film | The best little slaughterhouse in Europe

Gross: vomiting.

Grosser than gross: vomiting with a ball gag in your mouth as several of your fingers are shredded from your bound hands with a chainsaw.

Gee, I'm not entirely sure why there wasn't a McDonald's tie-in promotion for HOSTEL, an unpleasant trough of splattered gore and gristle that begins as a raunchy sex comedy, then goes full-tilt horror-show after locking in the interest of its target audience — that'd be hetero fratboys for $400, Alex! — with a bounty of exposed female flesh. In other words, you get naked chicks frolicking in a co-ed sauna during the movie's first half, followed by a second act in which some poor young lady is strapped to a chair and scalded with a blowtorch while her right eyeball precariously dangles from its socket like a loose pom-pon on a winter hat knitted by dear old grandma.

Dude, I don't think I'm gonna finish these twizzlers ...

Initially, the film chronicles the horny misadventures of two U.S. college-grad backpackers (Crazy/Beautiful's Jay Hernandez and Dumb and Dumberer's Derek Richardson) as they stagger around Amsterdam with a new Icelandic acquaintance (Eythor Gudjonsson) in search of booze, hash and promiscuous foreign women. They decide to travel to Bratislava — huge mistake, which they'd know if they ever rented Eurotrip — to visit a hostel they heard is a living Girls Gone Wild video, but the copious debauchery turns out to be merely an inviting front to lure victims into a Slovakian torture ring where the rich and deranged from around the globe pay big bucks to maim the young and unsuspecting.

The one genuinely clever idea in Hostel: that kids from the states are sold for the most money, presumably because the rest of the world hates us so much that there's a high demand to watch us twitch, bleed, beg for mercy and (eventually) die. That, sadly, is believable, and director/writer Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, about six shades of silly) portrays the Hernandez and Richardson characters as such unlikably ugly Americans that you can't wait until they start to suffer. Whether this was a conscious decision or not, I dunno, but it renders all the libidinous-hijink stuff flat and insipid, and by the time the surviving protagonists turn the tables on their evil captors during the woefully extended — and gratuitously contrived — climax, you're nowhere near the edge of your seat. Beyond a few visceral jolts, it's hard to imagine many viewers really becoming involved in Hostel, which is maybe why the movie eagerly strains to provide blood, sweat and tears of its own. D+