This movie is heavy-handed in ways that will be immediately off-putting to some.

The main characters are young men almost entirely motivated by sex. In this pursuit, they objectify every women in their path, seeking out the most vulnerable, using them for their own needs (e.g. Getting over an ex, providing pleasure/entertainment for a night, etc.). In this pursuit (whether intentional from Roth or not) the first half of the film frequently objectifies the women on screen.

This motivation is then mirrored in the horrors of the dark Slavic town they've wandered into. The women (and staff) of the hostel sell tourists to be carved up by those willing to pay the price. These torturers have a range of motivations (a man who couldn't be a surgeon on account of his shaky hands, a man who no longer gets thrill out of sex, etc.) It's methods are even more disturbing than those of our sex-crazed protagonists, but the concept is the same: use people for your own needs.

Along the way is an exciting adventure. It conveys the fear of the unknown: a strange town with strange customs, people plotting in a language you can't understand, helplessness in the face of forces unseen. And as with many good horror films, the horror is retribution. It is payback for the naïveté of three young men, traveling to a foreign country just to get laid.

The nudity is as over the top as the gore. It exploits fear and lust the way its characters exploit themselves.

It would seem from the majority of the comments on this film that very few of the people making these comments have any real insight into film production or what some film makers are attempting to communicate to an audience. With that in mind, here are some things I discovered upon viewing this film: (1) The story is new and unique. Thank goodness for any film that is not a sequel, a remake, or a film based on some decades-old television program. (2) The director uses the Xenophobia most Americans have about Europe and the citizens of those countries to very good effect. He plays on those fears, throws fuel onto that fire, much like Tobe Hooper did with rural areas in the U.S. in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". (3) I was impressed by the build-up of uneasiness leading up to the torture scenes, the prevading sense of something "off bubble". If the characters had not been tenth-degree horndog party animals intent only on having a good time, they might have been more suspicious of the strange events taking place around them, which - in my mind - justifies the scenes of debauchery to show how oblivious these guys were. (4) A great number of things often have to be done in a film to appease The Studio. I saw several scenes that appeared to be included seemingly at the behest of The Studio for "saleability", and were not necessarily included for story-telling. There is also a desire to "one-up" each other in the Studio System, which publicly decries sex and violence while unofficially tells Producers to "give us more, and make it even more shocking than (fill in the blank)". All-in-all, while this film is not for the squeamish, it does have some things to say that create discussion and dialogue about a number of things, from how we view foreign cultures to how we treat each other. Any film that can generate that kind of thought while providing innovation deserves applause.

This movie really could have been so much more. The idea would have been much better off with someone who actually wanted to make a decent movie, instead of a porno gorefest. The first half of the movie consists almost entirely of sex, talk of sex, drugs, and talk of drugs. Instead of, hey, maybe develop the characters a little so the audience might care about them and make their plights a little more tense, the filmmakers decided to have a lot of party scenes and annoying main characters acting like idiots until, uh oh, we didn't plan on being tortured, oops! The sad thing is, there are hints of something more intelligent beneath the surface, but the surface is piled so high with garbage that it's lost. For example, while at a sex club (wow, original!) one of the characters mentions something along the lines of "paying to do anything you want to a person," of course he means sexually, but we know the basic plot of the movie involves the same concept with death and torture instead of sex. One of the characters is supposed to seem like a nice guy, but still never really develops enough for us to care. The main character has absolutely no depth other than a childhood story and his shallow interaction with his friend. The last half or so of the movie actually starts to gain momentum, and the first half not been an entire waste of film, I could have walked away with more than a feeling that I'd just watched 15 minutes of an okay movie, and an hour and fifteen minutes of porn and senseless gore. Sadly enough, the idea of this movie was put into the wrong hands. A little less than halfway through, my friend turned to me and said, "Maybe I picked up the wrong movie..." to which I replied, "Yeah, I think you got Eurotrip by accident." I am baffled as to why they decided to write the first half like they did. I guess I was hoping for something deeper. Don't watch this expecting anything special, be ready for lots of nudity and lots of incredibly disturbing gore mixed randomly, the two not even seeming to fit like they would in a slasher flick.