Eli Roth takes us on another excursion to Hell in Hostel Part II, in which a trio of female American tourists are lured to a remote resort village in Slovakia where sadistic killings are performed by wealthy sociopaths who would just as easily spend $70,000 for an hour of cruelty and murder as buy a new sports car.

In following the basic plot of Hostel Part I, Roth can either be praised for giving his fans more of what worked the first time around, or criticized for lazy storytelling. To his credit, he does give the story a twist (such as it is) and in the nature of previous gore films, there is a hint of the macabre morality tale woven into its fabric of cynicism. There's a sharp dose of "Lord of the Flies" in Hostel's world where rich and poor, men, women and children each indulge in exhibiting the worst traits of human nature.

The acting and direction in Hostel Part II are good if not great; everyone involved certainly rises to the level of the roles they are given. The gore effects are effective, particularly in a scene depicting a body that has been half-eaten by vicious guard dogs.

Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Doll House, Scream 3) plays a character who starts out as insufferable, and ends with pure suffering. I felt more sympathy for the actress than I did for her ill-fated character, who is at the center of the film's most "colorful" scene.

Lauren German and Bijou Phillips play the two feisty, capricious heroines: one is self-centered and hedonistic; the other is wealthy but sober. The suspense of the final third of the film is in which, if either, will survive.

Upon hearing the hue and cry concerning Roth's latest gore-fest, one can't help but hear echoes of the outcries from decades past, when blood-drenched features like Blood Feast (1963), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) provoked universal shock and mixed critical reactions in their times.

Hostel doesn't come close to the "gore-for-gore's sake" nature of some Japanese horror films, for example. All Roth has succeeded in doing is to bring the most recent wave of blood-drenched "shock and aww" to mainstream American theater chains without couching its narrative in the comforting premises of insanity, revenge killing or surreal phantasmagoria.

The murderers in the Hostel films don't kill because they're psychotic, or because they're dispensing justice upon those who wronged them. They kill because it feels good, and because they can. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, they kill because they see themselves as above morality and superior to anyone they have the power to prey upon.

Roth's films are far from being the most blood-drenched, the most graphic, the most sadistic or the most disturbing films ever.

Yet, there is something unsettling about Hostel's depiction of innocent victims who are kidnapped to become "product" in the trade of human suffering -- exactly how close to reality does it come?

According to a report featured in the U.S. State Department's International Information Program, "According to U.S. government estimates, about 800,000 to 900,000 men, women and children are trafficked each year across international borders worldwide for sex and other purposes; approximately 18,000 to 20,000 of those victims are trafficked into the United States itself."

[ State Department Information and Statistics Regarding Human Trafficking ]

Having touched upon such an unspoken truth, having exploited such a dirty little secret, having come so close to exploiting one of the sickest realities in our world for the sake of entertaining ourselves, what responsibility do we as viewers and Eli Roth as a filmmaker have in exposing the truth and stopping the travesty?

I'm just asking.

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