I wanted to take a long hot shower after watching Hostel: Part II. I felt dirty. The horror genre is a distasteful, discomforting one to begin with; that's what sustains it. It's supposed to both titillate and frighten us at the same time with shocking images, unpleasant sounds, and extreme, sometimes disgusting, subject matter. But then there's Eli Roth's Hostel series, rolling up all those elements into a nice and tidy puke-ball of horrifyingly intense and nauseating brutality. The problem is that he does it so convincingly well.

Unlike another, albeit less gruesome, torture-flick, 1970's Mark of the Devil, there are no gimmicky vomit bags to be handed out here to lighten the experience, though now's the time they'd come in handy. Time was, you went to a horror movie to be grossed-out, but in a fun way. Thrills and chills, and some red spills, but ha-ha, just make believe your sick and keep that vomit bag pristine because it makes a wonderful souvenir.

Of course there are many horror films, from grind-house to art-house, that do their best to make you upchuck your last meal or your complacency, but Roth's fictional Slovakian village, filled with menacing townspeople — including the children — pushes your complacency right out the window, then stomps on its fingers as it desperately dangles from the windowsill trying to avoid that long fall downward.

This time around, our soon to be tortured tourists are three girls; two hot babes, one tepid one, and all three acting like babes in the wood. Unfortunately, the wood they choose to hang out in is inhabited by human wolves involved in one hell of a local tourist economy.

Roth fleshes out his characters a little more this time around, as well as show the rich brains and black-clothed muscle behind the thriving tourist business, where potential victims are auctioned off to the highest bidder using ubiquitous technology and wanton desire. This is perhaps the most disquieting and chilling part of the Hostel franchise: big business drives the mayhem, the soullessness, the anguish, much as it does in the real world. And with all that burning of left-over body parts and personal belongings, the business-minded bastards of Roth's sleepy little Slovakian gateway to hell are contributing to global warming as if there's not a care in the world. A little too much reality for me there.

Another disturbing aspect here is that the whole town knows what's going on, but since it benefits the local economy, mum's the word. Here is where Roth's story transcends the direct grind-house approach and, consciously or not, thumbs its nose at the business trends that permeate our waking lives, promising us so many wonderful todays if we just don't worry about our tomorrows. Roth paints a microcosm of the malignant aspects of high-finance and it's one-dimensional focus on profit carried to extremes: his Slovakian village is the perfect model of an efficient economy, whose "employees" and "management" see nothing wrong in handling the human commodities they profit from. This makes Hostel: Part II much more frightening  than all the gore you can stuff in a garbage bag.