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

Still trapped in the devilish hotel, the fabled hitman is shocked to learn he's being held by the same demons he had encountered before and must reclaim the elements held inside the hellish dimension in order to generate his body back on Earth, setting off to face the demon hordes intent on preventing that.

This was a fairly enjoyable and worthwhile follow-up. Much like the original, there's a lot to like with the fact that this one is shot in a point-of-view manner which continues to make great use of the format in its visual storytelling. Utterly forced on principle to be up-close and personal to the proceedings as the filmmaking tactics demand the actor be a central figure to what's happening around him and it results in a chilling setup to play out. As the confrontations and various situations presented here offer a near video-game experience with the way they focus on interacting here, it develops an immediacy to the action that becomes quite immersive as time goes on. Moreover, the numerous jump-scares are even more effective as the darkness and insanity offer up a fun time here. That becomes evident in the film's hallmark where it's all about the gore and brutality as it goes along. The fact that the gore is all over-the-top practical splatter that literally rains buckets of entrails and viscera at moments, creates a fine atmosphere of extreme and graphic bloodshed. This is a near-constant from the start, ranging from having skulls ripped open, limbs being blasted off, decapitations, stabbings, impalements and getting blasted to pieces with numerous gunshots resulting in the body being left nearly unrecognizable. The constant nature of this bloodshed manages to offer up the kind of blood-drenched atmosphere that's immensely appealing, which goes alongside all the fine make-up on the numerous creatures to give the film a lot to like. There are some big issues with this one which is the exact same flaw in the original. The main issue is the over-the-top nature of the shooting style wearing thin quite easily, much quicker even than it did in the first one. The jumpiness of the transitions here imitates a video game on autopilot where it focuses on intense action for a brief moment only to have someone off-screen explain what's going on or make vague threats about what's to come. The need to constantly have the plot explained in a narration-like style from the one other member he meets who agrees to help him gets old and tiring quickly just as well, especially with the unhelpful nature of the instructions. Given the fact that it's all the way through the film, this can be a little much and brings it down somewhat.

Rated Unrated/NC-17: Extreme Graphic Violence, Extreme Graphic Language, Nudity and graphic actions against infants.

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.

Dark, ultra gory, unsettling, and not funny. Don't know why people compare this to a video game, to me this is more a fpv Fulci's movie. Italian gore at its best, highly recommended.

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 ;)