I watched the first Hostel film and was impressed so was quite looking forward to seeing part 2. As is usually the case though I shouldn't have built up my hopes too much as this film really isn't a patch on the original in my opinion.

We pretty much leap straight into the story upon watching the film, taking up where Hostel left off. The last survivor from the first movie winds up in a hospital and is trying to tell the police what happened to him, before he can get to the heart of his story it becomes apparent that these doctors are actually part of the organization and bear the elite hunting tattoo's which are required for entry. After this turns out just to be a dream sequence we've just witnessed we quickly move on to the deeper part of this sequels story. This time around it's not a group of guys who get lured to the Hostel it's a group of American girls. Now it just so happens that American girls are one of the highest priced targets and are furiously bidded on by the rich, sick and twisted people who pay obscene amounts of money to torture and kill victims in an old abandoned factory. We watch as bidding for the girls escalates and is eventually won by several business men (and women) from around the world.

As with the first movie, one by one the girls are kidnapped from the Hostel and taken to the abandoned factory to face their death in a number of sick and disturbing ways. These include everything from being hacked up, to chainsaws and a girl bound and hung upside down so that a deranged woman can bathe in her blood. Yuck.

Desperate Housewives stars Roger Bart and Richard Burgi (George and Karl on DH) star as two of the businessmen who hand over their cash to the exclusive club in return for the chance to torture and kill a woman each. During the process there is a really sick scene involving Roger Bart and an incident to a VERY sensitive part of his body (yes guys THAT part) if you watch the uncut version it's very gross and very graphic!

That is just one in a number of gruesome scenes which in my opinion just seem to be trying to milk the violence and gore for all they are worth. Now that we know how the Hostel works and the ins and outs of everything it has lost an aspect of its scariness and becomes a little, dare I say tedious?! I read in an interview with Eli Roth recently that he actually had no intention of making a follow up to Hostel so maybe that's why it didn't turn out anywhere near as good as I would have liked. One of my main problems with the film was with the characters themselves, they were so underdeveloped that you really didn't care who lived or who died. There actually wasn't one character that I was rooting for to make it out alive; I just didn't care at all.

Shocking and downright disgusting as the violence was, it just wasn't SCARY so came across as kind of pointless and uncalled for! However, the main thing that let Hostel 2 down was its ending. It was awful, and I mean awful. I understand that the message we were supposed to ‘get' was that the only way the main character was ever going to stand a chance of getting out alive was by appealing to the one thing that these people understand; Money. But how boring is that for an ending?! Wow, she buys her way out ... scary! The final scene was pretty much just as bad, the only good point was when the kids played football with the woman's head (that was only good because it was SO bad if you catch my drift) yet it appealed to my warped sense of humour.

Sadly at the end of the day Hostel 2 showed promise, but bad scripting and under developed characters meant that it was just a big letdown that left me wishing I had never seen it!