Hotel Inferno 2: The Cathedral of Pain

I thoroughly enjoyed the Italian film Hotel Inferno (2013), it was a well made highly original horror effort and upon learning it was becoming a franchise I was fairly excited.

Foolishly they waited too long, it took a whole four years before the second part came out and I can confidently say that it's a bust and does not come close to the quality or novelty appeal of the first.

We see Franks story continue, he's now dead after the events of the first film and finds himself in hell. Upon escaping his chains he makes an ally and goes about finding a way back to his body in the land of the living.

Solid enough idea and once again the practical effects are top notch (If you can stomach them) but the story is an absolute mess and never quite finds its feet.

For those unaware of the first movie it's all filmed through the characters eyes, so found footage but less silly. It's hyper gory, on levels you may never have seen before. It even gives Brain Dead/Dead Alive (1992) a run for its money. This is really hardcore stuff and for that reason certainly niche, people might also struggle to make it through the level of profanity. How can swearing be hard to cope with you ask? Watch it and find out, it's very annoying.

I had high hopes for this franchise as the first movie was fantastic, but if this is it's future then I'd say wrap it all up with one final movie and be done with it. I'd say don't bother with the third movie, but Cathedral of Pain hardly resolves anything.

Wasted potential, such a shame.

The Good:

Incredible gory practical effects

Decent soundtrack

The Bad:

Voice work is still hokey as hell (Pun intended)

Weak script

Not for the squeamish

Oddly boring in places

Some stupid inconsistencies

For certain Hotel Inferno 2: The Cathedral of Pain is no movie for the mainstream horror audience. It's kinda Hellraiser (the parts playing in hell's domain) on steroids, or, what Rob Zombie does not dare to show to us ;)

I like this movie simply for one main reason - its visuals (the gore, the settings, the demons), and the soundtrack and the last "level" remind me here and there tenderly of the Doom game series, which I played uncounted hours in my younger years (so my judgement on this one may be seriously clouded).

Conclusion: you must like the unusual to like this movie (including the egoshooter-perspective of the cam), that's for sure, and you must like gore and splatter, lots of - and by the way, some masks and gore effects are just too adorable. If you vote this gem down, go watch your teenage horror slashers ;)

Necrostorm's sequel to their enjoyable first person POV gorefest Hotel Inferno features bucket-loads of impressive splatter effects (and some less effective monsters) but proves extremely tedious thanks to a silly storyline that plays out like a very bad video game, repeating the same thing over and over again: central character Frank Zimosa (voiced by Rayner Bourton) wanders through Hell, performing incomprehensible tasks that bring him up against a series of infernal creatures who he proceeds to beat or shoot into a bloody mess. Frank is aided in his by quest by an annoying witch (voiced by Roland Stone) who talks like one of Jim Henson's creations from Labyrinth. Sounds like fun but there really isn't much more to this than kill, repeat.

Frank's catchphrase "I'm so ****ing tired of this ****!" sums up how I feel about the movie as a whole. However, I get the feeling that I must be in the minority: Hotel Inferno 3: The Castle of Screams is filming as I type, and IMDb has 'in production' pages for parts 4, 5 and 6.

I suppose this is some kind of video game adaptation because the result is like one of those "Doom"-like games in first person.

The setting is a fifteen out of ten, the FX are pretty good too but it fails on some creatures although being low budget and I suppose fan film it does not matter.

You can see the whole thing and it is short, an hour or so.

Not really much to say about the story, the protagonist is in Hell trying to resurrect somehow. The whole movie looks like a live action fps game on drugs, with quite interesting demons and cultists being ripped in half, smashed, exploded, gutted, shot... well you get the idea. The gore fxs and sets are awesome, high budget quality. The acting, not really high budget quality. All in all a solid 7 out of 10