HOSTEL PART II

This torture porn flick is, of course, the sequel to the first Hostel. While I actually liked the first Hostel (and was, if memory serves, the last film I actually paid to go see in a movie theater), I wasn't much of a fan of the sequel (but then, isn't that almost always the case with sequels?). In the first film, it was a group of guys who take a trip overseas and end up getting captured and tortured by this agency of sorts where people pay to literally torture people to death. In the sequel, it's a group of girls who take said overseas trip and wind up getting captured and brutally tortured. And here's why I'm NOT so much a fan of the gory sequel. Being a horror aficionado, I certainly don't have an aversion to gore, even extreme gore, but there are some acts of violence even I can't stomach, especially if it involves women. Now I'm NOT one of these politically correct D-Bags (Roger Ebert, are you listening?) bitching about how horror films or slasher flicks or whatever you wish to call them are "degrading towards women" and whatnot (since, of course, men are killed just as brutally in these films) and I don't even mind sometimes viewing women getting killed in these films (like, for instance, when women were killed in the first Hostel film and in the earlier-reviewed film The Hitcher where we didn't actually see Jennifer Jason Leigh get brutally killed by Rutger Hauer but still got the point nevertheless). But, I've got to tell you, the scenes in the second Hostel where Bijou Phillips gets her scalp split open with a chainsaw and Heather Matarazzo gets literally slashed to death by a scythe while hanging upside down--nude--by this crazy evil bitch in a bathtub so she can bathe in her blood left me, well, disturbed for days after seeing them. (And here's another gripe I have about the Heather Matarazzo death scene: While I certainly enjoyed her nudie film debut, I certianly DIDN'T enjoy the fact that she was brutally murdered while she was naked. I don't know about you, but I prefer my nudity and gore to be totally separate, thank you very much!) I don't mean to get too personal here, but seeing women abused in my own life (and don't ask me who because I won't say) may have at least a little something to do with the fact that I sometimes (or often) can't stomach watching movie scenes of women getting brutally attacked and killed. You think?