Horror movies have fallen on hard times. Amidst the deluge of pointless remakes (The Hills Have Eyes, etc.), and the greater horrors of a pro-torture Bush regime, Hostel goes with human trafficking as its we-will-shock-you premise. Two horny young American dudes (Jay Hernandez from Friday Night Lights and Dumb and Dumberer's Derek Richardson) are happy ripping bong hits in Amsterdam until a fellow traveler at a hostel tells them about Bratislava: "There is so much pussy, and because of the area there are no guys." So they go. And get trapped in a pay-to-play torture house. Eli Roth's film isn't very clever, but it's got gnarly gore aplenty: see a dopey kid try to walk with severed Achilles tendons, an Asian girl get her eyeball snipped out — and plenty of Eastern European betties butt-naked, of course. But despite its chilling twist about how the torture house operates, Hostel ultimately plays like a mediocre episode of the "Twilight Zone" fleshed out to feature length via bunch of masked men brandishing surgical instruments. Quentin Tarantino liked Hostel enough to endorse it; the Slovakian tourist board s probably less thrilled.

“Alison”

On Elvis Costello’s country-tinged ballad, the lyric does not get too sentimental in recalling an ex who had since been with one of the singer's "little friends" and is now married. Some believe the song is about murder, due to lines like “Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking,” "Somebody better put out the big light" and, of course, "My aim is true,” which became the title of Costello's debut album. In 2002, Costello told Rolling Stone, “It isn’t [about murder]. It’s about disappointing somebody. It’s a thin line between love and hate, as the Persuaders sang.”