Home

Commentary

25 Most Disturbing Movies List, #10: Clockwork Orange

Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the previous 13). [<< #11]

10. A Clockwork Orange (1971) 10/7
A film of such high artistic merit that I hesitate to place it here, but Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's sci-fi novel must grace any list with "disturbing" in the title. Mainstream enough to have been seen by countless neophytes, but twisted enough to be treasured by the more perverse among us, A Clockwork Orange (even the title is unsettling in its somewhat arbitrary and colorful surrealism) evokes a not very distant dystopia that is both absolutely convincing and yet disorienting in its restrained mix of futurism and contemporary realism: Kubrick infuses the early 70s overt, garish style with "things to come" details to create an effect both familiar and strange.

Blog entry 11/05/2009 - 3:25pm
Cotinue reading. . .
25 Most Disturbing Movies, #11: The Devils

Continuing Simon Augustine's countdown of the Most Disturbing Movies (Read Part 1 for the previous 13) [<< #12]

11. The Devils (1971) 10/7
(Still not on DVD as of publication)

A grand freak-out of religious sexual frenzy, persecution and humanist martyrdom, The Devils is probably the most censored film in history and the most accomplished film by supreme agent provocateur and English madman Ken Russell. Based on sci-fi demiurge Aldous Huxley's semi-historical novel The Devils of Loudon, it is the story of Father Grandier (Oliver Reed), the leader/priest of an outpost of Protestantism in a sixteenth-century France that Louis XIII - prodded by corrupt Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) and his henchman - is trying to “persuade” (with theology, Christian love, and torture) to become more Catholic.

Blog entry 11/04/2009 - 12:50pm
Cotinue reading. . .
25 Most Disturbing Movies, Continued: #12: Pink Flamingos

We'll be counting down the top 12 Most Disturbing Movies from here on out. Read Part 1 for the previous 13 from Simon Augustine.

12. Pink Flamingos (1972) Gross-out: 7 /Artistic Merit: 8
John Waters, emerging from the depths and despair of middle-class Baltimore, was Disturbing Night At the Movies' first great Confabulist of Campiness, taking full advantage of Susan Sontag's observation's about the underhand power of “camp,” and infusing it with all the bizarre bluster, pain, confusion, humanity, resentment, irreverence and all-out bad taste you'd get if you merged the gay community with an underground-oriented Disturbist sensibility, smacking what was left of square America in 1972 square in the face.

Click on for more.

Blog entry 11/04/2009 - 12:23pm
Cotinue reading. . .
The 25 Most Disturbing Movies: Part I

Disturbing Night At The Movies:” The Ultimate List of Dangerous Films (or How I Misspent My Youth Watching Slashers, Sickos, and Psychos Instead of Reading Shakespeare)

By Simon Augustine

One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real. -Klaus Kinski 

Please Do Not Read This Article If You Are Under The Age of 25.

Introduction: Q: Are We Not Men? A: No, We Are Disturbed

There is a whole underground army of moviegoers out there, scouring the internet for undiscovered treasures, rifling through what is left of sketchy video stores, prying open dark vaults to find the dusty reels of forgotten anti-masterpieces. The cinematic warriors of whom I speak - constantly fighting normal moral conventions, the prodding of their own consciences, and the eternal “tsk-tsking” of the world at large - are the “Disturbists:” cinephiles devoted to the most disgusting, terrifying, upsetting, gory, profane, irreverent movies ever made: the Canon of Disturbing Cinema.

Blog entry 10/30/2009 - 10:44pm
Cotinue reading. . .
Zulawski & Raimi: The Hell They Dragged Us Into

By Steven Boone

(originally published on GreenCine Daily, May 2009)

Isabel Adjani in POSSESSION

"To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I'm concerned, I don't make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence."
- Andrzej Zulawski

"My goal is not to offend people. It is to entertain, thrill, scare, make them laugh, but not to offend them."
- Sam Raimi

"I don’t give a fuck about the audience."
- Andrzej Zulawski

Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987) and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) are two sides of the same cursed coin, producing in the viewer an identical effect—sheer giddiness at their audacious, divinely, demonically, deliriously inventive visual play. Each flick is a series of riffs on the notion of possession—Raimi's aimed at the grindhouses, Zulawski's at European arthouses. But both films are so dizzyingly choreographed that keen viewers will recognize them as two of the 1980s' most sublime horror classics. Like the possessed humans, hands and furniture dancing around in them, these films simply convulse with creative electricity. They forced their way out of their creators.

Blog entry 10/13/2009 - 11:19am
Cotinue reading. . .
To the Motion Picture Production Code on its 75th Birthday

 

by Mick LaSalle

hayscodedisclaimer.jpg The story of the Production Code is a special story, in that it's the one time the producers didn't win. They didn't because of a single, dread miscalculation that ended up changing movies and American society, in both cases for the worse. The effects of this miscalculation are still being felt today.

