• Eli Roth interview • Movie stills • Glenn Kenny on Hostel: Part II

If you still care about the story, it's once again a Euro-trip to Hell as all-American rich girl Beth (Lauren German), the one-dimensional balance between slutty friend Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and prudish nerd Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), is coerced by a sinister art model (Vera Jordanova) to the same Slovakian hostel o' doom seen in last year's multiplexes. Similar to buddy Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (in which Roth plays a thinly veiled caricature of who I believe he is in real life), Hostel: Part II only has two acts: an uninteresting, shallow gab-fest between these underwritten girls that then segues into their butchery, extreme but not extremely creative. Fine, it's a free country. Just don't go preaching that this desensitized crap reflects our current sociopolitical climate like Vietnam-era slashers did, which just so happens to be something Roth attempted to do recently in the L.A. Times: "You look at the war, you look at 9/11, the tortures at Abu Ghraib, the things going on down at Guantanamo — these are real horrors and we are all scared. There's no place left to scream in public. I think these films help people deal with the real world." This coming from a guy whose self-satisfaction behind a camera comes not from acts of killing, but from the hour-and-a-half of ritualistic preparation that wishfully precedes them.

— Aaron Hillis