From sewing people together to chomping down on a live octopus, these R-rated movies really
pushed audiences to their limits.
"Wolf Creek" is the product of unchecked misogyny and a sickening fascination
with violence.
The movie positions itself as a typical slasher flick about three friends taking a trip through
the Australian outback when their car breaks down in Wolf Creek Park.
A man named Mick stumbles upon the group and offers to help before revealing himself to
be a sadistic killer.
"That's not a knife.
This is a knife."
The trio of protagonists in "Wolf Creek" contains one man, but he's sidelined for almost the
entirety of the movie until he escapes with his life at the end.
Most of the screen time is dedicated to showing Mick torturing the two women in ways that
the film seems to find entertaining.
After an implied sexual assault, Mick severs limbs and spinal cords while stabbing and
shooting to his heart's content.
The movie never lets up on showing women in horrendous pain and suffering.
Roger Ebert rightfully called out the film for its misogyny, writing,
"There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic
celebration of pain and cruelty?"
Slashers have their place, but they don't have to be as openly hateful as "Wolf Creek."
Unfortunately the visceral nature of these killings might be due to the movie being based
on a true story, that of Ivan Milat, the serial killer known as the Backpacker Murderer.
A movie with a title like "I Spit on Your Grave" sets a certain tone for audiences before
they even walk into the theater.
The film debuted in 1978 with a poster that read,
"This woman has just cut, chopped, broken, and burned five men beyond recognition...
but no jury in America would ever convict her."
Aside from the dubious claim about juries, the sentence perfectly sums up the film's
fascination with violence.
Unfortunately, violence is really the only thing the movie cares to show.
The premise sees a woman seeking revenge on five men after they sexually assault her,
and the weak plot merely serves as a means to string together one horrifying scene after another.
The assault that kicks off the movie's revenge plot takes up a gratuitous amount of screen
time, and the brutal murders that follow it don't really offer any sense of catharsis.
Roger Ebert called the movie "a vile bag of garbage" and continued by saying,
"Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life."
The shock factor can carry a movie pretty far, though.
Decades after its release, "I Spit on Your Grave" somehow spawned a 2010 remake and multiple
sequels, each arguably as upsetting as the original.
"Sausage Party," the 2016 comedy from the minds of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg begins
with a premise reminiscent of "Toy Story."
When the lights go out at a local grocery store, the food items come alive.
Most of them dream of one day being bought by a customer and taken to the Great Beyond,
but they don't realize they're destined to be eaten alive.
Feature-length adult animation with an imaginative concept seems like a promising proposition.
On release, the movie generated a ton of buzz, and its critical reception was overwhelmingly positive.
Looking back now, it's hard to imagine how the film even earned a release, much less
critical praise, considering how heavily it relies on being downright offensive for laughs.
The crude sexual humor is rampant, but with a name like "Sausage Party," what else would
you expect?
"You couldn't fit an eggplant in there!
It's too big, it'll tear you in half!"
However, what's really jarring is just how many racial stereotypes were squeezed into
the film.
Scene after scene pairs Kareem Abdul Lavash with Sammy Bagel
Jr. and forces them to play out one anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic trope after another.
A sentient bottle of Native American liquor is given a cringe-worthy performance by Bill
Hader, and the movie's Twinkie character is gay.
The list of groups used as punch lines goes on
and on, but the movie, really, should not.
"Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star" really tries its hardest to turn the adult film industry
into one interminable running joke, but it really should have channeled its efforts elsewhere.
The film follows its titular character after he discovers that his parents used to be porn stars.
Bucky takes their history as inspiration and sets off for Hollywood, determined to find
his own way to break into the industry.
"This is my destiny!
I was born to be a star!"
It doesn't take long for Bucky to realize that his body doesn't exactly live up to adult
film standards, but he finds his way to stardom despite anything that he's lacking.
The problem with "Bucky Larson" might not be that it went too far with its lazy sex
humor, but that it didn't go far enough with creating real characters or a story worth
paying attention to.
There are only so many small penis jokes someone can be expected to listen to, and "Bucky Larson"
fills out more than a lifetime's quota.
Darren Aronofsky has become synonymous with films that push boundaries.
He isn't afraid to tell complicated stories or to present audiences with horrifying imagery
that works to make the reality of his characters really hit home.
It's a filmmaking strategy that's definitely earned him success, but one that's also sure
to turn away plenty of viewers.
"Requiem for a Dream" was Aronofsky's second film, and he had ambitious plans for it.
The movie is an adaptation of a Hubert Selby Jr. novel, and the story centers on the lives
of a group of addicts living in New York City.
Sara becomes addicted to amphetamines while trying to lose weight for a potential television
appearance, while her son Harry and his friends use and deal heroin.
The film uses split screen segments and other editing techniques to disorient audiences
and put them in the mindset of the movie's fractured characters.
The bizarre and rapid editing is enough to make someone feel a bit queasy in certain
moments, but it's the movie's depiction of needle injections, arm infections, violence,
and sexual assault that really takes things over the top.
The original cut of the film was rated NC-17, but even though the R-rated version cut down
on some of the sexual content, the rest is still graphic enough to sicken an unprepared viewer.
"Oldboy" is a 2003 South Korean film by director Park Chan-wook.
Based on a Japanese manga of the same name, the movie follows a man named Oh Dae-su who
is kidnapped and locked inside what amounts to a hotel room for 15 years.
When he's suddenly released, Oh Dae-su desperately begins looking for the truth behind his imprisonment
and plotting his revenge against the people who took him captive.
