Sadistic brutality bothers me in movies. Not just violence, but when a movie seems to revel in inflicting pain. I still won’t re-watch RoboCop because of a couple scenes in it, particularly where Peter Weller is shot to pieces by the bad guys.
Testament - watched it when I was about 10 or so…Ye, gods, that movie haunts me…
The Man who Saw Tomorrow - Doc on Nostradamus narrated by Orson Welles. Goofy now, but I saw it when I was a kid, and the thought of the guy in in blue turban who was going to nuke us in 1994 was very frightening to me. Even now that I’m a rational adult, when 1994 passed without a nuke, I secretly was relieved.
PBS Doc on the 1968 Democractic convention. I was about 18, deep into my “Down with the Man” phase, and I was of course aware of what happened. But seeing the actual beatings, in Chicago, a city I know, just blew my mind. I was very upset that that could happen in America, in the recent past.
The end of Thelma and Louise made me cry almost uncontrollably when I was 14-ish. It just seemed so bad that a seemingly normal person could have so little hope that they would kill themselves. I think because the characters were totally regular, middle-class women.
Just wanted to add…
Just last fall, I was doing some aimless wandering on the internet, and ran across the clip of the Max Headroom/Channel 11 pirating incident. I am creeped out right now thinking about it. I showed to some of my friends, but had to leave the room while they watched. Even the audio I could hear made my very panicky.
If I had seen that live, I would probably would have lost my mind…
In the first season of Nip/Tuck, a character commits suicide, assisted by one of the main characters. Elton John’s “Rocket Man” plays in the background.
The entire scene made me want to vomit, and I couldn’t listen to “Rocket Man” for a couple of years after that without feeling sick to my stomach.
I don’t know anyone who has committed suicide, but the way it was depicted in the show bothered me more than I would have ever expected.
This is exactly the movie, and even exactly the scene I came in to mention. I remember the water turning brown, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to watch that movie again to confirm it.
I have just remembered another feature movie that made me ill as I watched it, and which I can’t think of a good reason ever to see again.
Gummo (1997) A vile and disgusting piece of trash with no redeeming value whatsoever. (Let me know what you think of it when you see it. 
)
Is this a commonly known incident? Never heard of it.
Does anyone care to summarize it?
What was this?
Three come to my mind:
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The first time I saw Schindler’s List. Not because I had any relatives in concentration camps or anything like that–just the sheer power of the movie, the emotional impact…I was shellshocked. I remember leaving the theater with the spouse and the two of us just kind of wandering around the parking lot like zombies for a few minutes before heading to our car. We weren’t alone, either.
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A kids’ show I remember watching when I was a young child. I think I mentioned it in another thread and someone told me what it was, but for some reason I block it out. It involved a little boy in a bad neighborhood who found a stray kitten and was raising it in an abandoned building. In the scene I’m referring to, some older kids found out about it and were messing with the kid–in the resulting skirmish, the kitten ended up being scared or tossed into the street and run over by a car. I saw the show again many years later as an adult and I still can’t watch it. I saw the end that time–the kid ends up being given another kitten or two with the blessing of his mother (who hadn’t wanted him to have pets) but I couldn’t stop feeling sorry for that poor dead kitten (and wanting to commit acts of violence on those stupid kids). I simply can’t handle any movie or TV show that involves killing or hurting cats (really beloved pets in general, but particularly cats)
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The movie Beyond the Mat, a documentary about the (then) WWF. The spouse used to be a wrestling fan, so we went to see it. There’s a scene at the end where Mick Foley (aka Mankind) was wrestling in a very bloody match. He was clearly taking real injury (though undoubtedly not as bad as it appeared) and then the camera panned over to the audience, where his wife and very young daughter (I think she was like 3) were sitting there watching. The look of horror on that little girl’s face just shocked me–that parents with any sense would subject someone that young to watching her dad get the crap beaten out of him–at that point I had to get up and leave. The movie had already depressed the hell out of me (all the stories of drug addiction, broken-down lives, and generally crummy situations professional wrestlers get into) and that was the final straw. I told the spouse I didn’t mind at all if he wanted to stay and watch the rest, but I’d be in the lobby. He came out soon after.
Never heard of it, but a Google search turns this up:
http://www.hack247.co.uk/2008/01/06/max-headroom-1987-pirate-tv-incident/
Freaky.
Note - this isn’t supposed to be scary or anything, but it’s just so disturbing to me…
Sorry for the hi-jack!
When I was about 12, I watched “When the Wind Blows”, which is this animated movie about an elderly couple who live out in the sticks, and when the nuclear holocaust happens, they don’t realize it, and slowly die from radiation poisoning. While the whole movie tapped into my fear of a nuclear holocaust, one small scene really stayed with me: They turn on the radio and there is only white noise (because everybody out there has died). And now every time I turn on a radio and there is only white noise, I freak out a little and have to change the channel to be reassured everybody else is still alive.
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The movie, Citizen X. Ran it on HBO years ago. It’s about a serial killer in the USSR who targets children. Based on a true story, I think. Stephen Rea is in it. Plays the cop who is hired to track down this killer. Most disturbing movie.
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The movie, 28 Days, with Sandra Bullock. Both my husband and I come from alcoholic families and this movie hit home in a big way for both of us.
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Oddly enough, Stuart Saves His Family…for the same reasons noted in #2. Although I rarely tell people I was bothered by that movie because it is supposed to be funny (“Do you mind if I move your bong?”).
The ear-cutting scene in Resevoir Dogs made me ill. I had to walk out, and that’s the first and only movie I’ve walked out of. To this day I can’t listen to “Stuck in the Middle With You.”
And my timing for watching Children of Men was shitty. I should have known better because I knew what the subject matter was, but I loves me some sci-fi apocolyptic stuff, so I went ahead and watched it. This was while I was home recovering from emergency surgery after having an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured one of my ovarian tubes. I didn’t know yet what impact it would have on my own fertility and was grieving over having lost what I’d thought was a pregnancy. I cried through a lot of that movie.
I found the film United 93 almost unbearable to watch; not that it’s a bad film, but it’s impossible to disconnect your emotions when you know what’s going to happen. One of the terrorists is portrayed as a quiet guy with glasses who appears to have serious doubts and fears about what’s going to happen. I don’t know why, but that guy haunts me to this day.
A lot of people rag on this movie as being one of the SNL sketch spinoffs . . . but there’s a lot of truth in it. I have no personal experience with alcoholism, but I know all about dysfunctional families. “Waste of space,” “I hope you’re not too disappointed when you don’t win,” crying and eating at the same time . . . been there, done that.
Movies with Vietnam fighting scenes always make me incredibly upset, like Born on the Fourth of July and Forest Gump. I always cry when I see scenes like that in movies.
My dad was a grunt in the jungles of Vietnam and the idea of my dad, as a teenager, having to endure all of that is devastating to me.
-FrL-
Sorry, not trying to be insensitive or anything, but this is really cryptic. What exactly are you talking about?
I lost it while watching this movie when Jasper, knowing he was about to be arrested, gave his wife the lethal injection and held her until she died. Less than two years before that my wife’s Parkinson’s had suddenly gone terminal, and I had made the decision to stop her feeding and let her go.