The film stars Lauren German, Roger Bart, Heather Matarazzo, Bijou Phillips, and Richard Burgi.
The plot follows three American female art students in Rome who are directed to a Slovak village where they are eventually kidnapped and taken to a facility in which rich clients pay to torture and kill other people.
After the significant box office receipts of Hostel, Roth conceived a sequel set directly after the events of the first film, opting to include three female protagonists to "up the ante.
In Rome, three American art students, Beth, Whitney, and Lorna, are convinced by Axelle, a nude model they are sketching, to join her on a luxurious spa vacation in Slovakia.
The four check into a hostel, where the desk clerk surreptitiously uploads their passport photos to an auction website run by the Elite Hunting Club.
After being taken to a secluded area downstream, Lorna is kidnapped, and awakens to find herself having been stripped naked, bound, gagged, and hanging upside down.
The Elite Hunting Club then offers the maimed Whitney to the other clients to kill, including an elderly Italian man who is eating Miroslav alive.
[4] Vera Jordanova was cast as Axelle, a female antagonist, while former Slovak Minister of Culture and actor Milan Kňažko was given the role of Sasha, the Russian mafia member and ringleader of the torture factory.
"[4] To play Stuart and Todd, the American businessmen who are "emblematic of the more extreme sides of human nature and the dark shadow of First World materialism," Roth cast Roger Bart and Richard Burgi.
[4] Much of the tunnel sequences in the torture factory were filmed in sets constructed at the studio, while additional photography took place in and around Prague.
[4] The unnamed village where the protagonists stay and attend the harvest festival is Český Krumlov, located in the Czech Republic's South Bohemian Region.
[4] Lionsgate devised several one sheet posters for the film in late 2006 and early 2007, the first of which consisted merely of a closeup of what appeared to be torn flesh.
[10] A second poster, released in February 2007, showed a side profile of actress Bijou Phillips nude, holding her own severed head.
On May 11, 2007, the final one sheet was released, which showed Roger Bart standing in a darkened corridor, holding a power drill in front of his groin.
[18] The film was banned outright in New Zealand upon submission to the ratings board, after the distributor refused to make cuts in order to receive an R18 certificate.
MP Charles Walker claimed that although he had never seen the film, he was "assured by trusted sources" that "from beginning to end it depicts obscene, misogynistic acts of brutality against women.
[29] In a 2007 article, the New Zealand publication Newshub stated that Hostel: Part II was the most-pirated film of all time, having been illegally downloaded on the Internet by millions of users.
The site's critics consensus reads: "Offering up more of the familiar sadism and gore, Hostel: Part II will surely thrill horror fans.
In The Hollywood Reporter, Michael Rechtshaffen said the film was "a step up in virtually every aspect, from production values to its better focused storytelling and more fully developed characters.
[36] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly believed the businessman ethos and auction-style bidding process in the film is similar to the real-life practices of the sex trafficking industry.
[37] In a retrospective assessment of the film in 2017, Mike Thorn of The Film Stage praised Hostel: Part II, citing perceived geopolitical undercurrents and its doubled narrative perspective as primary reasons: "By extending its narrative reach to include the Hostel "clients" as well as its prisoners, Part II deepens its moral and political insights.
In The Guardian, Phelim O'Neill awarded it three stars out of five but wrote that the film was "virtually identical to the first outing" and that "everything, save the bloody third act, is handled in a rudimentary fashion.
"[40] Jamie Russell of the BBC gave it the same rating but wrote that the plot similarity to the first film "elicits déjà vu" and that "Eli Roth returns with more bucks but less imagination.
[41] Laura Kern of The New York Times described the main characters of the film as "fractionally more tolerable than the moronic frat boys of Part 1" and wrote that Roth had "mastered the cheap sadism-as-entertainment gross-out.