to Hostel (2005), Phillips starred as one of three American female art students in Rome who are directed to a Slovak village where they are kidnapped and taken to a facility in which rich clients pay to torture and kill people. She claimed that her torture sequence, which entails her being scalped by a power saw, required around forty-five setups. "I don't think I could do something like this again", she stated in a 2007 interview. "I'm glad that I had the experience, and I love my job, but we went into places that I didn't know existed, and I don't need to do that again." Banned from theatrical release in several countries, Hostel: Part II was released theatrically in the United States, to lackluster box office returns. The biographical film What We Do Is Secret featured Phillips as Lorna Doom, the Germs' bassist and a close friend of singer Darby Crash. Director Rodger Grossman cast Phillips when she was 17 years old, and she stayed committed to the project for the entire time it took to bring the film into production, which was almost one decade. She received critical acclaim for her portrayal; Phil Gallo for Variety found her performance to be "striking" and stated that her character "lights up in a unique way whenever she's in Crash's company or simply talking about him." In 2008, Phillips appeared in the documentary Chelsea on the Rocks, about the Hotel Chelsea, directed by Abel Ferrara, and starred as a milkmaid, opposite Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston, in the well-received black comedy Choke, based on the Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name. In Dark Streets (her last 2008 film), Phillips played a love interest and the alluring star singer of a club in 1930s New York City. In 2009, Phillips had starring roles in four independent feature films, three of which were opposite Danny Masterson. Her first release in the year was the romantic comedy Wake, in which she played an emotionally isolated, modern woman who meets a man mourning his fiancée at a funeral. The horror film It's Alive, a remake of the 1974 film of the same name written and directed by Larry Cohen, saw Phillips star as a mother who has a murderous baby. Dread Central, in its review for the film, noted: "Bijou Philips is undoubtedly the star here, jumping into her role in what is admittedly