The 100 Most Movies

The 100+ Most Controversial Films of All-Time
Film Title/Year, Director

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Baise Moi (2000, Fr.) (translated "Screw or F--k Me")
D. Virginie Despentes
A hardcore hybrid of Natural Born
Killers and Thelma & Louise, this drama about two abused
women who turned vigilante was banned in its native
France.
This daring and scandalous, unrated art-house import about
heartless and irrational female sexual rage by two hardened
and randy females was the first collaboration between French
film-maker Virginie Despentes and former porn actress Coralie
Trinh Thi. The script was adapted from Despentes' own 1995
novel.
The French female empowerment film was a very violent,
sensationalist, bold, graphic and hard-core sex-filled version
of Natural Born Killers (1994) and Thelma & Louise (1991) - a
nihilistic and self-destructive picture that ran into extreme
protest and controversy. Pressure groups sought to have the
French government reclassify it as X-rated. It was banned in
France, its native country of release.
The nihilistic and nasty road film set in modern-day France and
shot on grainy digital video, featured two main female
characters (both French adult film stars), lower-class French
'bad girls' who appeared to have lesbian tendencies:


Nadine (Karine Bach/Karen Lancaume), a tall part-time
prostitute



Manu (Raffaela Anderson), a smaller, lower class,
underaged, unemployed porn star actress

Its porno-style, animalistic sexuality (fellatio, ejaculation and
penetration) included - in the first fifteen minutes - an explicit
and brutal rape/sodomy scene in an abandoned underground
parking garage (against Manu and a drug-addicted friend of
hers), with a close-up insert shot of the violated vagina of the
friend. Manu's friend struggled, screamed, and resisted (and
was bloodily beaten), while Manu laid back and accepted the
violation from behind from the rapist - who soon became
disinterested in her.
Shortly later, the anarchic Manu shot her unsympathetic,
abusive and contemptuous boyfriend when he accused her of

Nadine

Manu

enjoying the rape. At around the same time, Nadine strangled
her roommate during an argument.
Manu stole 10,000 francs from her brother's stash, then
kidnapped Nadine when they had a chance meeting at a metro
station. Manu forced her to drive them to Paris, as the two soon
teamed up and told each other: "We'll follow our lucky star."
They were tired of being pushed around by losers and low-lifes
in their seedy, marginal neighborhood, so they decided to
engage in a lucrative shooting spree and sexual romp across
France.
They went on a randomly vengeful, remorseless, violent
sex/murder spree on both men and women (a robbery/murder
at an ATM, killings of a cop and gunstore clerk, the murder of a
lewd guy in a street and of a male pick-up after receiving oral
sex, and other instances of indiscriminate sex). They also
sought violent sexual revenge in a climactic scene set in a
swingers sex club where they used a phallic-shaped gun to
perform anal rape and murder.

Requiem for a Dream (2000)
D. Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky's hallucinatory chronicle
of addiction had to be released unrated when he refused to
cut certain scenes, notably a degrading orgy.
Director Darren Aronofsky's effective and disturbing film told
about the consequences of drug use for four individuals:


Sara Goldfarb (Oscar-nominated Ellen Burstyn), a
lonely, TV-addicted, diet-pill-popping Brighton Beach
widow



Harry (Jared Leto), Sara's heroin-addicted son



his drug-dealing best friend Tyrone C. Love (Marlon
Wayans), Harry's best friend



Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly), Harry's girlfriend

Pre-release discussions claimed the film bordered on
pornography and glamorized drug use.
In the film, Sara's addiction to weight-loss and obsession with
being on a television show led to hallucinations, near insanity,

and shock-treatment, while the harrowing price of heroin
addiction caused Harry's arm to become severely infected and
require amputation. Meanwhile, despairing and pained Marion,
earlier seen in full-frontal before a mirror, prostituted herself to
pay for her addiction.
The controversial sequence, argued as a necessary component
and message that the cautionary film had to deliver about the
consequences of drug use, was a nasty, extremely-graphic
lesbian orgy scene with a shared anal dildo (at a stag party
hosted by black pimp Little John (Keith David)). In a degrading
so-called "ass-to-ass" scene, she shared a two-headed dildo
with another female as a group of spectators watched, tossed
bills at them, and shouted: "Ass-to-ass!" and "Come! Come!
Come!"
The scene shocked the MPAA which rated it NC-17 - Aronofsky
appealed the ruling (which was denied), so the film was
released unrated. A slightly-modified R-rated edited version of
the film was released on video with a shortened sex scene.

The Crime of Father Amaro (2002, Mex.) (aka The Crime of
Padre Amaro, or El Crimen del Padre Amaro)
D. Carlos Carrera
Condemnation by the Catholic Church
actually helped make this melodrama about unchaste
priests a blockbuster in its native Mexico.
This brave, melodramatic romance film was nominated as Best
Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards and Golden
Globes, and became Mexico's biggest blockbuster due to the
controversy it aroused (it broke Y Tu Mamá También's openingweekend record, and surpassed the previous highest-grossing
Mexican film of all time, Sex, Shame & Tears (1999)). The story
of moral hypocrisy was adapted to modern times (the year
2002) from the 1875 book "O Crime do Padre Amaro" by
Portuguese writer Jose Maria Eça de Queirós. One of the film's
criticisms, advertised with the tagline "Love...Lust...Sin," was
that it wasn't faithful to the novel.
Recently-ordained and celibate handsome 24 year-old priest
Father Amaro (Gael García Bernal) on his first assignment was
sent to a parish (steeped in illicit love, corruption and drug
trafficking/money laundering by drug lords, and cynicism) in the
remote Mexican town of Los Reyes. There, the idealistic young
priest became infatuated with beautiful, virginal 16 year-old
devout catechism teacher Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancón), in
part due to her confessional that she erotically touched herself

