plain sick? Let us not forget the silent, slow scene with a grown man pointing a gun at the heads of children in a lineup.

At least he used a silencer. That was kind.

In deliberating the sequel, Roth says he sought to make the "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" of the "Hostel" series. In truth, though, grouping the two in the same sentence is like contrasting a fine wine that has aged to perfection with a tasty glass of Red Bull that has its thrill rides but may or may not stand the test of time.

Timing is very much on Roth's brain. He describes the ability to be scary to audiences as that which is scary to him. He also plots his stories squarely around what America fears at a given moment in time.

"I was in Prague when Katrina hit. It was like 'Dawn of the Dead,'" Roth said. "Bodies were flowing down the street and there were no police. People went right to a primal state of killing, raping and looting. The army didn't show up for five days. That terrifies me.

"Look anywhere where there's no law. What do people do? They go right to killing. It's something in human nature. Under the right circumstances, anyone can become a killer. When no one's looking, people have that need inside them to control and torture another human being."

With the plot of obscenely moneyed people who drool at the opportunity to bid on the torture and ultimate death of random overseas female tourists, Roth makes the stretch of comparing his fictional story to President Bush's real-world war in Iraq.

"Why is that war happening? It's for oil. It's for money. Halliburton is making those decisions. Do you really think any of those decisions are being made for the good of a country? It's blood for money. It's capitalism to its most extreme. It's very real. We're in Iraq because that's where the money is. That's scary."

Roth bills his work as not just scary but intelligently so. To up the gore ante, he says all you need is another tool – such tools are inspired by torture devices used by the church – and another body. The tough part is making it smarter, he says, and what's really terrifying is the look on the actor's face. It's not the actual graphic brutality.

"I have to compete with films with $100 million ad campaigns along with '24,' 'Nip/Tuck' and 'CSI' on TV. A great horror movie kill can trump everything. If you can do the shower scene in 'Psycho,' the opening in 'Jaws' or another signature scene, then it doesn't matter what movie stars you have or what you spent on special effects because people have got to see that moment.

"That's what 'Hostel: Part II' has. At the end of the film, people will come out saying: 'I've never seen that in a movie.' The ratings board didn't know what to compare this to and that's what people like about me. People see my name and they look for intelligence and originality. 'Hostel' was the one that raised the bar and pushed the envelope further than any film had at that point."

The bitterly divisive debate about the "R" rating for "Hostel: Part II" by the MPAA – instead of "NC-17" – is unsurprisingly viewed by the film's maker as a democratic breath of fresh air. He eulogizes the association's autonomous process.

"With 'Hostel' and 'Saw II,' the MPAA got many complaints. We were under the microscope this time. Before we were under the radar. When 'Hostel: Part II' came in, they were ready for it. It's 'Hostel: Part II'. It's not 'Happy Feet: Part II'. People know what it is. What they built it up to be in their minds was so much worse than what it actually was. We had a great discussion about it.

"I really feel lucky that we have a system like the MPAA. In Germany, they'll say: 'Take these scenes out or the movie's not going in theaters.' It's government censored.

"In Japan, 'Hostel' didn't come out. They said: 'We're not going to have a movie where an American disfigures a Japanese girl's face.' That's it. There's no discussion. You watch a movie and they say 'yes' or 'no'. Ukraine? No. Singapore? No. In the U.S., we can have a discussion about it and can recut it. It's run by the studios and not the government. It's the only system by which I have a voice and a process."

Whether you deem Roth to be a tormented soul or an explicit genius, there's a method to his madness.

In his view, the stories touch on what people really feel and do – but often don't say or show – and the realities about the most menacing parts of life. To bring what he perceives as such raw honesty to theaters, Roth paradoxically makes his actors feel "comfortable" and "safe" in their bloodied environments.

"These actors go to a very dark place," Roth said. "When they're crying and screaming, it's real. They're stirring up deep trauma and mental anguish. The most horrible, darkest thing in their life is right there on the surface and they're reliving it."

As culture changes, Roth's terror changes.

Next, Roth is fixated on honing in on the dying of the world's bees in the upcoming film "Cell". From human torture to bees? Yes. He's terrified by it. He says a quarter of the bee population is currently dying potentially because of cell phones knocking out the radar of the bees.

"Einstein says the human race is four steps eliminated from the extinction of bees," Roth said. "Once the bees go, flowers won't get pollinated, vegetables won't grow, we won't get oxygen and the human race will die without bees. Cell phones could be killing off the bees. I want to show there's something brewing.

"With all this wireless stuff that's pumped into the air to make our lives convenient, there's a fear that it's doing something we can't even see. 'Cell' explores that fear. You have to know what the fear is going to be to know what the horror will be. It's not a movie about the fear of technology. It makes the human behavior real. Then the film is timeless."

[Ghostboy]

This movie doesn't deserve any controversy. It's just dumb and annoying and immature.

[modage]

It's just dumb and annoying and immature.

