Forget suspense for the moment. Forget nameless horrors that actually go unseen. Forget taut, edge of your seat thrills…we’re talking about pure blood’n’guts.
My picks?
•Day of the Dead. ('Natch.)
'Natch. Mostly because of the …final scenes at the end, with the horde of zombie feasting upon several hapless (living) humans. On screen. These zombies weren’t just munching on arms…they were tearing open abdomens, and ripping off still-screaming human heads.
•Dead Alive.
Peter Jackson’s zombie movie. Fun movie. …with so much blood shed in just one scene, that a character starts slipping in it.
So…anyone else care to take a stab at this topic? Don’t leave me hanging.
Ranchoth
(I’m such a cut-up.)
I second “Day of the Dead”…i was quite suprised by the mentioned scene. Especially since the previous installment “Dawn of the Dead” ,while a wonderfull zombie flick, was somewhat lacking on gore (the zombies just looked like humans covered in sickly green makeup!).
As far as mainstream movies I offer “Evil Dead”.
Also i’m told by a friend that a basically unknown movie “Gates of Hell” is the gorriest thing he had seen.
Though not exactly horror, ‘Ichi the Killer’ is one of the goriest movies I have ever seen. It also has plenty of violence that is disturbing in it’s brutality, if not exactly gory. It’s also pretty damn funny.
A couple years ago they did a stage show of Dead Alive (aka Braindead) in Wellington. The first few seats were labelled as potential splash zones. I was completely gutted (sorry for the pun) when I missed the run.
The remake of House on Haunted Hill is probably the goriest I’ve seen for a while.
Your friend was right, ThatGuy, The Gates of Hell is pretty gory. I own it on DVD. It’s been mentioned several times here on the SDMB. In once scene, a character literally pukes her guts out. It was one of the only things I ever saw on film that actually made me gag (although I was only ten at the time). It’s on sale now at Amazon under the title City of the Living Dead. Pretty much anything by that director is going to be pretty nasty. Zombie is another favorite of mine. Watch out for that splintered wood!
In threads of this sort, Peter Jackson’s Braindead (released in the states as Dead Alive) always gets mentioned, especially concerning the climax involving a lawnmower. For me, though, the grossest thing in that movie was toward the beginning when Lionel’s newly zombified mother has a boil that bursts and the bloody pus it emits lands in another person’s soup, from which that person then eats a spoonful. The lawnmower climax is so over-the-top that it can’t be taken seriously as gore, at least by me.
There’s a scene toward the end of the David Cronenberg film The Brood that I won’t even attempt to describe, but I will say that I think it actually rivals the gut-puking scene in City of the Living Dead. David Cronenberg is another director whose movies are frequently very gory.
I hear the Japanese Ginnipiggu (Guinea Pig) series of movies are disgustingly gory. The story is that one was so bad that Charlie Sheen had been watching it and he called the FBI, because he thought it was a real-life snuff film.
The first two Evil Dead movies fit the bill quite nicely.
Though in the 2nd it gets a bit over the top with the sheer amount of colored blood. I really didn’t know the human body contained ten gallons of blood.
I’ve seen them, and they are definitely among the goriest I’ve ever seen. The first one, Flower of Flesh and Blood (probably the one Sheen saw), was done seriously, and was meant to look like an actual snuff film. A woman is kidnapped, drugged, and
slowly disembowelled as each of her limbs is sawed and pulled off, piece by piece
Only one person dies in the film, but it’s the entire hour-long film.
The subsequent Guinea Pig movies are even bloodier, but it’s played for laughs. In one, a hopeless mook of a salesman decides to commit suicide, only to discover that he cant die. He spends the entire movie hacking, slicing, chopping, stabbing and breaking himself until by the end of the film he’s just a head sitting on the table wondering how he’s going to get to work.
