HOSTEL 2

I like being surprised and Hostel 2 really surprised me. Not in a "Whoa, the guy with the meathook hand is ACTUALLY the girls dead father resurrected as a killer who knew what she did last summer?" kind of way, but in a having-negative-expectations smashed kind of way. Hostel 2 was a lot smarter and dare I say--relevant--than I ever imagined it would be. It's essentially about American xenophobia taken to comical extremes. It's also about how rich white men are youth-killing psychopaths whether they pay to torture them in sex dungeons or simply destroy the future with reckless capitalist annihilation. It's not particularly subtle about making these points, but I appreciated the subtext all the same. It spoke to me.

It's also waaaay less bloody than I was expecting. Basically it's an hour of set-up where nobody dies and then 20 minutes of carnage. But the setup was kinda interesting and funny.