Hostel: Part II

[pete]

I'll never watch the film, but I love reading this thread, I love it when xixax doesn't buy into something, it makes me feel proud to be part of this thing.

[grand theft sparrow]

Guarantee they blame the shittyness of this movie on piracy.

Source: Cinematical

Eli Roth Talks 'Hostel II' Box-Office, Blames Rampant Piracy, Says 'Cell' Is Now On Hold
Posted Jun 16th 2007 6:32PM by Ryan Stewart

Director Eli Roth is speaking out about the lackluster box-office for his latest film, Hostel: Part II, and he's blaming everyone but himself. Roth puts piracy front and center as the reason for the film's performance. "Piracy has become worse than ever now, and a stolen workprint (with unfinished music, no sound effects, and no VFX) leaked out on online before the release, and is really hurting us, especially internationally," he says, before going on to specifically tear into critics who reviewed a leaked copy of the film. "Critics have actually been reviewing the film based off the pirated copy, which is inexcusable," he says. "Some of these critics I have actually known for a few years, and while I wouldn't dignify them by mentioning them by name, I know who they are, as do the studios, and other filmmakers, and they will no longer have any access to any of my films." Roth also advises fans of his that haven't seen Hostel: Part II to "go now, because after next weekend the film will be gone from theaters."

As for the future, Roth says "I am not directing Cell any time soon, and I most likely will take the rest of the year to write my other projects. Which means I wouldn't shoot until the spring and you wouldn't see a film directed by me in the cinemas until at least next fall." He goes on to say that in Hollywood, "the R-rated horror film is in serious jeopardy. Studios feel the public doesn't want them anymore, and so they are only putting PG-13 films into production. The only way to counter this perception is to get out there and support R-rated horror."

[mogwai]

fucking twat.

[Stefen]

Told you guys.

This guys head is so big he is above any kind of criticism. Reminds me of M. Night before he got put back on earth and his right shoulder go tired of resting his big head.

At least M. Night made some good movies, this guy Roth hasn't made anything good, just had one movie that was okay.

[bonanzataz]

i loved cabin fever and i loved hostel part i. this movie was baaaaaaaaaad. wienerdog gets a pretty good death scene, but the rest of the movie is just so blah. i don't know why you all hate eli roth so much. yeah, he's a little annoying and kinda egocentric, but he's a showman. he makes movies for people who want to have a good time at the movies and he does his best to advertise them. he should've moved on from hostel and done something new and original. changing the leads to girls in an abbreviated version of the first just ain't that interesting. especially when there was only one good death. i think the producers must have paid the critics to say that this movie was "appalling" and "disgusting," calling it "torture porn." i wanna know what movie they were watching, cuz i saw some movie about dumb chicks without ENOUGH gore or blood. critics were ACTUALLY complaining that this deserved an nc-17, seriously, this movie was surprisingly tame. the first one had better gore, suspense, social commentary, and nudity. this felt like something that was made quickly and without thought for a quick buck to cash in on the original.


yeah, he may be a sellout and a bit of a douche, but try to convince me that "thanksgiving" wasn't the best part of grindhouse.

[Stefen]

I hate Eli Roth because he's everything I hate in a human being.

I guarantee he reads Maxim more than any other magazine, has more than once drugged up a girl at a frat party and had his way with her, his favorite movie is Boondock Saints, he uses the words awesome, gnarly, & tubular more than anyone else should EVER be allowed to, ask him about politics, or whats going on in darfur and he'll give you a blank stare, but ask him whats going on with tomcat and he'll give you the lowdown.

I'd tell this to his face if I wasn't so scared of getting stuffed into a locker by his frat brothers.

[bonanzataz]

it's so easy to make blanket statements about people you've never met. you know the man by his public persona. he knows his audience, and people that like to go see cool/bloody horror movies are teenagers and frat boys, so he tries to appeal to that demographic. i can understand why you'd feel that way, but take a look at the original hostel and you'll see a damning indictment of american excess that's rife for political discussion (like, five minutes worth, at least). good horror has and always will play on people's socio-political fears, and while the original hostel was a movie for frat boys to go "awesome" to while their girlfriends bury their heads in their arms (or laps), it also had some pretty good subtext. it's a movie that was made by a man who clearly loves and knows the genre he's working in. also, if you watch cabin fever and hostel, you can tell that the death, nudity, and general fratboy nature of those films are, albeit slightly, tongue in cheek. it's gratuitous for a purpose.

counter arguments:
1. my friend did some casting work on hostel 2 and said that eli roth was a douchebag in real life, but only because he's a shrewd businessman. he knows how to get what he wants and he's not above intimidation tactics, however, how in fuck are you supposed to survive in hollywood if you're not like that?
2. hostel 2 really was some lazy bullshit.

