Punch the director!(FILM)(Hostel: Part II)(Movie review)

THERE are a variety of interesting observations that one might make about the trends in American popular culture that gave rise to Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II, the latest in a spate of gruesome, torture-heavy horror flicks that includes the original Hostel, the Saw trilogy, the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, and stand-alone efforts like The Devil's Rejects, Wolf Creek, and Turistas. Start with the obvious: that the Seventies are back. There's something about rising gas prices, apocalyptic anxieties, and unpopular foreign wars, apparently, that makes filmmakers turn to brutal, nihilistic gore--just as they've turned once more to zombie movies, paranoid political thrillers, and gritty renovations of classic American genres (though this time around, those reinventions are more likely to come from HBO than the Hollywood studios).

From this initial insight--that the horror movie has circled back to its 1970s roots, trading in the silliness of Freddy, Jason, and the Scream films for straightforward gore and existential despair--one might go on to note that a new element has been woven in, a thread of imperial anxiety appropriate to an age of blowback and terrorist violence. The gorefests of the 1970s terrified a nation that was coming home from Vietnam; they were about the darkness waiting in the heartland's heart, whether in Leatherface's Texas or Michael Myers's Illinois. Some of their contemporary imitators recapitulate that theme, but others--the Hostel films, in particular, but also John Stockwell's Turistas--locate their terrors overseas, in Eastern European abattoirs or Brazilian operating rooms. They send their young Americans abroad to be slaughtered, in Old Worlds and Third Worlds that the New Worlders visit without even beginning to comprehend.

In Hostel and its sequel, unwary backpackers become fodder for a "hunting club" run by a black-hearted Slovak aristocrat and populated by bloodthirsty members of the globalized elite; it's Dracula plus Davos, an atavistic menace retooled for the information age. In Turistas, it's the wretched of the earth rising up against their oppressors, as a Brazilian doctor drags American tourists to his jungle lair and harvests their organs, in a small-scale attempt to reverse the flow of kidneys and lungs from poor donors to rich patients in the West. In both movies, the pleasures of being a young American abroad--boozing it up amid Old Europe charm, downing tequila on a tropical beach with topless women--are the bait that lures the victims to their doom.

One might then draw the obvious conclusion that these films are at once expressions of our anxieties about War on Terror violence--their storylines may be implausible, but hard-to-watch images of Westerners getting tortured to death in foreign locales resonate for a reason--and commentaries on our fascination with that violence. They're responses to what happened at Abu Ghraib, perhaps, and to America's not-so-secret love affair with hardcore pornography; they're the next logical step in the commodification of the human body. Go on in this vein for long enough, and one might eventually reach the heights of self-serious analysis attained by, say, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, who interpreted Hostel II as a serious meditation on the ravages of globalization. "Roth isn't just whipping up ...