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Disturbing List Epilogue: (Dis)Honorable Mentions and More.
11 November 2009 11:06 AM, PST
Before we get to Simon Augustine's addendum, his lengthy list of (dis)honorable mentions, other Disturbing Films, he first has this suggestion to get through your viewing party.
Items you may want to have handy in addition to DVDs:
Ouija Board: you may want to leave this lying on the coffee table. You'd be amazed how many otherwise rational and reasonable adults, who adamantly believe in science, evolution, and Einstein, and who shrug condcscendingly at the mention of Sasquatch, The Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, crop circles, ghosts, aliens, and A Divine Creator will refuse to use or even touch the magical Ouija. A lot of people don't believe in God these days, but they believe in power of the Spirit Board. Moving the pointer around and inviting Satan and his hellish minions to join you at Dnatm can add to the fun and anxiety. Draw a pentagram on the floor. It can't hurt. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies #1: Irreversible
11 November 2009 10:08 AM, PST
Finishing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #2]
1. Irreversible (2002) 10/10
The undisputed king - no doubt about it. Bar none. No holds barred. Hold everything. Hide the kids, lock the door, be prepared to white knuckle it and hold on tight. L'enfant terrible and talented sonafabitch Gaspar Noé used some of the most prodigious command of sight, sound, and atmosphere since Kubrick to completely envelop you, rendering you helpless and utterly aghast.
Irreversible, still banned in several countries, is an all-out assault on the senses: the camera swirling and dipping like a drunk sailor getting sea-sick; the grinding, insisting, dread-soaked musical score; the flashing effect that can cause seizures; the backward titles; the backward chronology; the backwardness of the characters who get caught up in a maelstrom of violence; the foreboding bell of horror tolling, that signals the beginning of the film. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies List: #2: Salo
10 November 2009 2:26 PM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #3]
2. Salo (or 120 Days of Sodom) (1975) 10/9
This is high falutin' stuff for such a reprehensible list as this: it's the only Disturbing Film that is accompanied by a bibliography in the opening credits (just what an audience wants - homework). In this case, however, such ambitious gestures are warranted; Italian poet and provocateur Pier Paolo Passolini assembles all of his considerable directorial skill and visual mastery to deliver a really, really bad time -- an unflinching look at the savagery and absurdity of the sadistic impulse brought to its logical, and most banal, extreme. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies #3: Last House on the Left
10 November 2009 9:30 AM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #4]
3. Last House on The Left (1972) 8/10
In the horror genre, Last House on The Left is the seminal modern Disturbing Film; it was to the downer hippie crowd sliding out of the bad trip of Vietnam what Psycho was a decade earlier to audiences covering their eyes during the shower scene. A gang of drugged-out killers, lead by Krug (David Hess, one of the standout exploitation roles of all time; far too convincing) drags a pair of upper class girls to the woods of suburban Connecticut after the teenagers are ensnared going to the big city to see a rock band. They proceed to viciously humiliate, rape, and dismember them in some of the grimmest and unsettling scenes ever put to celluloid.
Based loosely on Bergman's The Virgin Spring, Last House has slapstick “comic-relief” cop scenes (with a young Martin Kove, »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies #4: Texas Chainsaw Massacre
9 November 2009 12:57 PM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #5]
4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) 8/8
Tobe Hooper, a talented and innovative filmmaker who never quite got his mainstream due, even after making Poltergeist (and be embroiled in controversy with Steven Spielberg about who actually directed it), made this perennial classic on the cheap in the early seventies. Taking the baton from Wes Craven and Last House on The Left, it expresses the miasma of violent dread and disorientation that hung over an America left schizophrenic by the auto-cannibalism of Vietnam, Kent State, Attica, Watergate, etc. Hooper swings at the audience with the kind of gritty haymaker that only very hungry, very creative, and very poor directors just out of the gate can make. »
- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies #5: August Underground Trilogy
9 November 2009 10:48 AM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #6]
5. The August Underground Trilogy (August Underground 2002, Mordum 2003, Penance 2007) 10/6 [link to request on GreenCine]
Wow, August Underground, you're a piece of work. All your best home movies include you and your psycho girlfriend running around, capturing unsuspecting victims, and dragging then to a basement or attacking them in their home and doing the most unspeakable things to them. (“Unspeakable” is one of those hyperbolic movie-critic stock words, like “unimaginable' or “jaw-dropping,” but not entirely accurate, because I'm about to speak a little bit about the unspeakable.) The trilogy plays like an extended and benumbing snuff movie as the two twentysomething killers videotape their gleeful and absolutely barren adventures in misanthropy...
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- underdog
25 Most Disturbing Movies #6: Requiem for a Dream
9 November 2009 10:11 AM, PST
Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the first 13). [<< #7]
6. Requiem For A Dream (2002) 9 (gross out)/8 (artistic merit)
Darren Aronofsky, the Diy auteur who burst onto the scene with the black and white religious-techno fable Pi, and more recently made the wrenching The Wrestler, may have reached a creative peak with this adaptation of a novel by one of the stars of the disturbing branch of the literary world: Hubert Selby, Jr., who also wrote the book Last Exit to Brooklyn. In perhaps the most jarring and skillfully unnerving chronicles of drug addiction ever made, we witness the destruction by heroin and prescription pills of a mother, her son, his girlfriend and best friend (Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans, all top-notch). »
- underdog
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