[Stefen]

Of course the only things I know about him is what I get from his persona that he projects in interviews, etc.

Osama Bin Laden seems like a dickhead but I bet he's a really nice guy once you get to know him.

He just reminds me of a swarmy asshole. The type who practices chants in front of the mirror all by himself like "Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!"

Yeah, I compared Eli Roth to Osama Bin Laden. It doesn't even work cause at least Osama accomplished something (too much?)

[bonanzataz]

(too much?)

haha, no, just enough.

[modage]

Eli Roth discusses Frat Boys and Hostel II on The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell podcast...
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330616&s=143441&i=16717147

[Stefen]

Eli Roth discusses Frat Boys and Hostel II on The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell podcast...
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330616&s=143441&i=16717147

Elvis Mitchell = Possibly my favorite educated Uncle Tom.

Whats that show he used to have on IFC? Independent Focus or was that a different one? I don't get IFC here anymore.

[©brad]

i'm really glad this failed. i hope this puts the saws to bed for a while too.

because i never understood this genre. and i love a good scare, and i also think extreme suspense rivals an orgasm from a pleasure perspective. but violence for the sake of violence, the "who can do the grossest shit possible" game these C-list directors play with one another is just retarded. what is the ultimate goal, to get people to throw up? where's the talent in that? anyone can go out and film something really sick. girl gets captured, beated, arm cut off, then force-fed live squirrels and shots of her own blood. boom. hostel 3 right there. now to film something truly suspenseful, so much so that the hair on your neck stands erect, now that's a skill. one that none of these jerkoffs possess.

i'm actually happy that 1408 is getting pretty dope reviews, especially after reading this one: "Listen up, all you Hostels, Saws and other purveyors of bloody terror. Lay down your whips, chain saws and paring knives to watch a truly scary movie."

so yeah, that's what i think about that.

[children with angels]

I'm gonna lose this fight, but I prefered it to the first one.

I want to stress that this isn't a good film - it's just more of an interesting one than the first Hostel. I don't tend to go to horror films to be scared, because they don't really ever do that for me. A small part of me always hopes they will, but they never really do. Equally, I don't tend to go to horror films for believable characters and situations. If they happen to crop up (as in, say, Blair Witch or 28 Days Later or or The Descent) then that might be a bonus, but it's certainly no deal-breaker for me. In terms of being well-made, etc., I agree - Hostel 2 is probably not as well-crafted as the first one.

But what I go to horror films for (and I do go, and enjoy them, quite a bit) is generally because I find them interesting for the extreme way they're able to deal with their themes as the most consistently extreme mainstream genre - violence, sex, gender, race... The first Hostel I found xenophobic (the presentation of the eastern bloc), homophobic (the gay guy on the train who turns out to be a client of the Hostel) and sexist (the laughable amount of leering at naked women, the siren-whore characters). I didn't buy Roth saying that it was some kind of critique of marauding Americans abroad because these guys were our main characters and we were certainly asked to root for them - it was definitively all the foreigners, gays and women who were seen as dangerous and 'other'.

SPOILERS

Hostel 2 I had less of a problem with in the way it dealt with its themes. Using women instead of men as its main characters was a good idea I think - it linked it to a whole tradition of slasher and exploitation cinema very nicely, and let it use the sometimes perversely empowering sexual politics of those movies to its advantage.

What I saw was a film about women being sexually victimised by men in the world in general (e.g.: those guys on the train), who then stumble into a situation where that victimisation is amped up to extreme heights (the hostel). One of the these women is stripped naked and cut up by a sexually fucked-up female character, so the first proper nudity is uneasily tied to violence - nicely uncomfortable. One of them was dolled up and made pretty (i.e: put in lingerie) in front of a movie-star-dressing-room type mirror - fitting in with the sexual spectacle of women on display that the film as a whole deals with (the life drawing model, the woman in the magazine getting her leg stabbed, the guy who rapes the woman he came to kill, etc.). You could indirectly see the whole film as being about this situation that's involved in making and screening a Hostel-type movie: hyper-masculine American males paying their money to see (in the case of Hostel's audience) or enact (in the case of Hostel's characters) the torturing and killing of beautiful women, with all the psycho-sexual undertones that come with that.

The fact that the whole film had become about the sexual victimization of women was made very nicely clear at the end by the conclusion being a financially independent woman buying her way out of her situation and cutting off the dick (basically the source of all the problems!) of a man who had raped and tortured her because he called her a cunt - the word that had heralded the start of all the victimizing at the beginning of the film.

