Last night, I watched "Hostel: Part 2." I didn't see "Hostel" because, well, I wasn't that interested, and the main reason I wanted to see the sequel was due to fourfour's review of it in which Rich stated: "Live by the vag, die by the vag." Indeed. It was a must-see. The basic premise of the movie is that a trio of young women traveling through Europe get sucked into a torture-and-murder ring in which men 'round the world bid online for the right to torture and murder chicks. It's like "The Most Dangerous Game" for the Louis Vuitton set, this time with chainsaws. In any case, the ladies in peril are Beth (Lauren German), who is smart, Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), who is a dork, and Whitney (Bijou Phillips), who is a slut. Thankfully, director Eli Roth has covered the postfeminist trinity here. Not unlike "Death Proof," most of this movie is totally fucking boring unless someone is being tortured or killed. And since nobody really gets tortured or killed until the second half of "Hostel: Part 2," the first half of the movie feels a lot like the parts of a porn movie in which nobody is having sex. Dull. Eventually, it's time for the torturing and the killing, and Lorna is the first to get whacked. Lorna gets her comeuppance strung up upside down and naked, gutted like a squealing pig, and the villain who does her in is a naked older chick who lies below the leaking Lorna, taking a bloodbath in the young woman's virginal blood. While watching Lorna get tortured and killed isn't pretty, what's equally disconcerting is that Lorna is played by the actress who played Dawn Wiener in "Welcome to the Dollhouse," and while one should be caught up in the horror of Lorna's demise, it's hard to sublimate the realization that one is staring at Dawn Wiener's boobs. Up to this point, much of the movie has been devoted to following the girls' galavanting to their end. The, in my opinion, more interesting parallel plot follows two American men, Todd (Richard Burgi), a macho pig, and Stuart (Roger Bart), a meek married man, as guys who are so bored by their average American lives that they travel abroad to hunt the opposite sex. Poor Whitney--seen here--gets gagged and paired up with Todd, who, it turns out, is not as macho as he seems. Dear Beth gets set up with Stuart, who, in the end, reveals he is more monster than man. These dungeon scenes, rife with screaming, nubile women, splattering streams of blood, and the ragged effects of machine tools on female flesh, have been referred to as torture porn and gorno. To be frank, I was surprised by how unsexual they were. If violence is the new sex, someone is going to have to do better than this if they expect to turn today's desensitized audiences on. If blood is the new sperm, I'm bored already. Or, uh, maybe that's just me. The movie's best scene is its finale, a scene that leaves the audience gasping and laughing in horror and wonder, like a good torture porn movie should. Beth, as Rich rightly pointed out, is the final girl, the last woman standing in the middle of a madman's mayhem. This time, she wields a pair of hedge clippers--with Stuart's penis trapped between the blades. The 21st century postfeminist castrates the man, throws his dick to the dogs, and becomes one of the boys. Better her than him, I suppose.
