This might be a controversial entry as it is not as disturbing as some of the others, but frankly, the scene above (which many people find amusing) is very disturbing. While it does not portray physical violence, it portrays mental violence that can have a long reaching impact on a person. I also wonder what parents would allow their children to act in a scene like this.
Un Chien Andalou 1929, Luis Buñuel
Un Chien Andalou consists of seventeen minutes of bizarre and surreal images that may or may not mean anything. A straight razor seems to be placed by a woman’s eye, a small cloud formation obscures the moon, a cow’s eye is slit open, a woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane, a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys and live priests, and a man’s hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge.
A lonely Japanese widower whose son is planning to move out of the house soon expresses his sadness to a friend and fellow film producer, who becomes inspired to hold an audition for a non-existent film so that the widower can select a new potential bride from the resulting audition pool. The widower ultimately becomes enamored with and fascinated by one particular young woman…but first impressions can often be horribly wrong.
For me, beyond any doubt, the scene involving a double ended sexual device was the most disturbing. This film is a descent in to a drug induced nightmare.
Bad Boy Bubby is just that: a bad boy. So bad, in fact, that his mother has kept him locked in their house for his entire thirty years, convincing him that the air outside is poisonous. After a visit from his estranged father, circumstances force Bubby into the waiting world, a place which is just as unusual to him as he is to the world. This film involves incest.
A camera crew follows a serial killer/thief around as he exercises his craft. He expounds on art, music, nature, society, and life as he offs mailmen, pensioners, and random people. Slowly he begins involving the camera crew in his activities, and they begin wondering if what they’re doing is such a good idea, particularly when the killer kills a rival and the rival’s brother sends a threatening letter.
Begotten 1991, E. Elias Merhige
I don’t know if it is just me, but I find extreme surrealism very disturbing – this film falls in to that category. For your viewing pleasure, the entire film is included here.
A Christlike figure wanders through bizarre, grotesque scenarios filled with religious and sacrilegious imagery. He meets a mystical guide who introduces him to seven wealthy and powerful individuals, each representing a planet in the solar system. These seven, along with the protagonist, the guide and the guide’s assistant, divest themselves of their worldly goods and form a group of nine who will seek out the Holy Mountain, in order to displace the gods who live there and become immortal.
The brutal rape scene in Irreversible is truly horrific and that scene alone garners it a place on this list.
Based on a true story set in pre-war Japan, a man and one of his servants begin a torrid affair. Their desire becomes a sexual obsession so strong that to intensify their ardor, they forsake all, even life itself.
Henry likes to kill people, in different ways each time. Henry shares an apartment with Otis. When Otis’ sister comes to stay, we see both sides of Henry; the “guy-next-door” and the serial killer. Low budget movie, with some graphic murder scenes.
Yakuza boss Anjo disappears with three hundred million yen. His loyal gang members, lead by the masochist Kakihara, start a search, but their aggressive and gory methods worry the other yakuza gangs. Kakiharas most frightening counterpart is the mysterious Ichi, a psychopathic killer with a dark childhood secret, who is controlled by a retired cop.
Set in the Nazi-controlled, northern Italian state of Salo in 1944, four dignitaries round up sixteen perfect specimens of youth and take them together with guards, servants and studs to a palace near Marzabotto. In addition, there are four middle-aged women: three of whom recount arousing stories whilst the fourth accompanies on the piano. The story is largely taken up with their recounting the stories of Dante and De Sade: the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit and the Circle of Blood. Following this, the youths are executed whilst each libertine takes his turn as voyeur. I can only find this brief clip of the film on youtube. I would just like to point out the fact that it is not chocolate they are eating.
In the beginning of this film we meet a documentary team of three young men and a young woman. They are heading for the south-American jungle to search for real cannibals. After a while the crew is reported missing and a rescue team is send from the US. This team gets in touch with an amazon tribe called the Tree-people. The tree-people gives them the only remains of the first crew – the film rolls containing the material this crew shot during their search for real cannibals. Back in the US we get to see these films. We now get to see exactly what happened to the first crew.
Dumplings
2004, Fruit Chan
In this film, Mei is a doctor who has performed a lage number of illegal abortions in the past. She looks incredibly young for her age – her secret: home-made dumplings from a special recipe of – you guessed it – fetuses. A neglected wife of an executive is looking for youth and is willing to pay any price for the dumplings. The ingredients of the dumplings are rare, but then a mother with her pregnant daughter shows up… Hopefully you read this blurb before the clip – it makes all the difference.
À l’Intérieur
2007, Alexandre Bustillo
This award winning film is most notable for its extreme gore. Four months after losing her husband in a car accident, Sarah (Paradis), a pregnant woman, is visited on Christmas Eve by a mysterious woman (Dalle) who wants Sarah’s child for herself by any means necessary. goes to bed and the visitor arrives in the bedroom, awakening Sarah with scissors puncturing her navel. Sarah fights the visitor off and locks herself in the bathroom, where the visitor tries to gain entry. This is interrupted several times by the arrival of Sarah’s employer, mother, and the police, all of whom are killed by the visitor, except Sarah’s mother, whom Sarah accidentally kills, believing her to be the visitor before getting a good look. The story plays out with the visitor finally delivering Sarah’s baby with a pair of scissors in a brutal variation on Caesarian Section.
