Hostel: Part III (2011)

Hostel: Part III arrives as the third entry in the franchise and the first without Eli Roth, a fact the film announces through a certain diminished swagger. The Elite Hunting Club has been relocated from Slovakia to Las Vegas, which the production justified by observing that the premise can take place anywhere. It can. That is not a defense. The whole thing was shot in Detroit on a 42 percent tax rebate, a detail that constitutes the film's most coherent statement on political economy, though nobody involved intended it as one.

The plot concerns four men at a bachelor party, two paid escorts, and a members-only club where wealthy clients wager on which captive dies first. There is a premise here about plutocrats treating human suffering as a spectator sport, and it flickers for perhaps ninety seconds before the film returns to peeling faces and releasing cockroaches into a woman's mouth. The club is a franchise, the clients are rich, and the film has no interest in what any of that means. Bodies exist to be cut. Women are dressed as cheerleaders and ninjas and killed for an audience. The film offers no instruction, no argument, no request of the viewer beyond endurance.

The ensemble includes a few non-white performers in roles that could be swapped without consequence. Their presence reflects standard exploitation casting, not a casting ethos. Elsewhere the film is a vacuum. No historical reading, no environmental concern, no diagnosis, no romance of any kind beyond the straight men doing the killing and the straight men being killed. We are left with a sobering classification: a sequel that exists because a tax incentive made it cheap, and asks its audience to sit still while it happens.