Two toothy, milk-fed frat boys, fresh in Europe, hook up with an Icelandic satyr to score drugs and tour flesh bars in Amsterdam. As Americans, they demand it all and are aggressively open to the evils of the old continent in the way only escapees from a puritanical culture can be. In one iniquitous den, they meet a molelike Slavic young man who promises them unending sexual recreation in a mysterious place called Bratislava. So tempting is the man's description of this bacchanalian burg's youth hostel, the lads decide to set off the very next day to experience it all for themselves.

"Hostel," when pronounced in the American fashion, offers up some warning of what's to come. Suffice to say that Hostel's Bratislava is a charming set for a butcher's theater — a pleasure abattoir where wealthy men can satisfy their needs by slowly slaughtering wayward young people who have been lured into town.

Eli Roth's film is inspired, as all recent American-style Grand Guignol is, by the work of Quentin Tarantino. It's pure bloodbath as entertainment, happily lacking the bizarre and hypocritical attempt at ethics that can be found in the Saw series, or more seriously in Pasolini's Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Hostel is, on the simplest level, a straightforward saturnalia of shock, serving as a "how-to" guide for paring, drilling and carving the taut flesh of youth. End of story. Yet the film does inadvertently provide an interesting window into the contemporary American mind.

Czechs and Americans will not be viewing the same film. For Americans, Hostel is clearly a hostile Valentine to Europe. It's a cautionary tale against Americans ever leaving home, especially to tour the lands of our devious, over-intellectualized and godless friends here. But it's also a strange example of nervous projection (if not deflection) on the American side. Last time I checked the papers, it was America that was allegedly establishing torture centers and perfecting the concept of violence as spectacle (of which this film is a noteworthy byproduct), rather than ominous Slovaks in Bratislava (enchantingly underplayed here by Český Krumlov).

But in the film, Central Europe is a dungeon of Carpathian horrors where not much has changed since the days of Adolf Hitler, let alone Vlad the Impaler. Our healthy, athletic lads are lured into a decrepit factory where effeminate, duplicitous European men (if you'll pardon the redundancies) are eagerly waiting to dismember them and enjoy the music of their cries. There is one boisterous American in their number, too, who doesn't know whether a good, fast shot to the head of his victim might not be more exciting than lingering over a surgeon's kit. Time is money, after all.

The whole of Hostel's Bratislava is complicit in these terrors. It only lacks an enterprising Mrs. Lovett to finally fashion the scraps into nice kidney pies for down at the pub. Meanwhile, back at the meat plant, a heinous plume billows from a smokestack, as if Birkenau were back in business. It's Europe as a circus of suffering, a night mind's midway of grisly activities, which seem born from a contemporary American paranoia that is obviously tinged with guilt.

All of this will be apparent to Czech viewers, many of whom laughed uproariously at the film's naive subtexts (along with its more obvious comic pleasures) at a recent screening. Plus, it has to be cathartic for European viewers, especially those who have been forced to work in customer service, to see boorish, loud American tourists (and not a few Japanese) ushered violently into that good night. If Roth's bloody rampage scares off one frat rat from visiting the Continent, his film will not have been in vain.