Taking a step back: There's a disease that seizes the imagination of both the right and the left in America, the conviction that if only the side of goodness and virtue had control of the movies, it could rid the world of everything bad. These are people inflicted with an idealism that takes the form of wanting to destroy art, and from the beginning, movie producers have known how to deal with such characters: Humor them. Give them a press conference. Give them a studio tour. Make them feel as if they're being brought into the fold. Never say no to them. Only say yes, of course, we will do that. We've never thought of that. We must make an arrangement, immediately...

Blog entry 07/31/2009 - 1:45pm
Cotinue reading. . .
Subways, Shitholes & Death Wishes

by Vadim Rizov

(A GC exclusive; reposted from GreenCine Daily)

Taking-of-Pelham-123.jpgReleased three months apart, Death Wish and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three are twinned images of the subway as a microcosm of 1974 New York City: Death Wish the urban hell variant, Pelham a dystopian playground. Both focus on people with guns infesting the transport system and start a general acceptance of the city being as violent and out-of-control as could be. (The next year, the city almost had to declare bankruptcy, leading to the infamous Ford to City: Drop Dead Daily News headline, which pretty much sums up the overall tenor.) Both have lasted far past their initial sell-by dates as basic programmers. On the occasion of Tony Scott's ill-advised remake of Pelham, it's worth thinking about the ways the films complement each other.

Blog entry 06/11/2009 - 3:18pm
Cotinue reading. . .
DVD OF THE WEEK: a Johnny Got His Gun video essay by Kevin Lee.

[We're extremely proud to bring Shooting Down Pictures cine-whiz Kevin B. Lee into the fold with a fabulous new video essay for GreenCine Daily's DVD of the Week: Johnny Got His Gun. Headbangers, unite!]

Blog entry 04/29/2009 - 1:38pm
Cotinue reading. . .
MIA DVDs 3-D

By Craig Phillips

taxingwomanYet another in my series of fully biased reports on movies that are frustratingly absent a current DVD release here in the United States (the other two lists are here, and here.) Here are ten more neglected films -- and this is one article I wouldn't mind seeing become dated, when/if these films finally do arrive on disc:

  • The List of Adrian Messenger: I'll confess that I haven't seen this one since I was a pre-teen (on television one night), but it was one of the first mystery films I both really loved and even understood, aside from the 70s all-star Agatha Christie films. Even if there's a chance it's now dated, the pedigree -- director John Huston, actors Kirk Douglas, George C. Scott, Robert Mitchum, et al -- should alone be enough to get this one its due on DVD. A real head-scratcher that it's not
  • A Taxing Woman: Juzo Itami's wonderful film has long been OOP on DVD, which seems to occur to me every year on tax day. The titular tax agent is played by Itami's wife. Was followed by a sequel, also not on DVD in the States. Someone do an audit and find out why.
Blog entry 04/20/2009 - 11:42am
Cotinue reading. . .
Why Linklater's 1980 Will Totally Rule


dazed and confusedBy Vadim Rizov

Last Friday, CHUD.com reported that at a benefit screening of Dazed And Confused, writer-director Richard Linklater said he was working on "a sort of spiritual sequel" to the film, using none of the same characters, but a similar approach to frosh stumbling through a first weekend at college in 1980. If you're a fan of Dazed (and I am, to the point of fetishism), this is good news: though Dazed has definitively replaced American Graffiti as the template for the "one coming-of-age night" genre, no one's really gotten it right since. (Can't Hardly Wait got closest, and it's basically a cartoon.)

It's easy to be cynical about why Linklater's making this movie at this particular moment. He's sitting on two movies that aren't theater-bound. It's no real surprise that his documentary profile of University of Texas coach Augie Garrido, Inning By Inning: A Portrait of a Coach, is going straight-to-DVD after being shown on ESPN; the arthouse crowd doesn't typically do sports movies, no matter how warmly intended or who's making them. But who could've guessed Me And Orson Welles would still be distributor-less half a year after its Toronto premiere, demographic-baiting star Zac Efron and all? It gets worse: in the years since the undeniable critical and commercial success of School of Rock, Linklater's worked on a rejected HBO pilot, a Bad News Bears remake that underperformed commercially and critically, a cult movie (A Scanner Darkly) that failed to justify its budget, and a didactic lecture-film (Fast Food Nation) that came and went virtually unnoticed. This is not the way one of '90s indie cinema's icons should be heading; Linklater would appear to no longer be at the vanguard of American film, a status that once went unquestioned.

Blog entry 04/01/2009 - 2:41pm
Cotinue reading. . .

* You can comment on articles

* Private messaging to others in the GreenCine community -- and more features coming soon!

* Keep apprised of happenings in the world of films festivals, independent, international, cult, classic, horror movies and more!

* As a free registered member, you can upgrade your account to a rental subscription -- or if you want a rental subscription right away, click here.