in the bath while having thoughts about Jesus, with his offering
of advice: "Sensuality is no sin."
He draped her body in the Virgin's blue satin cloak ("You are
more beautiful than the blessed Virgin") originally made for the
local church's statue of the virgin Mary, and engaged in an illicit
union with her under the guise of training her to be a nun. He
spoke memorized portions of the Old Testament's "Song of
Solomon" (or Song of Songs) to poetically admire her breasts.
To make matters complicated, the young girl's mother
Sanjuanera (Angelica Aragon) had been engaged in a long-term
affair with Amaro's superior, retiring priest Father Benito
(Sancho Gracia). The film also included some blasphemous
images, such as one of consecrated communion wafers being
fed to a sickly cat. After getting her pregnant, the young
idealistic priest covered up the scandal by paying for an
abortion in an illegal clinic in the jungle, and she bled to death
on the way to the hospital. Amelia's ex-fiancee Ruben (Andres
Montiel) was blamed for impregnating Amelia, while Amaro for
trying to save her and her child.
Catholic groups in Mexico called for the scandalous film to be
banned for its "vicious," defaming and unfavorable portrait of
priests, and the church threatened to excommunicate its stars.
The engendered controversy only aided the film's visibility and
profitability.

Irreversible (2002, Fr.)
D. Gaspar Noe
Walkouts were common during this French
thriller, which depicted a vicious and lengthy rape and its
brutal aftermath in reverse chronological order.
Frenchman writer/director Gaspar Noe's hard-hitting, graphic,
profoundly disturbing and violent film about rape revenge, was
non-linear - it was told in flashback and reverse order in
continuously-filmed takes, similar in structure to Christopher
Nolan'sMemento (1999), with the theme: "Time destroys
everything." The fatalistically-tinged film implied that the
characters in the film were predestined (irreversibly) to face
what would happen to them.
It was also noted for its excruciatingly-long, almost-unbearable,
painful-to-watch, nine-minute real-time beating and anal-rape
sequence - shot with a static camera. In a Parisian pedestrian
underpass lit by a reddish glow, beautiful and erotically sexual

Alexandra (or "Alex") (Monica Bellucci), earlier seen being
flirtatious in a revealing dress while dancing, accidentally came
upon rapist/pimp Le Tenia/Tapeworm (Jo Prestia) beating up
prostitute Concha in the tunnel. She found herself to be his new
victim.
As he endlessly assaulted her (verbally and physically),
threatened with a knife, coerced her, and thrust into her, he
continued to call her foul names ("F--king high-class swine"),
and asked: "You bleeding or you wet?" Afterwards, she
attempted to crawl away, and he kicked her in the face ("I'm
gonna fix your face, I'm gonna fix it good"), beat her with his fist,
and smashed her face into the pavement until she went into a
coma. He pronounced her "dead meat" when he was finished
with her.
After that, Marcus and Alex's ex-boyfriend Pierre (Albert
Dupontel) searched in retribution through the dingy underworld
of Paris, looking for and eventually brutally beating the
suspected rapist named The Tapeworm. There was the horrific,
violent and vengeful retaliatory scene of the man getting his
head beaten to a pulp with a fire extinguisher in a gay S&M
night-club sex bar with leather-bondage patrons, called The
Rectum.
Also earlier in the chronology (the film's final scene) was a lovemaking (or spooning) scene of Alex with boyfriend Marcus
(Vincent Cassel, Bellucci's real-life husband). She had
explained earlier to her friends during a subway ride the secret
to love-making pleasure - it was a turn-off for a man to be too
focused on a woman's pleasure.
As Alex and Marcus laid together in bed after awakening, she
described a foreshadowing dream of a red-lit tunnel which broke
into two. She also said she was a few days late with her period
(it was soon learned that she was pregnant with Marcus' child).
They got up for a few moments and danced naked in the living
room, then returned to the bedroom after Marcus told her: "I
wanna f--k your ass" - almost the exact same words used by the
rapist.
One of the film's final images was of Alex holding her pregnant,
swelling belly on a bed, below a wall poster of the foetal 'StarChild' in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (with "The
Ultimate Trip" tagline). The camera also soared into the blue
sky, and then settled on her sunbathing on a blanket on a
vibrantly green park lawn, where the camera then circled
dizzingly above a lawn sprinkler as children pranced through the
water.

