In an age where two men in Germany met on the Internet and engaged in mutually complicit penile cannibalism followed by murder (Google it, because it actually happened) horror maestro Eli Roth’s dark, decadent new freak-out film Hostel seems entirely plausible. In its diabolic depiction of American backpackers gone to hell in an Eastern European cavalcade of sex and death, in that order, explicit doesn’t quite say it.

On a tip from a fellow rail passenger, raucous American college dudes Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and Josh (Derek Richardson) hook up with Euro-buddy Oli (Eythor Gudjohnsson) enroute to an unknown Slovakian city that promises unlimited libidinal possibilities with Europe’s sexiest women. Looking for a last hurrah before returning to the frat they settle down in a local hostel, quickly snagging dream babes Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova) and Svetlana (Jana Kaderbkova) for a marathon of drink, sex and… well, more drink and sex. Roth expertly pushes the boundaries of the R-rating here and Hostel plays like the most sexually carefree, spirited hormones romp we’ve seen in American movies in ages. But nothing in life is free, and soon things start to get a little weird.

As the characters begin to disappear, Ten Little Indians style, Paxton is inadvertently drawn into a secret society of wealthy, depraved deviants who pay big money to use American tourists to enact elaborate twisted fantasies. Here Roth turns the film dark as pitch and unmercifully relentless in its final reel.

In a labyrinthine grotto within an isolated, abandoned hospital, there are painfully intense horror sequences that involve mutilation, slow and painful torture, dangling eyeballs that ooze, all manner of spikes through all manner of body parts, impromptu surgical procedures minus the surgeons, and a veritable dungeon of bloody murder and perversity that doesn’t, as most American horror films do, allow the viewer a safe distance of laughter and irony. This is a full-blooded, head first, head rush into horror that does Roth’s Cabin Fever one better with its macabre gusto and genuine ‘top-this’ approach to the mounting mayhem of its closing set-pieces.

Roth smartly allows the film and characters to take their time setting up as ugly Americans enroute to something even uglier. The entire first portion of the picture plays like an homage to 80s horny teen flicks, complete with overgrown, on-the-make boys up to their asses in homoerotic banter, hot as hell babes and (seemingly) free sex. Roth pours these elements on fast and with gusto as if inspired by an op-ed in Maxim or at least Penthouse letters. The film is gleefully high-gear at raunchy sexual hijinks for guys who likely spend more time playing with joysticks than sizing up their sexually liberated women--Hostel’s staggeringly attractive, premature ejaculation visions of European exoticism who offer themselves up at a mighty steep price.

Jay Hernandez pulls off a nifty trick that I’m not sure director Roth intended, being so good at playing a callously shallow lothario that when he does get his late in the game, you’re not quite sure whether to gasp or cheer. And then there’s a carnally intelligent performance from newcomer Barbara Nedeljakova, holding more cards than she’s letting on. When she plays her hand, Roth pulls out the stops with a fantastically gruesome comeuppance, the kind that makes you wonder how no actors were hurt in the filming. Nedeljakova’s Natalya is the dream babe as black widow, the type of woman who knows how to get what she wants from a man, uses everything she has and in an odd way, seems a realistic (and realistically evil) product of a decaying economic structure, a woman whose very livelihood relies on fatal attractions--and not hers.

Hostel is a humdinger of a horror picture, an economical thrill ride that makes no bones about what it wants to do to you--turn you on, make you laugh, scare the hell out of you, gross you out and then leave you shaken. Roth expertly balances the scale between the film’s raunchy, funny opening and its darker, horrifying reality, winking while weaving in thematic tropes of the horror genre; hot sex, beautiful women and not so sudden death. In the end, he knows what makes a great horror film; laughs, sexy women and money shots that flow blood red. You may laugh when legendary horror director Takashi Miike shows up for an unlikely cameo, but it’s one of the few moments you’re allowed to breathe. Hostel takes no prisoners. At least none alive.