Umberto Lenzi made this movie, which is kind-of like Planet Terror meets 28 Days Later. It's basically a zombie movie; this plane lands and all these infected people come out. It is awesome.

And it's got this thing where every time the infected people kill a girl they rip her shirt off first. There's a scene at a hospital where the infected are being brought in and treated - like Planet Terror - and they run up to a girl and they just rip open her shirt and then rip her tits off. You can't believe it. You'd think he'd maybe do it once, but Umberto Lenzi just keeps doing it over and over again. It's pretty hilarious.

There's also a whole scene set in a TV studio where someone's doing an aerobics class and all the infected zombies tear in and start ripping up and infecting this aerobics class. Nightmare City is fantastic.



The film that was the single most influential film on Hostel II was Fernando Di Leo's Avere vent'anni which translates as To Be Twenty. Fernando Di Leo is the fucking man, he made a whole bunch of fantastic films. There's a double-disc that Nocturno put out in England and Italy.

This movie, starring Gloria Guida and Lilli Carati, is kind-of about the different generational attitudes towards sex. The young generation that doesn't give a fuck about sex and the older generation who wants to punish them.

These girls go around Rome just fucking guys and fucking girls and their whole motto is like, "We're young, beautiful and pissed off." They don't care about anything, they just don't give a fuck, and it's plays like a light sex comedy which Gloria Guida is renowned for in Italy.

But they tease the wrong guys. At the end they go into this diner and there are these really fucking scary guys. So they're teasing them and fucking with them and these guys follow the girls into the woods and the ending is the most shocking, horrifying ending I've ever seen in a film. It's really hard to watch and really upsetting and then it just ends and the credits roll.

When this movie was released there was an outcry, an uproar, and they pulled every single print out of the cinemas and destroyed them or recut them. They re-released it completely changing the ending and made it end as a fun, happy sex comedy. So a recent release restored Fernando Di Leo's cut and he got a lot of shit for it.

It was really interesting, while I was making Hostel II I said I wanted to make a movie like To Be Twenty and the kind of reaction I got from Hostel II and the outrage, and the censorship, I said to my brother, "I think we did it, I think we actually made a Fernando Di Leo film."

Critically that guy never got his due and he died, but this movie is his fucking masterpiece. It's so smart but the ending is so violent and shocking that it's the only thing people can take away from the film. It's a comedy and a drama with a really, really upsetting, genuinely horrific close.

I had everyone watch it on Hostel II. The KNB guys, who did the make-up effects, were like, "That was the most disturbing film I've ever seen."