Eli Roth is batting three for three (or four for four if you include the trailer for Thanksgiving). Hostel Part II is not only a great horror film it is a great sequel to a horror film.

It begins with what I take to be an extended homage to Friday the 13th Part Two, a clearing up of left over business from the first film. This gets things off to a bleak note, since the sequence implies that the Slovakian gangsters who run the house of death are invincible and relentless in their pursuit of escapees.

From there, the film tracks parallel paths, a new pair of torturers and their victims, as they make their way independently to Slovakia (which must love these movies as tourism ads). There is a superb sequence in which an array of international bigwigs bid on one of the three traveling American girls the gangsters have captured, via an internet hook up.

Curiously, the two villainous American friends who arrive as clients in Slovakia are both Desperate Housewives alums: Roger Bart as Stuart and Richard Burgi as Todd. Together they make a pair out of a Neil LaBute play, say, In The Company of Men, in which the alpha dog bullies the weaker man into something cruel. The paradox is that the wimp turns out to be the worm who turns and the macho man is the fuck up who can’t take what he is doing, the one with a conscience.

The victims this time around are girls: Lauren German as Beth, Heather Matarazzo (late of Welcome to the Dollhouse) as Lorna, and Hollywood royalty Bijou Phillips as Whitney. This ups the hot chick quotient considerably. But Roth’s characters are rarely just stick figures. They are fully realized characters, and as he must realize, that makes the horror even more exhausting. The last 20 minutes of the film is a taut twisting of expectations and clever resolutions to impossible situations. Let’s just say that this film rings an interesting companionability to Death Proof; and does the name Lorena Bobbitt ring a bell?

Homages this time around include Edwige Fenech as an art teacher and Ruggero Deodato as “The Italian Cannibal” who is eating a live guy bits at a time. Fenech is the cult horror star from the 1970s, a sort of European Betty Page, unabashed about getting naked, to the gratitude of adolescent boys everywhere, or at those who could get access to such films as 5 Dolls for an August Moon, Demons of the Dead, and Your Vice Is a Closed Room and Only I Have the Key, to name only a few from the giallo genre out of scores of films. Deodato is of course the director of perhaps the most controversial film ever made, Cannibal Holocaust.

Once you get past the finger gnawing suspense, you have to sit back and be impressed with Roth’s sheer cleverness. Again and again he writes himself out of a corner. Roth has created this little world, sets himself problems in it, and like a screenwriting Buster Keaton, manages to work out a fully satisfying and clever escape. Plus the movie is subtly consistent. Football revelers near the start of the are echoed in a final, ghoulish but hilarious scene. Another broad homage is to the myth of Elizabeth Bathory.

The qualities I like about this film, and indeed all Roth’s horror films so far, is the humanity he brings to the characters (even the villains), the exotic locales that evoke the feel of some of the great European horror films of the ’60s and ’70s, the offbeat sense of humor, and the plausible, realistic surface and look of the films. He makes the relatively small budgets go a long way. I’m a little disappointed that his next film is going to be a Stephen King adaptation, Cell: first, few of them are good as films, and second, adapting a set text may restrain Roth’s wit (in the larger sense). But then, Roth has written himself out of corners before.

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