Ken Park (2002)
D. Larry Clark
Unsimulated sex scenes sparked
accusations that filmmaker Larry Clark exploited his
teenaged cast, and it was barely distributed in the US.
This was another controversial film from co-director Larry Clark,
in which the director was accused of exploiting young teens and
lasciviously filming unsimulated sex. Clark's film was banned in
Australia, and never issued in wide release in the US. Its plot
was about four dysfunctional, abusive families in Visalia,
California and their teenaged skateboarders, with themes of
teenage suicide and wild sexual experimentation. The film also
included other scenes of graphic oral and masturbatory sex and
nudity, violence, suicide and incest.
It opened with the suicidal death of red-haired, freckled teen
skateboarder Ken Park (Adam Chubbuck) in a Visalia,
California park, when he pulled out a gun from his pack and
blew his brains out. [The motivation for killing himself was
revealed later - he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant.]
In another of the film's scenes, scrawny teen Shawn (James
Bullard) made out with his girlfriend Hannah's breast-enhanced
mother Rhonda (Maeve Quinlan). They both fondled each other
through their underpants, and then after being excited, she
asked: "Take my panties off." He provided her with oral sex, too
fast at first when she requested: "Slow." As he pleasured her,
she removed her bra, and further instructed him to speed up by
guiding his head until she experienced an orgasm:
"Go just a little faster. Yeah, that's it. Right there. Move with my
hips. There you go. Oh, s--t, s--t. Good boy, Shawn. That's a
good boy. Oh my God, keep licking."
[The image of the two of them engaged in sex was often
displayed, in part, on the film's video/DVD cover and poster.]
She let him rest his head between her breasts. After she
bathed, she kissed him while massaging him (inside his
underpants), when he asked: "Whose dick is bigger, mine or
Bob's?" She smiled and laughed: "Yours."

In one controversially-graphic scene of auto-erotic selfasphyxiation designed to increase his own sexual arousal,
death-obsessed, masturbation-addicted, sociopathic parent-less
teenager Tate (James Ransone), who wore a T-shirt saying
"Keep it Simple," choked himself with a long green dressing
gown belt tied to a doorknob while he pleasured himself (to
climax) watching Anna Kournikova playing tennis. He had
earlier killed his doting, smothering grandparents that he was
living with - murdering them during a scrabble game - also for
purposes of sexual arousal. He explained:
"I killed my grandfather, because he is a cheater who likes to tell
war stories, and I killed my grandmother because she's a
passive-aggressive bitch who doesn't respect my privacy."
The film ended with an idyllic sex orgy scene between a trio of
teenagers (Tiffany Limos as nymphomaniac Peaches, Stephen
Jasso as abused Claude, and Shawn) in which they were in
both give-and-take positions - seeking refuge from their troubled
lives.

The 100+ Most Controversial Films of All-Time
Film Title/Year, Director
Crash (1996)
D. David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg's adaptation of J.G.
Ballard's outré novel about people who get off on car
crashes was too weirdly fetishistic for many viewers.
David Cronenberg's coldly-erotic, dark and disturbing drama
examined the lives of a subculture of individuals who had
passionate sexual fetishes about deadly car crashes.
The alternating kinky, perverse and depraved sex scenes
juxtaposed with gruesome car crashes was deliberately
controversial and repulsive, and thought to possibly inspire
people to have fetishistic sex in high-speed vehicles. This
provocative film, initially released in two versions rated NC-17

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and R, was vilified in much the same way as Michael
Powell's Peeping Tom (1960, UK), and the Cannes Film Festival
screening had people walking out in disgust, nausea and
revulsion. Ultimately, it received a Special Jury Prize "For
Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity."
It told about TV commercial producer/director James Ballard
(James Spader) and his open-marriage to icy-blonde wife
Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), who would be turned on by
casual talk about each others' extra-marital adulterous affairs
during love-making.
In the opening scene that showcased one of three couplings,
Catherine enjoyed sex while in contact with cold-steel (she was
taken from behind by her flight instructor in a private aircraft
hangar as her naked breast's nipple pressed into a steel
airplane wing). When James collided with another car on the
freeway in a near-fatal accident, the deceased victim/husband
passenger was thrown through the windshield onto his hood,
while the driver/wife Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter)
inadvertently revealed partial nudity when she broke free from
her seat belt in the twisted wreckage.
Subsequently, their first sexual encounter was in the front seat
of his new car (same make and model) at an airport garage, as
a way to re-establish the 'eroticism' of the crash. Ballard
continued his extra-marital affair with Helen, always with lovemaking in his car in a public place. The experience caused
Ballard to have increased sexual excitement toward his wife and
their own rear-entry love-making.
After the accident, the three characters were introduced to a
weird cult of individuals who derived sexual pleasure and
arousal from car crashes, either as survivors or as impact
victims with violated bodies. They would compulsively excite
themselves ("It's all very satisfying") by re-enacting (or
recreating) famed auto accidents ("the ultimate in authenticity" the noteworthy car accident of famous Hollywood legend James
Dean (Sept 30, 1955)). They would also observe and talk about
their physical deformities from crashes (including wounds,
scars, dismemberment, leg braces, crutches and full-body
support suits), watch car safety and test crash videos (as
pornography) and photograph crash victims, engage in sex in
parked or moving cars (even in a car wash), and recklessly
drive their cars near each other as foreplay.
Physically-deformed impact victim Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette)
made love to Ballard in a car while braced or harnessed with a
full-body support suit of black plastic and stainless steel - she
offered him her vulva-like gash/scar ("neo-sex organ") on the
back of one of her thighs after he ripped off her black fish-net

stockings. She fondled her own breast as he kissed her leg and
then made love to it.
In the film's startling conclusion, Ballard deliberately rear-ended
his wife's sports-car. She was thrown from the car onto the
ground next to the wreck, where he made love to her from
behind, after she regained consciousness and he learned that
she was all right. He promised her a more deadly crash the next
time: "Maybe the next one, darling. Maybe the next one."

