A sequel with an almost identical plot to that of its predecessor: during a trip in Slovakia, a group of students falls into the clutches of rich psychopaths looking for strong emotions. Sex, hectolitres of blood and lots of black humour for a movie that delivers. If you’re easily impressed, though, you’d better stay away from this one.


Inside the movie...

Hostel 2 doesn’t pass unnoticed, and we’ve got to give credit to Eli Roth for that. While the first episode was a shallow story filled with gratuitous violence, this time we’re definitely on a different level. Purists probably won’t agree, saying that true horror is to be found somewhere else, not in a reprise of a brutality similar to that shown by the exploitation cinema of the ’80s. It doesn’t matter, though: Hostel 2 remains in any case a tasty menu of ironical fury, an extreme movie which manages to disgust and charm at the same time.

Paying explicit homage to the dark Italian cinema of the ’70s and of the ’80s, this second chapter certainly doesn’t skimp on craziness and gore: there’s a Countess Bathory look-alike whose bloodbaths are equally disturbing and sexy (may that be a reference to Jorge Grau’s The Bloody Countess? The resemblance is striking, and seeing as Roth loves the Italian horror of the past…); there’s an educated chef (impersonated by the director Ruggero Deodato in an amusing and amused cameo) who prepares dishes that are still alive and screaming; there’s a macabre trophy room that seems to have come straight out of Bluebeard’s tale; and between a detailed eviration and a scalp, there’s also time for a soccer match where a freshly-decapitated human head serves as football, while some zigano violins provide accompaniment.

But the bizarre cruelties invented by Roth aren’t the only interesting point of the movie. Roth gives his characters a full-fledged psychology, especially in the case of the torturers. See the sequence where two customers enter into the chamber of horrors, where sentinels guarding the place and a longing music evoke unpleasant images of Nazi lagers. Or the will to survive that grows inside the crushed mind of the only survivor, which prepares an ending that makes us understand how exactly rotten can be the world we’re living into.

Between feminine curves and rather frequent sexual activities, pops up as a pleasant surprise the presence of the unforgettable Edwige Fenech: she’s still radiant and sexy in the small -and chaste- role that Roth wrote expressly for her. The lovers of vintage Italian erotic cinema are sincerely grateful for this decision.