By not watching it all, you missed the point of the movie. Well, I won’t say you *MISSED *it , but the point of Clerks 2 was, to me, the jail cell scene near the end. I think the whole movie was made just to get to that scene, that emotional honesty between 2 old friends who never let that wall down. I understand if the journey wasn’t worth it to you, but I was impressed by the surprising emotion from such stunted ppl in an otherwise silly movie with a donkey sex-scene. A silly, funny movie with that delivers more than gross-out humor.
And what was so disturbing in the first 20 minutes of that movie anyway? The donkey sex isn’t until later! And how does it even make this list? Have you seen Eraserhead ?
The Passion of the Christ was one of the few films I’ve seen that made me sick to my stomach. Stuff like A Clockwork Orange and Requiem for a Dream did sort of make me feel funny, but PotC was just…graphic.
I don’t know many people who have seen it, as most of my friends are not Christians. A few have asked me what I thought about it and I said that if you’re a Christian it’s powerful and moving. If you’re not a Christian it’s just gory, and long.
I understand what the director was trying to say, according to his commentary, but the rape scene is so long and unpleasant you feel drained after watching it.
I believe you are thinking of Irreversible. I agree, it is quite disturbing.
For me, the worst is a Korean film called Bad Guy. The director is Ki-duk Kim, who is quite popular (though I certainly don’t see why). The movie is not gory, nor especially violent in the slasher sense. Just the circumstances a young woman finds herself in and how the film ends is just vile. Reprehensible piece of trash movie.
I saw Soldier Blue, an extremely graphic dramatization of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when I was in junior high. I had been raised on war movies and westerns, but I simply wasn’t prepared for anything this brutal. Limbs being hacked off, a woman being stripped and then slashed open, and a slow-motion closeup of a child being shot in the head. That I was only vaguely aware at the time of the kinds of atrocities historically committed by the U.S. Government against Native Americans certainly did not help.
While normally immune to the excesses of horror films, there was one moment of the 1988 remake of The Blob that gave me nightmares for weeks. The girl who (IIRC) turns out to be the hero of the film witnesses her own little brother being engulfed by the blob. A moment later, his body, still alive but half skeletonized, bursts out towards her. There’s nothing else of the film I remember – just my own thoughts as to how I’d react had the still screaming remains of someone I loved been dangled in front of my face.
I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, and some have affected me more than others, depending on how young I was when I watched them. But there is one movie that I watched recently that I felt killed a part of my soul. (And I don’t believe in souls.) Martyrs, which has been mentioned a few times in this thread.
For a few days, the audio of this was played on news radio. Listening to the man gargle on his own blood was/is horrifying to me. I have avoided the video, as I don’t think I would enjoy snuff film.
plenty of movies being called “pseudo-intellectual” here, like Martyrs and Anatomy of Hell, are among my all-time favorites. I think there may be more to those than meets the eye :-/
Anyway, on a similar wavelength Trouble Every Day is deeply disturbing - not just for the gore, but also for a certain queasy unsettling quality to the whole way it’s made - the photography, the dreamlike acting and especially the fantastic musical score by Tindersticks in combination with all this.
Probably the grossest film I’ve seen was August Underground Mordum. The only point of that film is to be as shocking as possible, so it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. There’s no plot to it, it’s just a hand held camera showing people doing incredibly sick things.
I also saw this short film called *Aftermath *that was pretty disturbing. About a morgue technician performing an autopsy who
gets turned on and fucks a female corpse who had it’s torso cut open & exposed. That’s the whole film. What made it disturbing was that it had high production values, and was extremely realistic, it wasn’t just cheesy special effects & bad lighting. And if I remember right, there was no dialogue, just ambient noises.
I’m curious to see *Martyrs *now.
This is what I’m curious about. Why did you see the first two movies, particularly since it seems you had at least a faint notion what they were about or what they involved (gore, disturbing or shocking scenes). And why are you curious to see “Martyrs” now? Are you just trying to see if you can shock yourself? Have any of these movies had any deeper meaning through the use of gore or extreme scenes to you?
Leaving Las Vegas - Mainly for personal reasons but damn that movie put a dark cloud over me for days.
Irreversible - I knew what to expect but I was still shocked by how graphic the rape was.
Not to answer for him, but re: the August Underground films, I think a lot of people seek them out by reputation to see if they’re really as bad as is often claimed. They’re not unique films in that respect, just in the extremity of their content. Aesthetically they’re not worth much, but as a friend of mine pointed out, there’s something unnerving about seeing this behavior from realistically-depicted American white trash rather than French femmes fatales, Italian black-gloved psychos, geographically-isolated cults or Japanese samurai ghouls, which is the kind of cultural background a lot of extreme horror has. (I guess this is why a lot of people found Eden Lake so intriguing - seeing this behavior from chavs - but I disliked that film too.)
The realism of the August Underground stuff also has a lot to do with its uniqueness: it’s literally like those internet shock films, only fictitious. I suppose there’s some level of “deeper meaning” in relation to the fictionalization of things that voyeurs seek out, but it’s not a particularly interesting message: voyeurism has been implicated for years in films like Cannibal Holocaust and even stuff like the second Saw movie.
As for Martyrs, there can be no question that the gore has a lot to do with the film’s effectiveness: we’re inhabiting the mind of a particular character, and forced to take her journey vicariously in as unflinching a way as cinema can possibly represent. (And it’s not like they don’t back down on the gore here: there are places where this film could have gone a lot further, but Laugier took the road of art rather than that of exploitation.) Someone else in the thread calls Martyrs “pseudo-intellectual,” which I think pretty clearly misses the point: there are currents of thought at work on the part of some of this film’s characters that are pretty clearly intended to be shown as morally depraved and pointless, but that has little to do with the human experience at the center of the film, what the protagonists go through, which is the real emotional core of it all. It’s hard to say more without spoilers, though. I’ve been thinking of dedicating a new thread to discussion of this film on its own, but I’m not sure how many folks have seen it.
Meet The Feebles- Peter Jackson goes backstage at a Muppets-like show. There are graphic rape and shit eating scenes.
Born On The Fourth Of July- There are no really graphic scenes. But there is an overall unpleasantness that’s hard to wipe away.
Jacob’s Ladder- Everything about the film is meant to make you feel nervous, nauseous (again without being graphic) and ill at ease. It does all this VERY well.
, but the point of Clerks 2 was, to me, the jail cell scene near the end. I think the whole movie was made just to get to that scene, that emotional honesty between 2 old friends who never let that wall down. I understand if the journey wasn’t worth it to you, but I was impressed by the surprising emotion from such stunted ppl in an otherwise silly movie with a donkey sex-scene. A silly, funny movie with that delivers more than gross-out humor.