Lolita (1997)
D. Adrian Lyne
Lolita could still shock 35 years after
Kubrick's restrained adaptation; even after extensive cuts,
Adrian Lyne's franker version was too hot for theaters.
Director Adrian Lyne's 1997 erotically-charged, sensual version
of Vladimir Nabokov's novel (and a remake of Stanley Kubrick's
1962 film) told about a young 14 year-old "nymphet" (15 yearold Dominique Swain at the time of filming) and an obsessed
professor named Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons).
From the start, its coverage of an aberrant, still-taboo and
touchy topic of underage sexuality and incestual pedophilia
brought intense criticism. Christian fundamentalists and other
extremist groups accused the film of promoting pedophilia,
although it was entirely dubious that the film condoned or
promoted anti-social behavior. The film contained virtually no
female nudity (a body double was used in one brief dimly-lit,
bluish night sex scene), and strict precautions were taken
during filming.
It was produced on the heels of the Child Pornography
Prevention Act of 1996 and the murder of 6 year-old JonBenet
Ramsey (publicized as being a beauty pageant contestant).
After European showings, it failed to get a distributor for an
American theatrical release. Cuts were demanded to bring the
film into conformity with the 1996 law. After a limited one-week
US theatrical run in LA (to qualify for Academy Awards
consideration), it was eventually bought by Showtime cable
channel for viewing - which showed it on August 2, 1998
(providing its national premiere in uncut form). Its video rights
were purchased by Blockbuster in early 1999, but
since Blockbuster refused to rent NC-17 films -- it could only be
seen in a heavily-censored version differing from the European
release version or the cable version.

The film opened with Humbert in lyrical voice-over describing
Lolita: "She was Lo --- plain Lo in the morning standing 4'10 in
one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She
was Dolores on the dotted line. In my arms, she was always
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sins, my soul, Lolita."
The story was told in flashback. It began with an explanation
regarding the cause of British Professor Humbert's hebephilia
(sexual preference for pubescents). The opening sepia-toned
sequence recalled Cannes, France in 1921, where 14-year-old
Humbert (Ben Silverstone) become "madly hopelessly in love"
with a beautiful 14 year-old girl named Annabel Leigh (Emma
Griffiths-Malin). Four months later, when she died of typhus, he
was marked and wounded for life - becoming a broken-hearted,
tortured and helplessly unrequited romantic.
Humbert accepted a teaching position at Beardsley College (in
the New England town of Ramsdale) in 1947, where he had
become a boarder at the home of widow Mrs. Charlotte Haze
(Melanie Griffith). He was convinced to rent a room after the first
view of long-limbed schoolgirl Lolita in the garden piazza where
a lawn sprinkler soaked her pale sundress. Entranced by the
provocative and brash "nymphet" who innocently and playfully
teased him, he would daydream about her, lose sleep, and call
her a "little deadly demon." Lolita's annoying mother Charlotte
was concerned that her maturing daughter was bothering
Humbert, asking: "Is she keeping you up?" Before Lolita was
taken off to summer camp by her mother, she gave Humbert a
memorable goodbye hug and kiss after she jumped into his
arms. To keep close to Lolita, Humbert accepted Charlotte's
proposition that he marry her and become a "father" to her "little
girl."
Just as Charlotte discovered Humbert's secret papers divulging
interest in Lolita and calling herself a "cow", Charlotte was
fortuitously struck by a car outside their house, allowing him to
have "Lolita in my arms." When he picked her up at camp, she
admitted: "I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you," and then
asked for a kiss. He pulled over and obliged her - she hopped
into his lap for two sensuous kisses. When they spent an
overnight in a hotel, they were forced to share a room with only
a double bed. Lolita blurted out the word "incest" (forbidden
love) when they talked about how they were "thrown together"
and sharing the same hotel room as father/daughter. In the
room after dinner, as he removed her ankle-socks, she
confided: "If I tell you how naughty I was at camp, promise you
won't be mad?...I've been such a disgusting girl, just let me tell
you." Early the next morning after sleeping in the same bed, in
one of the film's most controversial scenes, she turned over and
wet-kissed him on the mouth with a French kiss. She then
whispered in his ear that she had played sexual games with
Charlie while at camp. She then said she would have to
demonstrate what she had learned: "I guess I'm gonna have to