By any measure, "Oldboy" is a fantastic film.
It delivers a noir-styled story with some truly memorable fight scenes and a plot that
keeps you guessing right up to the very end.
However, critical acclaim and popular reception aside, the movie still goes too far at least once.
Some might find the big twist a bit on the gross side, but that's not the gross-out moment
that puts "Oldboy" over the top.
The octopus eating scene takes place shortly after Oh Dae-su is released from his prison.
He shows up at a sushi restaurant and demands to eat something that's still alive.
He proceeds to chow down on a live octopus, which lead actor Choi Min-sik really did.
Creating the scene took three takes and each time Min-sik crushed a live octopus between
his teeth.
Does the scene create a thematically resonant moment in the movie?
Sure.
Was it completely necessary?
Almost definitely not.
The very premise of 2009's "The Human Centipede" takes things so far that it's a wonder that
the movie ever got made.
For anyone who's missed more than a decade's worth of jokes about the film, here's a basic
breakdown of the plot.
Dr. Josef Heiter is a retired surgeon-turned-psychopath who's become obsessed with using his medical
skills to make obscene creatures.
He kidnaps three tourists and sews them together in a line to form one continuous digestive tract.
After that, Heiter spends the rest of the movie continuing to torment the three as he
trains his "human centipede" as a pet.
Eventually, investigators stumble upon Heiter's home and a bloodbath brings the movie to its conclusion.
"The Human Centipede" is nauseating to even think about, and watching it is no better.
As we've already seen with other movies on this list, though, nausea-inducing shocks
can take a movie pretty far.
Horror movies often aim to make audiences uncomfortable, but it's a thin line between
scaring an audience so badly they hide their eyes and showing them something so repulsive
they're forced to look away from the screen.
"Hostel: Part II" found the line, poked it, then jumped right to the other side.
The movie ran into problems well before it even made its way into theaters.
The original theatrical poster had to be banned and replaced because it was too graphic.
It simply featured a small bit of text overlaid on an image of chopped-up, bloody flesh.
The replacement poster had an unclothed woman's body holding what is presumably her own severed
head, so that one likely ran into issues at most theaters as well.
The story, such as it is, follows a group of art students on vacation who unwittingly
get auctioned off to a secret ring of wealthy torture fanatics.
Scene after scene of nudity and torture play out, including graphic depictions of scalping,
multiple beheadings, and severed genitalia being fed to dogs.
"Saw" took the world by storm in 2004.
Horror fans were intrigued by the film's grotesque premise and delighted by its sudden twist ending.
A lot of the magic has to do with James Wan's directing, which might be why there's little
magic or substance to be found in the sequels.
When you start with a sadistic killer dishing out punishment via elaborate torture devices
to anyone he deems deserving, it's hard to get much more disturbing.
That didn't stop the "Saw" sequels from trying to up the ante, and even though the
most squeamish of viewers stopped after the first film, "Saw III" is the one that finally
took things too far.
There are, of course, all the nightmarish traps that fans had come to expect from the franchise.
A woman is ripped apart after fishing a key out of acid and still failing to escape.
Another is frozen to death, and a man is drowned in the ground-up remains of pigs.
It's all nauseating stuff, but then the film goes on to include a surgery scene in which
serial killer John Kramer has his skull drilled open to relieve pressure on his brain.
The movie is just one miserable scene after another, presented with sloppy editing and
a story that would send an audience right to sleep if it weren't for the constant onslaught
of nightmarish imagery on screen.
A movie doesn't have to be gross or crude to go too far.
Sometimes a film just finds a way to pour gas on a fire that really needs to die down.
In 1991, Oliver Stone released his political thriller "JFK" starring Kevin Costner and
Gary Oldman.
The film begins with the investigation of Kennedy's assassination, which ends after
Lee Harvey Oswald is killed.
Years later, though, the investigation is reopened and a conspiracy tying the murder
to members of the United States government itself is uncovered.
"We're going back into the case Lou.
The murder of the president."
Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination have been running rampant since 1963, and
the most diehard believers didn't need Stone to step in and reaffirm their suspicions.
He decided to do it anyway, and "JFK" glorifies the kind of thinking that keeps new conspiracy
theories popping up online every day.
In case anyone thought that Stone had just made the poor decision to use real conspiracy
theories as fodder for a big movie, he came back and released a documentary called "JFK
Revisited: Through the Looking Glass" in 2021.
It takes the same ideas at the heart of the original film's plot but presents them as
though they are definitive facts that Stone himself has uncovered.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno, like many raunchy comedies, is actually a sweet movie when you
get right down to it — one about lifelong best friends who may actually have romantic
feelings for one another.
However, the fact that it had the word "porno" in its title meant the film already went way
too far for moviegoers.
This was especially true in the movie's marketing, which kicked off with a poster that proved
so suggestive that it ended up getting banned from theaters – and replaced with posters
that seemed barely related to the movie at all.
Afterwards, the feature encountered further trouble running TV ads and public billboards
with its full title, resulting in it being given the generic moniker of "Zack and Miri"
on many promotional materials.
Sometimes, a movie that stirs up this much controversy can ride the publicity to box
office success – but that didn't happen with this one.
"If it's so easy, how come everybody doesn't do it?"
"Because other people have options!
And dignity!"
Released at the very end of October 2008, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" ended up sinking
without a trace at the box office.
The Kevin Smith comedy is ultimately a film that wants to tug at your heartstrings, but
despite the racy title, it probably failed to catch your attention.