A pair of horny US college students (Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson) go backpacking across Europe and end up in a Slovakian slaughterhouse, in this 2005 torture porno they should have called An American Horndog in Bratislava.

Eli Roth’s sophomore effort is framed as a EuroTrip-style sex comedy, where the joke is that the Americans on a predatory vacation accidentally stumble into someone else’s. But any sense of anti-imperialist critique fails in a movie whose approach is so bluntly American and entirely populated by xenophobic stereotypes, depicting all Eastern Europeans as criminals and drug addicts (including the children) and Japanese characters as giggling schoolgirls. And that’s not even touching on the moral equivalence Roth draws between sex work and torture.

Even leaving politics aside and treating Hostel as an amoral exploitation flick, this is simply not a good one. The unconvincing gore, one-dimensional characters and tensionless execution render the Tarantino-produced picture as scary as it is funny, which is to say not remotely. Foreigners and women are the butt of all its fearmongering and comedy, more an exercise in bigotry than brutality.

With all his pandering references to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Shining and The Wicker Man (and a cameo from Takashi Miike), Eli Roth comes across as a genre tourist more out of his depth than his chauvinist characters.