A lot of classic movies being mentioned here, but my WTF moments are from two relatively more recent films:
Brown Bunny, in which even a great oral sex scene at the end of the movie isn’t worth the time it takes to get there. The entire movie is a WTF, as in WTF, Vincent Gallo, were you thinking when you wrote and starred, and directed this excrescence? Even worse, why did I sit through it?
Even Rubber was a bit of a WTF, but at least it had the distinction of giving you advance warning! Admittedly, I did rather enjoy this one; I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy a movie about a suddenly sentient, psychopathic car tire?
Intersting to note that the name she give is “[Something] Washington.” Even back then it was noted that that name was more common among Blacks than Whites.
There’s a trope of the Magical Negro, which explains why so often in films there is no romance between a black and a white main character, even though it might make sense for there to be one in that film:
Part of it is that he is “a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.”
On the other hand, DeMille might have been simply doing the traditional Hollywood reworking of an earlier gag, this time with gorillas. Back in 1919 he’d dressed poor Gloria Swanson in a wedding dress and chucked her in with a lion. (Links to video of her recounting the experience)
OMG, I’d forgotten about that. I’m glad I’m not Mrs. DeMille. He had some strange concept of the purpose of marriage.
Speaking of Shirley Temple, the premise of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer made me go WTF. A notorious playboy is found with a 17-year-old girl in his apartment late at night and is arrested. The judge, who happens to be the girl’s older sister, “punishes” him by forcing him to date said girl. What the …?
My apologies. Apparently I can’t read, otherwise I would have realized the thread was about older movies and my post was pretty much irrelevant. D’oh!
Two other amazing things about that film:
(1) It was written by Sidney Sheldon
(2) It won the Oscar for Best Screenplay over masterpieces Shoeshine, Monsieur Verdoux and Body and Soul. And even the other nominee A Double Life is exponentially better.
I used to be open-mined, but the bismuth vein in my left shoulder blade ran out. Now Asscrack City is all but a ghost town. If it weren’t for the fertilizer plant nearby…
Here’s one you might not have expected: Häxan, aka Witchcraft Through The Ages a Scandinavian film from 1922, a year in cinema not noted for a surfeit of Satanic anilingus. on Youtube, 42 minutes in for you NSFW-flouters)
Haxan also has a drawing, supposedly an old woodcut, of a naked woman in wrist-ankle bondage, a young a beautiful woman with a really nice body … not the stereotypical haggard crone. I think there were some porny undertones to it, for sure. I’ll put a spoiler-boxed link to the pic I put on my blog, as it’s NSFW … dunno how the hell it got made in 1922, except, you know … European. It was a on TCM several years ago, so apparently almost a century of time made it less objectionable.
The clip I watched seems like a Jeffrey Jones wet dream.
I haven’t seen the film, but I find it quite amusing that (as I understand it) Vincent Gallo made a film that required his ex to give him a blow job. Presumably it had to be written that way, it had to be filmed that way, it had to be real, and it had to be him and his ex in the two roles. He must be able to keep an incredibly straight face.
ETA: Looks like she wasn’t his ex after all, but I remain amused.
Oh! I was thinking the other Jeff Jones, the illustrator. And that brings me back to the thread: Jeff Jones “Idyll” is chock-full of WTF humor – and also has depictions of naked children. Awkward! I don’t think he could publish this material today.
Reading this, I wondered "how could it possibly be that bad? They must be exagerating or something. So, of course, I had to watch.
Holy crap! You were both right. I didnt’ expect that!:eek:
I looked it up, of course, and it’s weird, but I’m not sure why you think it’s that bad. I couldn’t understand the dialogs, though, so maybe there’s something there?