show you everything" and as a prelude to oral sex, she started
to remove his pajama bottoms (and her own retainer) before a
fade-out. Hubert explained in voice-over: "Gentlewomen of the
jury, I was not even her first lover."
Later, Humbert was curious and asked if Charlie was her "first
one." He felt "more and more uncomfortable" about corrupting
her innocence, especially after she said that she hurt inside: "I
was a daisy-fresh girl and look what you've done to me. I should
call the police and tell them that you raped me, you dirty old
man" - but then smiled teasingly. He mused during extensive
road travels with the precocious Lolita that "despite all the fuss,
the faces she made and the danger and hopelessness of it all,
despite all that, I was in paradise, paradise whose skies were
the color of hell flames, but a paradise still."
In the film's most sensual scene, Lolita rocked pleasurably on
Humbert's lap while reading the newspaper comic pages. When
Humbert began teaching at Beardsley College in the fall, Lolita
was enrolled in the Beardsley Prep School (for Girls). Humbert
considered himself both "the willing corruptor of an innocent"
and a "happy housewife." In another scene, Lolita
manipulatively stroked his thigh with her bare foot ("You want
more, don't you?"), then nuzzled next to his crotch, inched her
hand up his inner thigh, and bargained for $2 (instead of her
usual $1/week allowance). When their relationship cooled and
tensions rose, Humbert paid her for sex: "As she grew cooler
towards my advances, I became accustomed to purchasing her
favors." Ironically, school administrators began to be worried
that the sexual maturing Dolores was "morbidly disinterested in
sexual matters" and that she needed family instruction in the
process of human reproduction. More strains occurred when
Humbert showed a distrust of Lolita, and she was increasingly
involved with playwright Clare Quilty (Frank Langella) during
rehearsals for the school play. Long simmering hatred erupted
when she accused Humbert of murder and howled at him:
"Murder me like you murdered my mother!" But then desperate
not to lose her, they made up only hours later, when she
undressed in front of him and requested: "Take me to bed."
During another road trip, Lolita provocatively mouthed a banana
while wearing a white two-piece outfit.
Jealousy continued to rise between the two, and he suspected
that she had another rival lover like himself ("another mad lover
of nymphets" - revealed in the film's conclusion to be playwright
Quilty (known to her as Uncle Gustav)), who was thought to be
following them. Humbert forced a kiss from her - as lipstick
became smeared on their faces, while he begged to know the
man's identity: "Please tell me." When Lolita was kidnapped by
Quilty, Humbert could not locate her ("the trail went cold and
dead"), until three years later, when she wrote to him.

Destitute, married to a man named Dick and now pregnant as
Mrs. Richard F. Schiller in the town of Coalmont, Lolita was
seeking Humbert's financial assistance ("I have gone through
much sadness and hardship"). She identified the 'thief' as the
pervert Quilty, while Humbert still vowed that he loved her (even
though she was "pale and polluted and big with another man's
child"). She rejected his offer to "leave here and come live with
me and die with me and everything with me" - but accepted his
monetary help of $4,000. Afterwards, Humbert vengefully
murdered the monstrous Quilty in gruesome fashion with the
jealous accusation ("You cheated me of my redemption") - and
then surrendered to police. He stood on a hillside listening to
the distant sounds of children playing and in an epiphany, he
expressed remorse for taking Lolita's 'child' away from her. He
died on November 16th, 1950 in prison of a coronary
thrombosis, while she died about a month later on Christmas
Day during childbirth.

Dogma (1999)
D. Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith's inquiry into the nature of
good and evil is surprisingly sincere, but its vulgar
snarkiness still rankled religious leaders.
Director Kevin Smith's fourth film was an imaginative, comic and
fanciful theological work (with foul language) about a
monumental struggle or race between good and evil forces to
save or determine the fate of Earth and mankind. The taglines
for the film were: "FAITH IS A FUNNY THING" and "Get
'Touched' By an Angel."
The film's premiere drew hundreds of protesters and disdain
from religious leaders, and Smith himself received 300,000
pieces of hate mail. The Catholic League publically criticized the
film's producer Miramax Pictures (owned by Disney), for the
film's anti-Catholic, sacrilegious and blasphemous stance, and
its satire of modern religion. Consequently, Disney's Miramax
declined to release the film, and sold it to another distributor,
Lions Gate Films.
On one side were two fallen, ousted or banished angels: Angel
of Death Loki (Matt Damon) and Bartleby (Ben Affleck), who
had been exiled to eternity at an airport in Wisconsin. They
discovered a loop-hole in Catholic dogmatic doctrine (plenary
indulgence) that would allow them back into Heaven. To have
their sins forgiven, they decided to make their way to St.
Michael's Cathedral that was about to be rededicated in New
Jersey for its 100 Year Anniversary. They reasoned that if they

entered the church's doors, they could be forgiven and regain
access to Heaven. They chose New Jersey because of a
revamped 'Catholicism Wow!' program announced there by hip
Catholic Cardinal Glick (George Carlin), who had replaced the
traditional "Scary" crucifix with a "Buddy Christ" effigy. There,
they would have their wings cut off, become human, and reenter
the kingdom of heaven. If they were successful, however, it
meant that they could prove the fallibility of God and destroy the
universe by nullifying and undoing all of human and earthly
existence.
God (angry slack-rocker Alanis Morissette) dispatched a
disdainful and bitchy seraphim - a messenger from God named
Metatron (Alan Rickman) (aka The Voice of God), to appear in a
pillar of fire in the bedroom of lapsed-and fallen Catholic
Bethany Sloane (Linda Fiorentino) who worked at an Illinois
abortion clinic. The resistant, infertile and divorced woman, who
was experiencing a crisis of faith but was Jesus Christ's last
surviving descendant, would be recruited to stop the two rogue
angels from ending humanity. Metatron instructed her about
meeting two muses or prophets (Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes
as dope-dealing slackers Silent Bob and Jay) who would assist
her along the way. Other characters in the tale included Chris
Rock as a ranting Rufus, the erased or forgotten 13th apostle,
and Salma Hayek as disaffected heavenly muse Serendipity
who 'inspired' men at a low-rent strip club.
Pompous, regenade Cardinal Ignatius Glick was delivering a
speech on the steps of the New Jersey church, when Bartleby
stepped up, pushed through the crowd, and threatened the
assembled parishioners:
"'God's house?' God doesn't live here anymore. He's grown
weary of your superficial faith. He's turned a deaf ear to your lipservice prayers. He has abandoned you, his favorites, to the
whim of judgment. Hypocrites, charlatans - Prepare to taste
God's wrath....(To Loki) You wanted your body count. You got it.
This lot is rife with sin. We'll judge them all."
Bartleby twisted Officer McGee's (Robert Holtzman) head to the
right to break his neck ("Mr. McGee, don't make me angry. You
wouldn't like me when I'm angry") - causing a riot. He spoke
above the tumult's screams: "Ladies and gentlemen, you have
been judged as guilty of violations against our Almighty God.
And this very day, I assure you, you will all pay for your
trespasses, in blood. (To Loki) Wings. Now! Do it!" Bartleby
killed everyone in attendance at the celebration.
A panicked TV reporter issued a statement about the
proceedings: "Men with huge f--king wings have laid waste to
St. Michael's. Bullets don't seem to affect them. The remaining

