Film Findings is a biweekly column where I explore a movie that I think is underseen or undervalued, and try to present a case for why it’s worth watching — or, at the very least, interesting. What’s covered will vary from week to week, but my goal is to encourage people to consider the artistry and value in films that are often unfairly dismissed. Feel free to watch along and share your thoughts!

***

A good amount has been written about the glut of extreme genre cinema that broke into the mainstream during the mid-2000s. Still, a majority of the films continue to fly under the radar among audiences and critics, and, in today’s neutered horror landscape, feel more vital and ferocious than ever. Out of all of his “Splat Pack” contemporaries, filmmaker Eli Roth was perhaps the most notorious figure of the movement, stomach-turning gore gags and unsavory frat-bro humor his signature directorial flourishes. For better or worse, both define nearly everything he touches, but when he’s good, he reaches deliriously gruesome heights. Hostel, his 2005 sophomore feature, is a splatter movie par excellence that — along with its excellent 2007 sequel — sharpens his juvenile instincts into legitimately incisive political commentary, all while maintaining a level of extremity that remains unsurpassed in modern American horror.

Though one of the films most frequently labeled with the (eye-roll inducing) “torture porn” moniker, no one is actually tortured onscreen until the back half. The build-up mostly functions as a hangout movie with the worst people alive: a group of college-aged bros drinking their way through Europe. While visiting Amsterdam, the group is lured to a — you guessed it — hostel in Slovakia that, apparently, hosts several sex workers who’ll gladly offer their services to American men. Only, the entire thing is really a front for a global network where tourists are supplied to elite clients who’ll pay exorbitant prices to torture and murder them in whatever ways they please. Our lovable cast, of course, discovers this far, far too late.

What’s immediately interesting about Hostel is how un-modern it feels among other similar films of its era. It lacks the industrial, hyper-kinetic stylings of something like Saw, instead opting for a sweeping orchestral score and clean, steady shot compositions. Thankfully, it’s no less disgusting. Roth doles out the grotesquery with such sadistic delight that, like the best splatter films, feels like the product of a particularly maladjusted twelve-year-old behind the camera. He’s clearly having a great time staging this stuff, like when one of the main guys sends the group a picture of himself only for the camera to pan outwards and reveal that, actually, it’s his severed head sitting on a table. Or one of the torturers slipping in a pool of blood and sawing off his own leg with a chainsaw. Or torrents of pus oozing out of an eye socket (whose contents, seconds before, had been removed with scissors). It’s nauseating, deeply unpleasant, and a little funny.

There’s two moments, though, that really stick out in my mind. The first occurs around an hour in, as Paxton, our protagonist, is dragged through a hallway by two assailants. As it’s happening, the camera adopts his perspective at eye-level and spans from open door to open door, each revealing a different person being tortured in some horrible way. It feels endless, and, in a few minutes, he knows he’s doomed to the same fate. It’s an intensely scary scene, revealing the true insurmountable scope of this organization. Paxton does manage to escape, however, and, later, finds himself in a room where clients can choose their outfits and weaponry. Upon donning a disguise, he comes face to face with one of the club’s patrons. It’s a tense encounter, but what’s most chilling is the other man’s naked bloodlust — and how closely his language and demeanor match the protagonists’ pursuit of sexual conquest at the beginning of the film. Roth draws unmistakable parallels between their atrocious treatment of women and the Elite Hunting Club’s literal destruction of bodies; in the end, they’re both manifestations of a system with the same goal: breaking down people into objects that exist to be subjected to every whim of the powerful. Only now, the wires in that apparatus have crossed, and its ugliness is staring at Paxton right in the face.

It’s a strange moment of self-awareness for Roth, who clearly identifies with these sort of bro-y characters. Hostel: Part II, released just two years later, continues its predecessor’s skewering of masculinity and global capitalism, pushing the envelope even further with its brutality. It’s one of the most punishing American horror films ever released — and one of the best. It retains a good amount of the first film’s structure and plotting, but the big change here is that our protagonists are now a group of three likable women. It’s a little less challenging, seeing that downtime spent with the main cast is actually pleasant to watch. There’s a real lived-in warmth to their characterization and banter that makes the ensuing cruelty all the more painful.

Narrative focus is no longer confined to the “bought.” In the film’s opening minutes, we see a montage of elites placing bids on the women, spanning an endless array of boardrooms and well-kempt suburban homes across the globe. We then shift to two businessmen who, much to their excitement, have won. It’s one of the rare horror sequels that truly benefits from an in-depth examination of its world’s inner-workings, with explicitly sexualized violence presented as a male bonding ritual. A lot of tension comes from whether the more mild-mannered and reluctant of the two will give in and participate. He’s easily the more sympathetic one, which isn’t saying a whole lot given his meekness and complicity when confronted with this system. Roth never lets him off the hook, though. Instead, the facade of his pathetic, unthreatening manhood crumbles fully in the third act, revealing even greater depths of depravity than his blatantly-psychopathic companion. It’s a great middle finger to all the self-proclaimed “nice guys” of the world.

The gore in Hostel: Part II isn’t really upsetting in a fun way, though Roth was probably having just as good a time filming it. I can think of few more nauseating moments in modern horror than the infamous “blood bath” sequence, in which a woman is hung upside down and repeatedly sliced with a scythe as a wealthy patron bathes in her dripping blood. It’s horrible — and truly inspired — imagery, the ornate, gothic touches of the torture chamber and weapon of choice evoking the 1970s eurohorror these movies are clearly indebted to. You certainly don’t get this kinda detail anywhere else. At a certain point, the unflinching camera begins to mirror the cold, inhuman gaze of her captors. The blood pooling up in the candles and the flames sizzling out. The dry scrape of the blade against bare skin. Just awful, awful stuff.

There’s a third Hostel film too, released in direct-to-video in 2012 with Roth curiously absent from any element of production. It sucks, really throwing into sharp contrast what this type of thing looks like without any visual imagination or ideas. He made a couple of interesting genre movies after the second one, but at best they’re fun pastiche and, at worst, weirdly reactionary and just plain bad. Along with his terrible offscreen politics, they certainly call into question the authorial intent of these movies. But they’re simply too thoughtful and vividly rendered to be written off. We’ve gotten plenty of “eat the rich” horror over the last two decades, but nothing is as searing as what we see here, where the debasement of living under billion-dollar corporations is rendered as literal agonizing torture.