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25 Most Disturbing Movies #7: Aftermath and Guinea Pig II: Flowers of Flesh and Blood
6 November 2009 1:18 PM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #8]
7. Tie: Aftermath (1994) 7/10, Flowers of Flesh and Blood (Guinea Pig II) (1985) 10/7
Two films about the systematic desecration of human bodies which have been rendered inert and still as they lie on a madman's table full of instruments.
In Aftermath [request it here], Spanish director Nacho Cerda presents us a short (30 min.) film with no dialogue, about the rhythmic and morbid procedures governing an autopsy room. Some of the most realistic looking dead bodies you will ever see in a film are cut, sawed and pried open, organs are removed, blood and gristle is drained into stainless steel basins, brains are removed from head, and skin is peeled back. The tone is ominous and a bit hypnotic, but what keeps disconcerting us is a sense that one of the surgeons - or whatever the heck you call 'em - seems, well, »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies #8: Cannibal Holocaust
6 November 2009 11:07 AM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #9]
8. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) 7/10
Ruggero Deodato's exercise in The Ugly American's confrontation with jungle cannibalism is an admired and feared placeholder on any respectable Disturbist's desert island list. Made a full twenty years before Blair Witch Project, Deodato's film cleverly played with the line between movie reality and reality-reality by using a story of found footage: film stock is found in the jungle that chronicles the self-made video diary of an intrepid naturalist/would-be documentarian and his cohorts as they cut a swath through the Amazonian jungle to capture the lives of a “primitive” and, unfortunately for them, cannibalistic tribe. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies List:, #9: Forced Entry
5 November 2009 3:37 PM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies Read Part 1 for the previous 13. [<< #10]
9. Forced Entry (1974) 5/9
Two years after starring in the most famous X-rated film of all time, Deep Throat, Harry Reems starred in Forced Entry (billed as Tim Long), tellingly the only film that Reems "regretted being in." Reems plays a recently returned Vietnam vet who has been transformed by the war into a psychotic killer. Cruising the fire escapes and alleys of Queens, NY, Reems breaks into the homes of women he has been spying on, rapes them, and then kills them. Unlike most everything being produced then or since, the film combines the explicit and real sex of hardcore with the realistically portrayed violence usually reserved for mainstream slasher films. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies List:, #10: Clockwork Orange
5 November 2009 2:25 PM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies Read Part 1 for the previous 13. [<< #11]
10. A Clockwork Orange (1971) 10/7
A film of such high artistic merit that I hesitate to place it here, but Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's sci-fi novel must grace any list with "disturbing" in the title. Mainstream enough to have been seen by countless neophytes, but twisted enough to be treasured by the more perverse among us, A Clockwork Orange (even the title is unsettling in its somewhat arbitrary and colorful surrealism) evokes a not very distant dystopia that is both absolutely convincing and yet disorienting in its restrained mix of futurism and contemporary realism: Kubrick infuses the early 70s overt, garish style with "things to come" details to create an effect both familiar and strange. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies, Continued: #11: The Devils
4 November 2009 11:50 AM, PST
Simon Augustine's list of 25 Most Disturbing Movies continues... [<< #12]
11. The Devils (1971) 10/7
(Still not on DVD as of publication)
A grand freak-out of religious sexual frenzy, persecution and humanist martyrdom, The Devils is probably the most censored film in history and the most accomplished film by supreme agent provocateur and English madman Ken Russell. Based on sci-fi demiurge Aldous Huxley's semi-historical novel The Devils of Loudon, it is the story of Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), the leader/priest of an outpost of Protestantism in a sixteenth-century France that Louis Xiii - prodded by corrupt Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) and his henchman - is trying to “persuade” (with theology, Christian love, and torture) to become more Catholic. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies, Continued: #12: Pink Flamingos
4 November 2009 11:23 AM, PST
We'll be counting down the top 12 Most Disturbing Movies from here on out. Read Part 1 for the previous 13 from Simon Augustine.
12. Pink Flamingos (1972) Gross-out: 7 /Artistic Merit: 8
John Waters, emerging from the depths and despair of middle-class Baltimore, was Disturbing Night At the Movies' first great Confabulist of Campiness, taking full advantage of Susan Sontag's observation's about the underhand power of “camp,” and infusing it with all the bizarre bluster, pain, confusion, humanity, resentment, irreverence and all-out bad taste you'd get if you merged the gay community with an underground-oriented Disturbist sensibility, smacking what was left of square America in 1972 square in the face.
Click on for more.
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- underdog
6 articles
