Behind the screams of the goriest movie of all time

DISMEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES From left to right, the vivisected author on set with director Eli Roth and legendary Italian actor Luc Merenda

As I watch a specially trained stunt cat hit its cues, gnawing chicken that's doubling as human flesh from the neck of a decapitated corpse, I can't help commenting out loud.

"That cat's better than Lassie."

"That cat's better than Bijou [Phillips]," counters Hostel: Part II director Eli Roth, to the delight of his crew. Nothing against the Page Six party girl-cum-actress, one of three females hired to replace the trio of males mangled in the gruesome 2006 original, but, as Roth explains, "It's very different filming with three girls rather than three guys. With girls, they've got the wrong lipstick on and suddenly the whole scene"—he pauses—"I mean your face is gonna get cut off by a saw blade. It doesn't really matter."

"I'm just putting in so much violence. It's like a bloodbath," says Roth. "I'm gonna go for the most violent unrated DVD of all time. That's the goal"Roth is back in Prague, Czech Republic, for the second installment of Hostel, a film that does for Eastern Europe what Deliverance did for Appalachia. And though the central characters are now women, played by Phillips, Lauren German (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Heather Matarazzo (Welcome To The Dollhouse), the premise is identical: Go for the guilt-free drugs and sex, stay for the bloodletting and torture. Oh, and beware strange businessmen with a fetish for dismembering student backpackers. The biggest difference, which becomes terrifyingly clear with each day I spend on set, is that this time there's even more bloodletting and torture.

GAG REFLEX Bijou Phillips gets a taste for the Hostel takeover

"I've been working at K&B Special Effects for twelve years," says prosthetics pro Michael McCarthy. "And there's a particular scene where I couldn't even look at the monitor. That has never happened to me before. It was just horrifying."

On this overcast afternoon in late fall, the crew is shooting in a Prague suburb that stands in nicely for the Eastern bloc gloom of Slovakia, where the film is set. Already nauseated from an earlier tour of the special effects van, I'm taken aside for a secret look at Heather Matarazzo's agonizing torture scene, an instant genre classic that pays tribute to both meat hooks and Erzsebet Bathory, a 16th century Hungarian countess who enjoyed torturing virgin girls almost as much as she did bathing in their blood.

"The ratings board is okay with violence," sighs Roth. "And they're less okay with sex. If you mix the two, you get in trouble. I'm gonna get crucified. The MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] has got the knives out."

But Roth might have something of a plan. "I'm just putting in so much violence. It's like a bloodbath," he says. "That way, they won't even know where to begin. At least I'm gonna go for the most violent unrated DVD of all time. That's the goal."

As for the violence being directed towards women this time around?

"It's the difference between hunting a lion and hunting a dear. With a lion it's like, 'Awesome, he killed a lion.' With a dear, it's like, 'Aww, he killed Bambi.' When you watch girls get tortured it's just awful."