Pink Flamingos
1972, John Waters
WARNING: if you are eating, don’t watch the clip above. Pink Flamingos is a 1972 American transgressive comedy directed by John Waters. When the film was initially released in 1972, it caused a huge degree of controversy and eventually became one of the most notorious cult films ever made. It is one of John Waters’ most famous or downright notorious films due to some shocking scenes and the wide range of perverse, taboo acts performed in the film, such as consumption of animal feces. IMDB has this to say on the plot: Sleaze queen Divine lives in a caravan with her mad hippie son Crackers and her 250-pound mother Mama Edie, trying to rest quietly on their laurels as ‘the filthiest people alive’. But competition is brewing in the form of Connie and Raymond Marble, who sell heroin to schoolchildren and kidnap and impregnate female hitchhikers, selling the babies to lesbian couples. Finally, they challenge Divine directly, and battle commences…
Sweet Movie
1974, Dusan Makavejev
It may be called Sweet Movie, but it is anything but! This is the intercut story of two women: a nearly-mute beauty queen who descends into withdrawal and madness, and another who captains a ship laden with candy and sugar, luring men and boys aboard for sex, death, and revolutionary talk. The beauty queen passes from a wealthy husband whose honeymoon delight is to urinate on her, to a muscular keeper who punches her, stows her in a suitcase, and ships her to Paris, to a lip-synching rock idol with whom she has a love spasm, to an Austrian commune complete with a banquet of vomit, urine, feces, chopped dildos, and wet nurses.
Cutting Moments
1999, Douglas Buck
Cutting Moments is the title of a highly acclaimed, highly controversial short feature from 1999 directed by Douglas Buck. Not only is it gory, it was also heart-wrenching and painful to watch. Briefly, the synopsis is: in the center of a monotonous suburban existence, Sarah lives silently and in subservience to her icy husband Patrick. They have been together far too long, and Patrick’s affections for his wife have all but vanished. Instead, his sexual urges are tempting him to lust after their own son. Realizing how far gone her husband is, Sarah undertakes drastic, shockingly sickening measures to salvage some sense of her life and purge her years of festering resentment
Men Behind the Sun
1988, Mou Tun Fei
The film is a graphic depiction of the war atrocities committed by the Japanese at Unit 731, the secret biological weapons experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The film details the various cruel medical experiments inflicted upon the Chinese and Soviet prisoners at the tail-end of the war. Because of its graphic content, the film has suffered mass controversy with censors all over the world. It was originally banned in Australia and caused public outcry in Japan to such an extent that director T.F. Mou even received threats on his life. The film is extremely controversial for its use of what Mou claims to be actual autopsy footage of a young boy and also for a scene in which two cats are thrown into a room to be eaten alive by hundreds of frenzied rats (the rats are later set ablaze).
Flower of Flesh and Blood
1985, Hideshi Hino
Flower of Flesh and Blood is said to be based on a snuff film sent to the director Hideshi Hino by a crazed fan. In it, a man dressed as a samurai drugs a woman and proceeds to cut her apart, and finally adds her body parts to an extensive collection. The snuff film rumour has been shown to be a contemporary legend; the film was in fact based on a manga (by Hideshi Hino himself, no less) about a florist who kills women and uses their dismembered parts as the seed of his beautiful flower arrangements. After viewing a portion of this film, actor Charlie Sheen was convinced the murder depicted was genuine and contacted the MPAA, who then contacted the FBI. FBI agent Dan Codling informed them that the FBI and the Japanese authorities were already investigating the film makers, who were forced to prove that the special effects were indeed fake. This is the second film is what is known as the Guinea Pig films.
Slaughtered Vomit Dolls
2006, Lucifer Valentine
The gruesome tapestry of psychological manifestations of a nineteen year old bulimic runaway stripper – turned prostitute named Angela Aberdeen; as she descends into a hellish pit of Satanic nightmares and hallucinations. True to its name, this film contains no shortage of actual vomiting mixed in with a healthy dose of slaughter. To its credit, the title does not lie. The film contains scenes of extreme violence like eyeballs being gouged out mixed in with scenes of self inflicted vomiting. All of which is intercut with a home movie of a little girl, presumably one of the girls in the film (or representing all of the girls in the film for that matter) during a once happier time in her life and their ultimate loss of innocence.
Murder-Set-Pieces
2004, Nick Palumbo
Murder Set Pieces is a 2004 American slasher film which looks into the life of a wealthy German serial killer. The primary plot line for Murder-Set-Pieces follows a burly neo-Nazi photographer who prowls the streets of Sin City with an affinity for dead whores. Under the guise of a professional photographer, he lures prostitutes from the streets and photographs them. This materializes into an eventual bloodbath, complete with rape and torture. Murder-Set-Pieces has Chainsaws, straight razors, putrefied skulls, hot chicks, masses of nudity, bloody FX work by Toe Tag, and a severed head blowjob. Oh – and we shouldn’t forget to mention some crazy stuff involving blood, a straight razor, an infant and a dead mother.
August Underground’s Mordum
2003, Jerami Cruise
August Underground’s Mordum is an independent exploitation film released by the Pittsburgh-based film production/special effects/design company Toetag Pictures in 2003; like its predecessor, Mordum is a simulated snuff film, which includes graphic depictions of sexual deviancy (including necrophilia and pedophilia) and murder (including a fleeting depiction of infanticide). The film depicts a dysfunctional love triangle of sorts between the volatile lead from the original August Underground (portrayed by Toetag founder Fred Vogel), his maniacal girlfriend and partner-in-crime Crusty (Christie Whiles), and Crusty’s animalistic brother, appropriately dubbed Maggot (Michael Schneider). As Maggot’s mental facilities decline and competition with Vogel’s character for the affections of Crusty mounts, tensions simmer before coming to full boil at Mordum’s climax: Maggot manages to wrestle Vogel’s knife out of his hands and then proceeds to… Well – I don’t want to spoil the ending – so go see it.
