As regular readers of this blog can imagine, I’m both anticipating and dreading the sequel to Hostel. The first one was my favourite horror movie of the past few years, and the last thing I want to see is some hastily assembled follow-up that doesn’t come close to matching the quality of the original.

Due to potential spoilers, I’m treading carefully when it comes to advance reviews, but I did find a few that revealed very little in the way of surprises. Please be warned that my tolerance for slight spoilers may be greater then your own. Twitch is especially interesting in revealing some of the influences they feel Roth shows in this outing, particularly concerning gialli.

“Whereas while he was toying with Hostel 2 and writing the sequel, Roth went to Rome where he met such great Italian directors as Sergio Martino, who made the amazing I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (Torso, 1973). Roth also saw other films like Avere vent’anni (To Be Twenty, 1978) by Fernando Di Leo—”Which was just so fucking sick; the ending of this movie I just couldn’t fucking believe it”—and L’ultimo treno della notte (Night Train Murders, 1975) by Aldo Lado. These were all early 70’s giallo films; not the operatic Argento-style giallo but the realistic-style giallo.”

What I’m finding most surprising about the reviews so far is how many people admit to enjoying the first film, when at the time I felt as if I were in a definite minority. It’s those reviews that I’m most interested in, largely because many of the negative reviews seemed to have missed the point to the extent that they had watched an entirely different film and I somehow doubt I can trust their judgement.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Movies, Sequels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.