Written and
directed by Eli Roth and executive-produced by Quentin Tarantino, 1996’s Hostel opened to $19.5 million, the eighth
biggest bow in January history, and rang up more than $80 million worldwide, against only a $5 million production budget. It was only natural, then, that distributor Lionsgate would ask for a sequel.

The first film — about three pals backpacking across Europe who, bored with Amsterdam
(!), fall sway to the stories of a fellow partier and head to a hostel in Bratislava, where there are supposedly
drugs, liquor and scorchingly hot women aplenty — was pretty much a willfully depraved exercise in stimulus response. After the neon-lit pleasure trip of its first act, Hostel tilts, in
rather gruesome fashion, toward impressively staged gore-porn, with the guys finding out in firsthand fashion that the hostel is actually a front for a black market
business that provides a homicidal service for disenfranchised thrill junkies.

If it was a xenophobic travelogue gone horribly awry, its sequel follows three young American females down the same rabbit hole, and is an even more starkly realized portrait of amorality. Hostel: Part II isn’t the type of movie you call “good” or leave with any sense of surging, cathartic excitement — rather, you sort of want to find some Purell and scrub your brain clean — but it is accomplished and authentically sketched within its own clearly defined parameters. “Impressively sick,” I guess you’d say. A proper full-length review will follow tomorrow or perhaps later tonight, but for more about Roth’s thoughts on the NC-17, first-pass cut of the movie, click here.

UPDATE 6/10: For the full review, click here.