crowd has dropped to their knees, identifying this as the fabled
Apocalypse." The exterior of the church was littered with
massacred bodies, as slacker Jay asked: "Then what the f--k
are we supposed to do? Just wait for a solution to fall out of the
sky?" On cue, the Cardinal's decapitated body plummeted out
of the sky and landed splat at their feet. Loki emerged and
identified the headless corpse: "That was a cardinal. You can't
tell by the face, but the rosaries are a dead giveaway."
With his wings cut off, Loki was now human and decided to help
the side of the good, but Bartleby killed him and fought off
Rufus, Serendipity and Silent Bob. Jay shot off Bartleby's wings
with a submachine gun and also turned him into a human being.
The film concluded with a female God figure killing a remorseful
Bartleby with Her voice, resurrecting Bethany from death, and
conceiving a child within her.

Romance (1999, Fr.) (aka Romance X)
D. Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat challenged the status quo
by casting an Italian porn star in her drama about the
disconnect between love and sex: outrage ensued.
This sexually-graphic drama import from daring French
filmmaker Catherine Breillat faced international censorship
problems for its explicit depictions of fellatio and intercourse.
The film's poster displayed a red X over a self-pleasuring
female's private parts, one of the scenes in the film. An
overriding theme was the lack of connection between love and
sex.
The film was released with no MPAA rating, although it
undoubtedly would have been an NC-17 rating with its full
frontal nudity and explicit unsimulated oral sex - a turning point
in the candid depiction of non-pornographic sex on screen for a
mainstream film. It was the first mainstream movie to feature an
erect penis.
The main character was a sexually-frustrated, self-reflective,
semi-depressed Parisian elementary school teacher named
Marie (Caroline Ducey) who was paired with an unresponsive
male partner and model named Paul (Sagamore Stevenin) who
no longer touched her or agreed to intercourse, although she
still clung to him. When she initiated sex with him and began
fellating him, he responded disinterestedly. She requested that
he touch and pleasure her, but seemed to feel that he despised
her.

Feeling dishonored, she began to contemplate finding unbridled
sexual gratification and lustful fulfillment through various 'nostrings-attached,' explicit sexual encounters with others. One
instance of random sex began almost immediately with a studly
stranger from an all-night bar. She soon began full sexual
involvement (including rear-entry sex) with the Italian stranger,
named Paolo (Italian porn star actor Rocco Sefredi).
She also became sexually intrigued and involved, in a "trivial"
and "shameful" relationship, with her older boss Robert
(Francois Berleand), a "prince of seducers," who claimed he
had enjoyed 10,000 women (with a record of his conquests),
and promoted her potential for S&M masochism, degradation
and bondage. She was at first freaked by the experience however, they maintained a long-term association: ("Tying me
up without tying me down was the secret of his ritual").
The film's additional scenes included a degrading rape (the
rapist called her a "whore, bitch") in a stairway, a probing
gynecological exam after Marie became pregnant by Paul, and
clear footage of her childbirth (edited and replaced
by Blockbuster Video).
The most controversial segment was a fantasy dream sequence
in which she imagined herself sexually defenseless with other
women. Their waists were available and positioned next to a
hole in a wall as unseen strangers on the other side of the wall
could engage in explicit sex with them through the opening.
There was a close-up of ejaculation onto her stomach,
juxtaposed with jelly being applied to her belly for an ultrasound
reading.

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
D. Trey Parker
Profane, vulgar and gleefully impious, this
animated satire included such provocations as depicting
Satan and Saddam Hussein as lovers.

