Random Fact: there's a pub in Knightsbridge called Paxton's Head. It seems that I have seriously alienated the Route66 lobby with my recent post on Cars. Anyway, there are essentially two main reasons for going off the beaten track in American movies: to have either your priorities or your body parts rearranged.
Whilst there's as yet little sign in recent Hollywood output of Yanks coming over to our side of the pond to refocus their view of the big picture (other than Michael Moore of course) Eli Roth's backpacker torture porn flicks are an indication that America's surplus fictional youngsters are increasingly comfortable with getting themselves diced up in Europe's backwoods, rather than in their own fly-over states.
I think I'm in a small minority of right-minded people that find these films quite entertaining. There's nothing particularly scary about them − I doubt very much whether anybody would be put off their inter-railing plans by watching them. But there is a degree of wit in the concept and the way it has been realised. (In this one I particularly enjoyed those unreconstructed New Europeans who interacted so charmingly with the girls on their train. )
Unlike the boys in Hostel, all guilty of lust, the girls of Part II are dreamier types, if anything only culpable of the (on paper at least) less deadly sin of willful self-pampering (as it is a legendary natural spa rather than an easy lay that lures them eastwards).
As well as switching to female victims Roth has panned out to reveal more about both the men behind Elite Hunting and those that choose to come on these homicide-holidays to Bratislava. Trouble is that in doing so he has managed to make both a lot less sinister than they could have been.
Anyway, at least we have now cleared up the issue of when Slovakia was last racked by war.
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