"Do you think we're sick?" asks Stuart (Roger Bart) of his tightly wound friend Todd (Richard Burgi) as they approach their date with bound-and-gagged, soon-to-be torture victims in the stomach-turning Hostel: Part II.

On any normal planet, the answer would be "Duh" or "Ya think?"

But this is a world informed by the sensibility of torture-porn filmmakers like director Eli Roth. Todd answers blithely in the negative. "Chad, New Orleans, this is the sh-- people are doing, pal. We're the normal ones."

There's nothing like giving a character you invented things to say in your own defence. Lately, Roth has been doing a lot of proclaiming of his own normality, even suggesting that when people scream at his movies, they're really screaming over the Iraq War.

So, whether you consider this a reason to make a beeline to the theatre or grounds to stay away, here's a rundown of some of the "sick/normal" moments in Hostel: Part II.

A woman gets a power saw in the face. A man's genitals are hacked off and fed to dogs. A woman is bound upside down naked and bled while her torturer, another naked woman below, enjoys the shower of blood orgasmically. A young man is butchered alive at a table as his tormenter sits down to "victim tartar." Children play soccer with a freshly decapitated head.

A travelogue for Slovakia it's not.

Which brings up another question. Kazakhstan took out ads all over the place and practically declared war over Borat, a movie that painted its citizens as dumb hicks. So why has Slovakia had nothing to say about a series of films that suggests it's a country of Paul Bernardos and Karla Homolkas who even enlist children in their abominable dirty work? Go figure. Maybe it's a Czech plot.

In Hostel: Part II, there isn't even a mystery to propel the plot. We already know there's a hostel in Slovakia where nubile young people (mostly women) are snatched and auctioned off to rich psychopaths for their slice 'n' dice pleasure. So we pretty much know what's coming when three frenemies -- Beth (Lauren German), Whitney (Bijou Phillips) and Lorna (Heather Matarazzo, an actress who deserves better than this) -- board a train in Rome for Prague and are convinced to detour to Slovakia by a beautiful stranger (Vera Jordanova).

Oh, and did I mention they met her in a nude modelling class? Because it's never too early in the plot to make that wholesome connection between sex and torture.

But not to put too fine a point on it, Roth does fill the 50 minutes or so of pre-torture foreplay -- er, I mean "plot" -- with thuddingly unsubtle imagery to spell things out. A thuggish European kills time on the train stabbing a magazine pinup with his Swiss Army knife. In a village puppet show, a female puppet gets whacked in the head repeatedly with an axe. That kind of thing.

It's times like this you wish theatre washrooms had showers.

(This film is rated R)
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