This R-rated, adult-oriented 81 minute animated film, a spin-off
of the animated TV series South Park, has been judged one of
the most obscenity-filled, vulgar and profane animations ever
made - clocking in at almost 400 profane words. It had even
more examples of offensive gestures, use of racial epithets and
ethnic slurs, blasphemous references to God, scatological
humor, and acts of violence by its young cast of characters. It
was reported that many under-aged movie theatre patrons
purchased tickets for other films in multiplexes and then the
minors attended this popular, R-rated film.
The film's story opened with the viewing of a film within a film
("Asses of Fire") by third-grade boys - an R-rated movie
featuring Canadians Terrance & Phillip, about lighting farts on
fire. [Later in the film, Kenny was incinerated when lighting his
own flatulence. When rejected by Heaven, Kenny was sent to
Hell.] As a result, the boys were 'corrupted' and their parents led
censorship efforts that ultimately pressured the United States to
wage war against Canada. The boys attempted to save their
two Canadian idols from being executed by electrocution.
It was an incongruous combination of an animation starring four
pint-sized 8 year-olds (Stan, Kyle, Eric Cartman, and Kenny), a
musical (with twelve songs including the Oscar-nominated
Original Song "Blame Canada"), a political satire (Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein was depicted as the homosexual lover of
Satan in Hell), a parody of Disney films (e.g., Beauty and the
Beast (1991) and The Little Mermaid (1989)) and Broadway
plays (e.g. Les Miserables), and a diatribe against misguided
censorship (i.e., the motion picture ratings system and the
MPAA) and American parenting.
Its subtitle was a reference to a large uncircumcised phallus,
and the film's song "Uncle F--ka" contained almost three dozen
uses of the F-word. [Note: The song title was changed from
"Mother F--ka" to escape an NC-17 rating by the ratings board.]
Angels were portrayed as nude females.

Stigmata (1999)
D. Rupert Wainwright
Rattling skeletons in the Catholic Church's
closet wasn't as shocking in the late '90s as when The
Exorcist opened, but still exposed this glum horror movie
to censure.
This predictable, non-sensical horror thriller with a music-video
MTV style, followed on the heels of two other, more popular
'supernatural' horror films of the year, The Blair Witch Project

(1999) and The Sixth Sense (1999). It boasted a soundtrack by
Smashing Pumpkins, continual rain and dripping liquids, the
enigma of mysterious forces, and silly theological exposition
about stigmata and possession to make it more marketable as a
horror film. The tagline was: "The Messenger Must Be
Silenced."
The poorly-paced, confused plot could not hope to compete
when compared to the more effective The Exorcist (1973) from
25 years earlier (and re-released in 2000). The major difference
between the two films was Stigmata's bold criticism of the
Catholic Church, and its positing of a conspiratorial role of the
institution in covering up gnostic truth found in some hidden
writings. [However, the truths that were supposedly being
hushed are considered prominent principles of some parts of
the Biblical record.]
Its story was about 23 year-old godless, atheistic, partying salon
hairdresser Francis "Frankie" Paige (Patricia Arquette), who
began to suffer torment after her unsuspecting mother sent her
a vacation souvenir package. Inside was a rosary (sold to her in
by a local Brazilian marketplace vendor), earlier stolen from the
corpse of beloved, deeply religious South American priest
Father Paulo Alemieda (Jack Donner). [During the priest's
funeral in the village church, a statue of the Virgin Mary of
Guadalupe wept blood, doves appeared out of nowhere, and
candles would mysteriously ignite and burn out.]
With the rosary in her apartment, Frankie began to display
disturbing signs -- upsetting nausea and vomiting, struggling
with unseen forces (and flashes of nails being pounded into
flesh) during a bath (with blood-tinged water), and possible
epilepsy (or demonic possession). She also began to develop a
case of stigmata - evidence of Jesus' five crucifixion wounds on
her own body, beginning with bloody wrist puncture wounds.
Investigating her distressing condition in Pittsburgh was a Jesuit
priest, Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne) from the Vatican
(he was a member of the Congregation for the Causes of the
Saints). He was confused because normally stigmata developed
only on those who were devout believers. He found himself
thwarted by nefarious, corrupt and evil Cardinal Daniel
Houseman (Jonathan Pryce) (quoted as saying: "You have no
idea who you're dealing with"), who wished to silence her (and
almost succeeded when he later conducted an exorcism upon
her followed by attempted strangulation).
More serious symptoms developed for Frankie (a deliberate
illusion to St. Francis who also suffered from the condition) scratches and slashes on her forehead (the crown of thorns?),
writing in cryptic Aramaic (Jesus' ancient language) on a car

hood with a smashed glass bottle, and later on a wall, and
speaking Aramaic in a deep male voice. When Kiernan was
able to translate the Aramaic writings, he realized the key to
everything was the Gospel of St. Thomas, part of an heretical
series of secret Gnostic writings hidden by the Catholic Church
because they could undermine and destroy the faith. The
writings preached that the kingdom of God was all around and
not confined to churches. Were the bellowings and writings of a
possessed spirit benevolent - revealed as the continuing
translation efforts of the spirit of the dead, excommunicated
priest within Frankie?
When Kiernan realized that Alemieda was speaking through
Frankie, he offered to be the priest's messenger, and Alemieda
released his spirit within her, set Frankie free, and departed in
peace. Some time later, Andrew visited Alemieda's Brazilian
church and located the lost gospel writings under the
floorboards. [In the DVD's alternate ending, Frankie died.]
The film concluded with three title cards: "In 1945, a scroll was
discovered in Nag Hamadi, which is described as 'the secret
sayings of the living Jesus.' This scroll, the Gospel of St.
Thomas, has been claimed by scholars around the world to be
the closest record we have of the words of the historical Jesus.
The Vatican refuses to recognize this Gospel and has described
it as heresy."

