Ok, I’m watching Gladiator here on HBO. Out of all the scenes of heads being cut off, faces being smashed by helmets or shields, or torsos being cut in half, the only scene that actually gives me the hebbie-jeebies is when Maximus is picking at his SPOR tatoo with a piece of glass or something.
So does anyone get grossed out by needles or minor little movie wounds but not major Saving Private Ryan style grotesque violece?
Also, feel free to comment on why.
Not exactly on topic, but pertaining to Saving Private Ryan.
I was fine with most of the movie. Sure the opening sequence was brutal, and it captured my full attention for twenty minutes, a rare thing. But it never really disturbed me.
Cut to almost the very end, when they are making their last stand against the Nazis. They are experimenting with “sticky bombs”, socks full of explosives and covered with grease, trying to stick them to tanks in order to blow them up. One guy misjudges the timing and is liquified by the explosion. For some reason that really got to me.
The end of Hannibal was also significantly disturbing. I thought that most of the movie was stupid and boring. I even knew the ending of the movie before I saw it. That being said, reading or hearing about something is a lot different than seeing it recreated in front of you.
I wouldn’t say I was grossed out, more disturbed.
I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re looking for, but I can watch any buckets-o-blood flick without any problems (the aforementioned Saving Private Ryan scenes were disturbing, but I wasn’t particularly grossed out by them). However, at work once, I passed out upon hearing about a bruise that one of my co-worker’s children got! I also passed out when my friend accidently cut my thumb open…
so I’m sitting in my intro to film before the 1950’s class and the prof says something about this next film to be the most disturbing thing we’ve ever seen on film (at this point I’m thinking “yea right”) then this black and white film comes on and someone proceeds to cut an eyeball, still in the victims head, horizontally slows with a sharp knife and the camera doesn’t cut away untill a large amount of eye puss ozzes out. It was pretty bad. If anyone know’s the name of this movie I would be interested to know it. If I remember correctly it was a silent film from another country. (ie. Not the US)
The scene in Robocop where the one guy is liquified by the toxic waste sent me running out of the room. Not so much because of how he looked, but because of how he sounded.
Also, there was only one scene in Jurassic Park which upset me: the one where Wayne Knight’s character dies. Again, they don’t actually show what happens to him, so it’s not that. I always have to leave the room when that scene comes on because his panic and frustration are too real. I mean, it’s not just “Ha ha, he’s fucked”; you can just feel him hating himself. One might say he’s too good an actor. People might not have brought their kids if they’d known that scene would play like that.
Life: That sounds like Andalusian Dog, or Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Bunel, except that it was a horse’s eye.
The film could quite possibly be Un Chien Andalou, an early (1929) surrealist film put together by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. The film opens up with the eye slit scene and goes on for a whole lot more weird crap.
I was recently able to see this from a video I checked out at the local library.
I believe the point of the film was to exterminate any image that applied itself to rational thought. I’ll let other decide whether they succeeded or not.
If you really want to see a bad eye scene, rent Fulci’s Zombie. Also digusting, but not played off in the callous manner of Un Chien Andalou.
The Andalusian Dog sounds very familiar, I think that was probably it, thanks man
As immortalised in The Pixies’ Debaser
Got me a movie, I want you to know
Slicing up eyeballs, I want you to know
Girl is so groovy, I want you to know
Don’t know about you, but I am un chien Andalusia
Anyway, one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen is The Fly (the Jeff Goldblum version). There’s very little that phases me, but I simply cannot bear the sight of him pulling out his fingernails. Aaaaaarrrrrghhhhh!
Ick!
Exactly! The Fly is also the only movie I cannot watch. Not only the fingernail, but when he’s arm wrestling, when he throws up on his food, and the end, where the fly comes out of his body. There’s a simular scene in another movie called Ticks where this huge tick comes out of this guy who had taken steroids (which is the reason why the tick is so huge). Another grossout is the sequel, The Fly II with the teleportation scenes with the dog and at the end, with that guy.
And, it’s sort of wimpy, but there’s this scene in A Clockwork Orange where the nurse is about to give Alex a shot and they show the needle. I cringe everytime. I hate needles. Yeah, I can watch the rape scenes and the orgy, etc. but don’t show me the needle. I also don’t like it when Alex is in the police office and that guy spits at him. I hate saliva, too.
Yeah, I think that’s what I’m talking about. Dude gets vaporized by a landmine…nice, gladiator cut in half by a chariot wheel…cool, head blown off by shotgun blast…yawn, time for your tetenus shot…AHHHH!!! AAHHHH!!! AAAAHH!!!
I don’t even get that grossed out by real needles.