[Stefen]

This movie doesn't deserve any controversy. It's just dumb and annoying and immature.

It does. It deserves controversy for the press it's getting for being gory instead of a shitty movie.

It's an AWFUL movie, nothing good about it. In the beginning why do they even have Jay Hernandez there? What's the point of that?

And that "twist" ending isn't a twist at all, it's just silly.

One of the worst movies that some people consider good I've ever seen.

I hope people start realizing Eli Roth for the HACK he is.

[Weak2ndAct]

Man, this guy fucked it up-- and I liked the first movie.  I dug "Hostel" because of it's unpredictability, but this one was so paint-by-numbers.  But now that we know the game, why replay it with 3 girls?  This film made a point of showing how dangerous it was to even pay to be involved in this organization, so why not just go all the way and make the movie about the businessmen?  Every scene with the girls was so boring and tired (just waiting for them to be abducted), and the only time I was intrigued was when the two businessmen were involved, or basically any scene not with the girls.  And of course, Roth had to drop the dialogue and do a montage of them getting to the rooms, rather than working on the mood/anticipation.

So much for a "shocking ending" as well.  "The 4th Man" numbed me to that move years ago, and as for Graham's turn, well, it's certainly lessened by showing throughout the film that this is not a boy's club, and doubly so for having to off someone that's despised.  Just from hearing Roth talk about the film, it's obvious he was too concerned with what the audience liked (like bringing those dumb kids back) in the first flick, rather than trying to take a chance and tell a story with elements that everyone might not agree with.

[john]

Eli Roth fucked up.

Goddamn, did he fuck up.

I've been a fan of the man's work since Cabin Fever. Hostel and the Thanksgiving trailer only cemented the deal.

I was actually, genuinely looking forward to this film. He talked a good game, about not wanting to cheat the audience, about expanding what was there originally and giving the audience what they want.

Maybe I'm not the audience he envisioned because Hostel 2 was everything I didn't want. It was what everyone accused the first film of being, while I defended it tooth and nail.

I didn't download this, I waited for the theater, I supported the man and I feel fucking cheated.

The ending was a cheat, the middle wasn't involving at all, the beginning was unfocused.

I'm sure I could sit around with Eli Roth and, over a few drinks, talk about the exploitative merits of Herschell Gordon Lewis, horror sequels good and bad, Dario Argento, Italian giallo, etc... etc... But, unlike his mentor Tarantino, Roth doesn't have the chops for it. Or maybe Roth's influences are more narrow and not as interesting as Tarantino's.

Either way, it looks like David Lynch was a much better mentor for this dude than Tarantino. Though, it's high time Roth stops having a "big brother" filmmaker to hold his hand at all.

I'm still going to hope for the best with this dude's career, though.

Because I am a sucker.

[diggler]

This film made a point of showing how dangerous it was to even pay to be involved in this organization, so why not just go all the way and make the movie about the businessmen?  Every scene with the girls was so boring and tired (just waiting for them to be abducted), and the only time I was intrigued was when the two businessmen were involved, or basically any scene not with the girls. 

spoilers:

that was the only thing remotely interesting about the film, or at least the only thing that offered anything new.  the death of the kid was apparently one of the key factors brought up by the groups protesting the film, yet it just felt tacked on. it's obvious roth knows that the films popularity is directly related to the public outcry, so he just pushes the most obvious buttons he can.  it's too bad because i enjoyed cabin fever, which was much more fun than the hostel films. when it comes down to it, roth is a showboat. making serious horror isn't his strength. the gag at the end of cabin fever was much funnier than the gag at the end of this one, which felt like a desperate attempt to lighten the mood of the audience as they left the theater.

go see severance, THATS a fun horror movie.

[The Red Vine]

I've always thought of Eli Roth as an immature shock jock of a filmmaker, but with "Hostel Part 2" he can't even succeed at being that.

Unfortunately for Roth, these gruesome scenes of violence are much more depressing and misogynistic than thrilling. I don't care how idiotic he makes his female characters. This is just exploitive. Does Roth really find joy and entertainment in watching a girl get cut to pieces, a boy getting shot in the head, and a woman being beheaded? It sure seems so, and maybe that's the most depressing thing of all. It's even worse that he seems to have approval from a real filmmaker like Tarantino.

This is the last time I ever buy a ticket to Eli Roth.

[The Perineum Falcon]

Since, from what I've gathered here, this movie isn't worth watching, could someone just tell me what the "twist" ending is?

Pretty please? =)

[Ghostboy]

There's really no twist ending. I guess you could say there's a twist third act, but the ending is pretty rote and predictable.

SPOILER

The lead girl is an heiress, and instead of being killed, she buys her freedom and pays to kill the guy who's torturing her instead. She chops his dick off, and then joins the hostel club. And then she tracks down the girl who lead them into the whole thing and chops her head off, and those annoying little kids play soccer with the severed cerebellum. The end.

[pumba]

SPOILERS:


...and the "good guy" is really the "BAD GUY" !!!