As I said, it's not a very well-made film, and I also doubt that Roth had much of this in mind when he made it (though I'm sure he had some inkling), but by putting women in the quite imaginative situation of the hostel that he'd dreamed up but squandered in the first film, I think he automatically made a movie with far more interesting ideas floating around it.

[MacGuffin]

Eli Roth Attacked in Parliament
Hostel: Part II called obscene, brutal and mysogynistic in the House of Commons.
Source: IGN UK

The so-called "torture porn" debate continues to rage, with the issue even reaching the House of Commons earlier this month. The erroneously monikered genre, which includes the likes of Hostel, Wolf Creek and the Saw films, has been roundly, and wrongly, criticised for glamorising violence and torture on screen. And the issue reached a new level of insanity on October 8 when Conservative MP Charles Walker decided to discuss the possession of extreme pornography in Parliament, and used the latest Hostel film as an example.

"I, too, am concerned about what comes over the Internet," he explained. "There is some horrible, nasty and unpleasant stuff. Clauses 64 to 67 are not as good as they could be -- there is potential for contradiction; for example, in the case of a film called Hostel: Part II, which I have not seen but that has been reported on by a number of people I trust. From beginning to end, it depicts obscene, misogynistic acts of brutality against women -- an hour and a half of brutality -- yet that film has been passed by the British Board of Film Classification for public release to people aged 18 and over.

"I understand that, although the Bill will not make that film illegal, it could make it illegal for someone to take stills from that film, because they could be deemed to have a purely pornographic nature. If it were deemed that stills from a film such as Hostel: Part II were of a pornographic and unacceptably violent nature, it seems madness that that film should be allowed on general release."

That opening sentence, in which Walker admits he hasn't even seen the film, immediately negates everything that follows, but I nevertheless got in touch with Eli Roth, the film's writer-director, to see what he thought about the statement. And Roth was annoyed to say the least...

"I'd like to thank Charles Walker for what could arguably be the single greatest public endorsement this film ever received. He might as well wear a t-shirt saying 'Buy Hostel 2 on DVD October 23rd' while addressing the members of Parliament. It's incredible that in this day and age a Member of Parliament would propose making it illegal for people to take stills from a movie because 'people he trusts' told him it was obscene. Why bother to see the film if you have people you trust to form your opinions for you? What other laws are 'people he trusts' recommending he propose? I hope Charles Walker never sees the film, because then he might see that the film's actually quite anti-violence and would then retract his statement. That would be the worst disaster of all."

Eli continues: "I hate to disappoint Mr. Walker, but there's no actual blood or violence in Hostel: Part II. Someone should explain to him that movies are pretend, and that no one's actually really hurt, and that any stills from the movie are pictures of people in food colouring and latex."

Harsh words, but I'm totally with Roth on this matter, especially as I took several photos while visiting the set and would rather not got to prison for posting them online. Mercifully, nothing actually came of Walker's statement, so Hostel: Part II will still hit shelves on Monday, and I predict that its release won't spell the end for civilised society. Instead, the world will keep on turning, with filmmakers continuing to work without fear of restriction or censorship while politicians continue to discuss subjects they know nothing about.

[MacGuffin]

What an incredibly HUGE disappointment. After praising the first one for it's originality, this one is predictable and cliched. All mystery of the torture factory is gone. So what we're left with is waiting for the victims to be captured and, like the Saw films, wanting the creative deaths. This movie doesn't have them, and very little death at that, and no gore whatsoever. In fact, the only torture the movie had was on it's audience.

*SPOILERS*


I knew so right off the bat when I anticipated Hernandez's "It was all a dream" in the hospital. From then on out, I was one or two steps ahead of the movie, knowing that what you think is going to happen, is not so (the spike anchoring the boat; the blowtorch lighting the candles). This film falls into my number one pet peeve of horror: the characters here are so dumb that they deserve what they get and instead of rooting for them to get away, you can't wait for them to die. For example, Dawn Weiner is missing the next morning, gone with a guy who just the night before Beth warned not to go with. So instead of worrying about and going to go look for her friend, she goes to a spa. It feels like Roth wants to make a statment about feminism (the objection to the word 'cunt,' the woman winning in the end), but his female characters are stupid and no better than the men they are disgusted by, that it has an adverse reaction.

The flick had a smattering of ideas that could have been fleshed out (pun intended); I liked the bidding war and the guys choosing their weapons and gearing up, like boxers before a fight. So if Eli had stayed with exploring how the syndicate worked, it might have made for new ideas.