Movies: Least pleasant Web site in recent memory.

Read this whole thing before clicking any links. I don't want to be blamed for you calling up any weird crap while your boss is looking over your shoulder and anything like that.

Ok? Ok.

In what might end up being a Blair Witch like example of promotional materials being better than the film they're promoting, and online ad site for the upcoming Hostel 2 is as creepy as anything seen in the first flick. The entire site seems to be a collection of security cameras placed throughout one of the torture-franchises several institutions. With some random background sounds (they don't appear to be sync'ed with any particular scene) or real discernible gore, we watch the everyday workings of this hellish place. It is all the more chilling for its banality – looking like some cross between a factory, a cheap gym, and a POW camp. This magnifies the most powerful aspect of the film, the creepy way in which money turned torture into just another job, and creates a horrible vision of human meat as cheap commodity.

That said, it doesn't free the Hostel franchise from its most glaring moral failure: sympathy with the torturers, rather than the victims. In fact, the site distills the aesthetics of the first film into its essentials and lays bare the flicks cheap, exploitative core. The victims are literally nameless and voiceless and the entire site is a celebration of the total and institutional process of turning their pain into entertainment. This is site is the closest thing to the Platonic form torture porn you're likely to see.

I don't know that there's anything literally NSFW, exactly, but I can't imagine that it would be appreciated at any office.