Another one that’s up there is Cannibal Holocaust, about a group of documentary makers who go into the Amazon to film a mythical cannibal tribe. The group vanishes without a trace, but their film is found several years later (sound familiar?). According to the IMDb, it was so realistic that the director ended up having to prove in court (in Italy) that the human death scenes were faked (the animal death scenes, AFAIK, are real). Very gruesome.
I don’t know - it may be tame by today’s standards, but I thought David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly was incredibly stomach-turning (and I mean that in a good way!). I’m not that squeamish, but there were several scenes where I had to cover my eyes for a second!
I saw a 1980s horror comedy BLOOD DINER that I think was a parody remake of a
1960s HG Lewis film. Damn fine gore!
Also, while not unremittingly gory, REANIMATOR and BRIDE OF both have some excellent money shots. Cue line for each one “Stand back, Dan- OVERDOSE!!!” and “Make a note of it, Dan- TISSUE REJECTION!”
I’ll third Gates of Hell; I saw it when I was thirteen or so, and spent about a week resisting the gag reflex, based on the puking scene and the drill scene.
I’ll also agree with Midnight Radio regarding Dead Alive; I think I was expecting more; the grand finale didn’t do much for me.
And I’ll second Zombie as well, for the shower scene. Ouch!
On review, I guess I agree with everything MidnightRadio said.
I can’t comment on Guinea Pig and Ichi the Killer, but I know people who’ve seen both and I’m pretty certain I won’t be subjecting myself to them.
I know it’s not considered a classic or anything, but I’m very fond of the Jason X frozen head bit. And pretty much anything Troma ever produced. I enjoy the splatter.
Sometimes it’s the less gory things that really make me cringe, though. The broken leg in the dumwaiter in H20 gets me every time, as does the boiling pot of corn in Sleepaway Camp.
But I think my all-time favorite gore is the first ten minutes of Ghost Ship. I went to see it on a lark, just for something to do, and that two minutes of flopping limbs was entirely worth the price.
Ravenous, a smaller film made a few years ago with Guy Pierce, was pretty gory. It was also alot of fun- about a bunch of stranded soldiers just after the Civil War who realize that if they eat each other, they get more powerful.
I saw a German zombie movie that was pretty damn gory and disturbing. I say a good half hour of the movie was closeups of German zombies eating people. They went into so much detail I wonder if it was some sort of strange erotic thing for them. (and no, I wasn’t turned on, that much).
Perhaps the most disturbing scene I’ve ever…err…seen, was in a low budget film a friend of mine was working on. At one point a lesbian vampire goes down on a lesbian nun -yes, that’s right-, and begins to literally eat her. They used roast beef with ketchup, I think. I sat there watching this thing with the director of the film. After, I didn’t know whether to puke on him or take him outside and give him the beating he deserved.
Ravenous was pretty gory, and very amusing. It involved stranded soldiers (around the time of the Civil War) who found out that eating someone else gave you their strength. It was a good movie, actually, with Guy Pierce and that English guy from The Full Monty.
The most disgusting scene I’ve watched so far (and I’ve seen many of the movies mentioned above), was in a low budget horror movie which a friend worked on. In it, a lesbian vampire goes down on a lesbian nun (yes, that’s what I wrote). During they course of this, she starts literally eating her. I think they used roast beef and ketchup for it. And I know they hired hookers to act it out. The director was in the same room when I watched this mess. After, I didn’t know whether to walk over and puke on him, or pull him outside and giving him a richly deserved beating. I did neither, but I know he was amused because I kept laughing at his stupid, ugly little movie.
The goriest movie ever? Hard to say. Context means a lot—there are some sights in the Evil Dead films that should be stomach-churning, but they’re played for laughs, and if you can get on the movies’ wavelength it’s more fun than gross, kinda like what the Three Stooges would’ve been like if they’d had Tom Savini working for them.
Given that, the movies that struck me as the goriest were probably the Nekromantik films. It takes more than blood and guts to get me queasy … like, for example, people getting intimate with putrefying flesh. Yep, I think that’ll about do it for me.
