The first Hostel was a movie I surprisingly enjoyed. It was gory, creative, and ballsy for a theatrical release. I admired Eli Roth's attempt to (along with Saw) bring forth a very dark and incredibly gory approach to death in mainstream horror. The sequel was a disappointment for me, as it was simply more of the same, but at least the gore was amped up and we were given a little backstory on the society that runs these torture chambers. Now, four years later, we're given a low-grade straight-to-DVD sequel that's nothing more than an obvious cash-in on the Hostel name.

Eli Roth takes a step back and lets his friend Scott Spiegel (Intruder, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money) take the reigns, which I wasn't entirely against since the last two horror fares from Spiegel offered some clever camera tricks that I had hoped to see him revisit with this sequel. Sadly that's not the case here, as aside from a lot of gratuitous shots of the camera following someone's ass (for whatever reason), it's all a pretty straight forward directorial effort.

Unlike the last two films taking place in Europe, this third piece is set in Las Vegas, which unfortunately takes away a lot of the claustrophobia and seclusion that an ominous foreign setting offered. We follow a small group of guys having a little bachelor party fun before one of'em gets married. And, as you'd expect from a Hostel movie, they follow some promised pussy, which leads them into the grasps of the members only Elite Hunting Club.

The movie actually started out somewhat promising, as it played with the viewer a little and kept you wondering when or how these guys were finally going to get captured. That all quickly changes once characters actually do start getting killed, because the deaths of these people really showed just how poor a movie this is. Carrying the Hostel name comes with a certain degree of expectancy in terms of gore, but it seems that the filmmakers forgot all about that. What were once gory and head-turning torture/death scenes are now nothing more than PG-rated off-screen kills with some blood splatter.

The first death? A guy has his face peeled off. That's it. The second? A girl suffocates after numerous cockroaches crawl inside her mouth. Why she didn't just close her mouth to begin with is beyond me. While the past films had an emphasis on torture, it's all absent here. The gore isn't really shown on screen until towards the very end, as if the filmmakers remembered at the last minute that they were making a Hostel movie.

They tried to change things up a little at the hour mark by adding an interesting twist, although it wasn't as effective or explored as it could've been. The story just gets more ridiculous as it progresses, and lastly leaves us with a ludicrous plot-hole-filled ending. Negative aside, I was never bored with this and actually enjoyed brief aspects of it. Had it not been a Hostel movie I probably would've liked it a bit more than I did, but as it stands it's just a huge disappointment.

This is simply a poor excuse of a Hostel movie. The deaths were unimaginative and tame, there's barely any gore at all, and the ending is just completely ridiculous. Aside from the fact that it managed to somehow keep my attention the entire time, it's an otherwise waste of a sequel. Fans of the series will surely be disappointed in this obvious cash-in.