I did find one scene in Saving Private Ryan disturbing. It was the one on the beach where Tom Hanks is talking to a radioman. You see the radioman for a second, Tom keeps barking orders to him but when you see the radioman again his face has a giant hole through it. I found that a little creepy.
Does anyone remember David Cronenberg’s follow-up to the Fly, Dead Ringers? I don’t remember much about the flick, but I do remember the evil twin inventing what can only be described as “the gynecological instruments of the damned”******* These creeped me out bigtime, which is odd as I"m a guy.
******* Which, when filtered through my oddly linked memory, I seem to remember looking a lot like the Cow Tools from the Far Side. Important disclaimer: there should be no misogynic interpretation of the statement above. pcubed is not trying to make any sly connection between gynecological instruments and cow tools. Although having pointed this out, he is probably doomed.
Actually, they were “gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women” and were not too dissimilar from the ancient surgery tools illustrated over the opening credits. And when he uses them for the first time–Yikes! (And I’ve never even visited an OBGYN) Fantastic film.
For me, the worst scene in The Exorcist isn’t all the head-spinning and puke-spewing, but when she gets the shot in the doctor’s office.
Actually it was a cow’s eye, and LifeWillFall’s memory is a bit faulty, because there is one important cut. You see the man with the razor open the lady’s eye up–cut quickly to the cloud crossing the moon horizontally–cut back to a closer shot of the eye (this time the cow’s) cut across with the knife exactly the same way the cloud cut across the moon.
[hijack]It is these visual connections and moments of free association that confirm Bunuel’s film (which he co-directed with Salvador Dali) as one with a specific agenda and not just random madness (though they did like that stuff too). Watch how the film undermines our expectations regarding time & continuity, music, the romantic genre. There are plenty of recurring symbols that encourage you to actively examine the film and not simply be alienated from it. I would call it less irrational and more primal, letting the baser instincts have free reign.[/hijack]
Watching people get hacked in half or blown up or decapitated or dismembered doesn’t bug me too much. Maybe it’s because I cannot suspend disbelief (some part of my brain says “Ooo, neat effect!” instead of “Omigod, they just cut a guy’s legs off!”) or maybe it’s just that I’ve never experienced that kind of violence, so it’s not as troubling to me as the small-scale stuff.
I can imagine what it’s like to have your hand impaled on a spike or to have your fingernails pulled off. (And thanks so much to all of you for putting that scene on “repeat play” in my head for the next four hours.)
I cannot imagine what it’s like to have your hand cut off, or to have all your skin burned off by acid. My brain tries to wrap itself around that, and just shrugs and says, “Huh. That must sting.”
Also, I’ve never seen someone injured that badly. Maybe if I’d seen it, right before my eyes, and empathised with the person at that time, I wouldn’t be able to dissociate myself so easily from it happening on film.
I too can take a lot of gore but when it comes to any sort of bleeding from the nose, I feel faint and must turn away cringing. The reason is I had chronic serious nosebleeds during junior year in high school and just can’t stand the sight of blood from a nose anymore.
Any sort of poking around the eye is not good either.
The bugs eating into the ears of those guys in that Star Trek movie (?) was pretty nasty too, for the grossness, but also for how helpless they were to stop it.
Now that you mention it, during the AFI 100 Thrills show, I found myself cringing during the Chinatown clip (Roman Polanski slicing Jack Nicholson’s nose). I knew it was coming (seen it many times) but I didn’t want to see the nose thing again.
Oh yeah the Exorcist one. The medical thing (that a spinal tap?) scared me a lot. Not more than the other crap- because that was frightening as well, but it made me really cringy and all because that’s stuff that has an actual chance of happening. I mean, possession could happen but you know what I mean. My mom says that scene is what scared her the most.
The gladiator thing sort of bugged me too. It was the really personal touch- everything else felt too unreal to be true, and this was somethng that was on a smaller scale, more accessible to the audience.
And the Jurassic Park thing, I agree…Creeped me out too.
La Femme Nikita- The opening part with all the violence wasn’t so bad but when she shoves the pencil into the guy’s hand- that really hurt.
The dentistry torture scene in Marathon Man. The funny thing is that I’ve never actually seen that film - I just saw that one scene on a TV show recently and it totally skeeved me out!
The scene in Saving Private Ryan where Giovanni Ribisi tries to save the guy whose carotid artery is sliced and gushing blood…it just skeeves me.
I was sickened by the scene in Poltergeist where the fellow stares into the mirror and slowly tears his face off. I never saw that movie again, after that. Ga-ross.
I also remember being disgusted by a scene in Caveman, where one of Ringo’s buddies kills a giant mosquito, and it squashed juicily all over Ringo’s face.