Best Slasher Movies

With Hostel: Part II, Eli Roth takes a bit of a different approach and while some think it was a failure, I see it as not necessarily a success, but a damn good try. He doesn’t focus as much on the gore, works on his characters more and gives the entire film more of a psychological feel. The truly chilling nature of this movie is found more in the mood than in the blood, and I think that took guts (no pun intended) on Roth’s part.

It would have been easy to make a carbon copy of Hostel here and honestly, I was a bit concerned that’s what Hostel: Part II would be when it opens with the sole survivor of the first, Paxton – played once again by Jay Hernandez. As much as I like Jay, I was glad to see he didn’t stick around long. In the end, bringing Paxton back tied both movies together nicely.

The cast in Hostel: Part II is equally as good as the cast of the original and I was especially glad to see Bijou Philips (Wizards of Gore). She did a great job playing Whitney and I look forward to seeing her in more horror movies.

All said, Hostel: Part II is a admirable attempt by Eli Roth to develop characters a little better and make people care about who is being hacked up instead of just waiting for it to happen. Maybe he fell a little short, but he came damn close.

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Hostel isn’t for everyone. I think that really goes without saying at this point. It got such overwhelmingly negative reviews, but I’m not sure what people were expecting. The movie was brutal – an absolute gory mess, but what else would we expect from Mr. Eli Roth?

There were two major complaints I heard about Hostel – too much sex and too much needless gore. My response to that is simply a question, how could you tell a story that begins in Amsterdam’s infamous red light district and leads our main characters to a factory where rich people pay to torture and kill people without nudity and graphic violence.

I, for one, didn’t find the violence in Hostel the least bit unnecessary. And hey, it’s not like the audience didn’t have a lot of warning. After the first screening, word spread quickly (especially about the eye scene) that this wasn’t a movie for the faint of heart.

Eli Roth has made one hell of a slasher movie with Hostel. It’s engrossing, you feel for characters, and it’s truly terrifying. The cast is great with Jay Hernandez (Quarantine) giving us an especially great performance. There are those that say the premise of rich people paying money to torture and kill people isn’t believable. To those people, I say closing a blind eye to the dark side of humanity doesn’t keep you safe from it. Sure Hostel wasn’t based on a true story, but I can definitely believe it easily could’ve been.

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Before I even begin with why I liked Quarantine, I’d like to say that I fully acknowledge it is more or less a shot for shot remake of Jaume Balagueró’s 2007 Spanish language movie Rec. This is noted in the credits and the original filmmakers are given credit. Rec is also an incredible movie but I did prefer Quarantine. In all honesty, there aren’t many differences, but the deciding factor for me was the final scene. I liked Quarantine’s more, but as I said, Rec is also well worth checking out. Just make sure you’re ready to read subtitles if you don’t speak Spanish.

Okay, on to the movie itself. Quarantine is another movie (like 28 Days and  28 Weeks Later) that is possibly scariest because the plot is so plausible. It isn’t some virus that reanimates corpses into flesh eating zombies. I’ll let you watch the movie to see what exactly happens in this one, but I’ll just say it’s not hard to imagine this coming true.

Quarantine’s cast is incredible – from Jennifer Carpenter who is amazing in the lead role, to Jay Hernandez (who I’m sure you all remember from Hostel 1 and II) to Johnathon Schaech (who makes a surprisingly short role in this film considering how much he was in Prom Night) and finally Manuela Velaso (a crossover from the Rec). Everyone is convincing and believable in their roles.

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