Caffeinated Clint
Star of the ‘sexy good time’, “Hostel Part 2”
At the time of writing this article, Eli Roth’s horror movie “Hostel: Part II” hadn’t received a rating from this country’s Office of Film & Literature Classification. (But I think it’s safe to assume that it‘ll probably earn itself an R.) The Motion Picture Association of America, however, had put its stamp on the film, restricting it to viewers over the age of 17 because of “sadistic scenes of torture and bloody violence, terror, nudity, sexual content, language and some drug content”. All of which, in the words of its co-star Heather Matarazzo, adds up to “a really sexy good time!”
Matarazzo, who first grabbed the attention of moviegoers with her portrayal of young misfit Dawn “Wiener Dog” Wiener in Todd Solondz’s “Welcome to the Dollhouse”, is being a bit facetious in describing “Hostel: Part II” as such…at least, I certainly hope she is. Given that one of her pivotal scenes in the movie has her character Lorna “hanging upside-down 15 feet in the air, completely naked, chained and gagged”, one can surmise that the European holiday of Lorna and her two friends (played by Lauren German and Bijou Phillips) isn’t exactly a laff-riot. “You can judge from that what kind of successful outcome or untimely demise I have,” she laughs.
Matarazzo, whose other credits include the two “Princess Diaries” comedies, is no fan of the horror genre (“I empathise too much with the people who get hurt”) but she found herself “incredibly surprised” by Roth’s screenplay for “Hostel: Part II”, which expands on the original Hostel by showing the inner workings of the Eastern European murder-tour operation, focusing on two American businessmen who pay for the chance to torture and kill another human being and showing the plight of the three young women who become grist for the mill, so to speak.
“When I read the script, what made me so intrigued about doing it was that the character of Lorna seemed to have amazing potential,” says Matarazzo. “Eli and I had a lot of discussions and we found we were really on the same page about how Lorna should be. If you ask me, he’s done a really great job of writing young women. He’s really great at what he does, you know, and I’m really excited to see where he’s going to go and what he’s going to do next.”
For her part, Matarazzo viewed her character as a kindred spirit to A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche Dubois. “She wants to be in a constant state of perpetual magic,” she says. “So when things go awry or she feels uncomfortable or vulnerable, she completely flips, completely changes, putting up her walls or breaking down.” And in the case of Hostel: Part II, things going awry results in Lorna hanging naked from chains in a human slaughterhouse – little wonder Matarazzo refers to the shooting of such scenes (which could take up to 20 hours a day) as “an out-of-body experience”.
With the first “Hostel” attracting the label of ‘torture porn’, and the sequel likely to earn similar categorisation, controversy has already developed over the fact that a trio of young women are feeling the pain this time around. Even though women have traditionally been viewed as the prey of stalkers and slashers in horror movies, having them graphically tortured in the Hostel style has already proved a hot topic among various pundits. It’s something Matarazzo welcomes.
“I’m always down for a little controversy,” she laughs. “But it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re white or black, if you’re Christian or Muslim – things like this do happen. And I think because we’ve become so incredibly desensitised by everything that’s going on in the world, when you see it this way in a film it’s almost as if we’re seeing it for the first time. When you get to know these characters and this kind of thing happens to them, it almost becomes personal. It awakens something and it stirs something you may have forgotten you had. It awakens a fear. And I think that’s good, stirring those sensory parts of you.”
Hostel: Part II is now showing
– GUY DAVIS
