Reviews

Hostell: Part II

Ocean's Thirteen is the better sequel

By TOM MEEK | June 13, 2007

2.0 Stars

Eli Roth has a big mouth. He trashed Ocean’s Thirteen, and lambasted Boston Globe critic Janice Page, in a letter to the editor, for her honest assessment of his debut, Cabin Fever (2002). Roth also loves gore and male sex fantasies gone awry. Although he has a knack for the creepy, he could benefit from some humility and a dose of creativity — Ocean’s Thirteen is the better sequel. All he does here is take the same pay-to-thrill-kill-a-human resort town in Slovakia and drop in three American women for the three guys who were hacked up in the first go-round. The can-do rich girl (Lauren German), the free-spirited nymphet (Bijou Phillips), and the nerdy tag-along (Heather Matarazzo) make for more-interesting characters, as do the two high-rollers (Richard Burgi and Roger Bart) out for their first blood, but with no fresh ideas, it’s back to bind, slice, skewer, and repeat. Roth already hit the gore ceiling in the first Hostel. Cut a guy’s dick off and feed it to a dog? Just more leftovers.

Related: Hostel, Drowning in a sea of red, The girls of summer, More

Hostel
Quentin Tarantino has given a nod to Eli Roth’s gorefest about three horny twentysomethings high-fiving their way across Europe searching for hash and babes.
Drowning in a sea of red
As a film critic, I'm obliged to approach every film with an open mind.
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It’s summer, so no one’s surprised at the onslaught of sequels, adaptations, or even movies based on toys. But films with Oscar-caliber women’s roles?
Review: Inglourious Basterds
From the beginning, Tarantino's obsessive self-referentiality and movie allusions never let you forget that you're watching a film.
Fractured fairy tales
Times are tough when the Dream Factory has a better grip on what’s going on than the people in Washington.
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With the possible exception of the days of Soviet Social Realism, people have gone to the movies to escape the daily grind, not relive it.
Monster mash
As high points of comedy go, the "Putting On the Ritz" routine in Mell Brooks's Young Frankenstein has to be one of the avalanche-inducing helpless-laughter pinnacles.
Forward into the past!
Could it be just a coincidence that as I sit here writing this, a grizzled Bob Seger is gearing up for the release of Face the Promise , the Detroit rocker’s first proper studio album in, oh, forever and a day? The Lemonheads, "No Backbone" (mp3)
Transformations
As fans of the film are aware, that precipitous crag atop which the castle of Young Frankenstein sits is a Catskill. But in The New Mel Brooks Musical Young Frankenstein (at the Opera House through May 2), the mountain is shrouded less in 1930s-horror-movie gloom than in Vegas glitz.
Kids who rock
The kids are at it again. We’ve got a new one to add to the list of the children of rock stars who want to be rock stars: Alexa Ray Joel, the 20-year-old daughter of Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel.
Broken dreams
Proxy rhetorician of love Cyrano de Bergerac is drawn into a less romantic age in Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel , which beat out August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean for the American Theatre Critics Association’s Steinberg New Play Award, and is now in its area premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theatre.
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Topics: Reviews , Eli Roth, Bijou Phillips, Janice Page, More

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ARTICLES BY TOM MEEK

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