Film Title/Year, Director
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
D. Ron Howard
Conservative Christian groups fumed and urged
boycotts, but the popularity of Dan Brown's thriller about arcane secrets
and occult mysteries won out.

Screenshots

Director Ron Howard's much-anticipated, big-screen religious conspiracy
thriller with the tagline "Seek the Truth" was faithfully based upon Dan Brown's
best-selling fictional book in 2003. The idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene
married and had kids infuriated many religious groups. In some countries
(such as Egypt), the film was banned. And a high-ranking Vatican archbishop
called for a boycott.
It opened with the discovery of the murder of the Louvre Museum's elderly
curator Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle) in the Parisian museum. He
was shot in the abdomen and bled to death - the man's naked body, in a
revealing pose, was found with a pentacle symbol (a symbol for the female
goddess Venus) that he had etched into his own bloody chest and an
enigmatic encrypted code written in blood (including a numerical sequence (a
security code password for a bank vault) and other clues). [He was murdered
by a self-flagellating, albino Opus Dei hooded monk named Silas (Paul
Bettany), who was later learned to be in the employ of both devious highranking Bishop Manuel Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) and a mysterious individual
known only as "The Teacher."]
Religious symbologist and Harvard professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks),
guest-lecturing in town, was called to the crime scene, and unbeknownst to
him, was considered the prime suspect by police Captain Bezu Fache (Jean
Reno) and Lieut. Collet (Etienne Chicot). French police cryptologist Sophie
Neveu (Audrey Tautou) tipped Langdon off that he was "in grave danger," and
the two fled.
Information provided in clues by Sauniere (the "Grand Master" - and last living
protector of holy artifact secrets) led the wrongly-accused murder suspect
Langdon and Sophie through a byzantine trail of clues through France and
England and ultimately to Scotland -- to a millenarian goddess-worshipping
secretive sect called The Priory of Sion (with heretical theories about the
marriage of a mortal Jesus Christ with Mary Magdalene who fathered a child the real Holy Grail was not a chalice-cup but a royal bloodline!).
Along the way, they met with crippled, obsessed Grail scholar Sir Leigh
Teabing (Ian McKellen), who revealed new findings about the Holy Grail, and
DaVinci's master work The Last Supper. [He eventually was discovered to be
the ominous double-crossing "Teacher" in the film's major plot twist.] The
search led them to knowledge of the Priory's centuries-old battle with the
clandestine Catholic sect Opus Dei regarding the group's 2,000 year old
conspiracy to hush blasphemous information about Jesus' mortality and
celibacy. The trail led to London's mythical Temple Church (where a group of
Templars Knights were believed to be buried), Sir Isaac Newton's tomb at
Westminster Abbey, and the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland.
Several Catholic and Opus Dei groups (portrayed as a murderous cult), as
well as conservative Christian groups, called for a boycott, mostly during the
making of the film and during initial screenings, accusing it of blasphemy. The
film was also accused of being ludicrous, inaccurate and unhistorical with far
too many plot twists. One item that appeared fabricated was the existence of
an ancient secret society called the Priory of Sion, which was actually created

in 1956 by a man named Pierre Plantard.
The main criticism of the film was that it unfairly mixed real historical fact into a
fictional narrative. Even albinos were offended by the film, and lobbied for
changes to the way the film portrayed them. Yet the tedious film was received
lukewarmly as a convoluted, flat and stultified bore, although some liked the
thriller aspects of the film. On a budget of $125 million, the film made $217.5
million (domestic).
One major point of contention was the question of who was sitting on Jesus'
right hand side in Da Vinci's The Last Supperpainting - was it the beardless,
effeminate long-haired Apostle John or Mary Magdalene? Also, there was no
holy grail or chalice on the table in the painting.
Another debatable item was the idea that Jesus, usually thought to be
celibate, married Mary Magdalene, who witnessed his crucifixion - and was
pregnant at the time, and that she bore a daughter named Sarah who survived
in France and created a bloodline. One of the non-canonical gospels, the
Gospel of Philip, referred to Mary Magdalene as Jesus' "companion" or
spouse - possibly meaning his wife. She was supposed to carry on his
Church, an idea that would be heretical and threatening to the established
church. In the last portion of the film, Sophie was revealed as the current living
descendant of Jesus, protected by the Priory of Sion.

Shortbus (2006)
D. John Cameron Mitchell
This drama of young bohemians in post 9/11 New York
was the most sexually-graphic American movie ever released in nonporn theaters.
Writer/director John Cameron Mitchell (director of the cult classic Hedwig and
the Angry Inch (2001)) brought out his second arthouse feature film titled
Shortbus (aka "The Sex Film Project"). It was screened both at the Cannes
Film Festival, and at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was the "most
explicit" or sexually-graphic film ever screened. It also had the widest release
of any film showing unsimulated sex. This highly controversial film - named for
the underground Brooklyn sex salon ("for the gifted and challenged") in the
unrated film, contained many unsimulated, hardcore images of sexual
intercourse (gay and straight), masturbation, ejaculation, a dominatrix sex
whipping, an orgy scene and a gay menage a trois scene (with oral sex)
accompanied by a rousing singing of the national anthem: "The Star Spangled
Banner."
The sex was encased within a non-pornographic dramatic narrative about
emotionally-challenged post 9/11 New Yorkers searching for sexual happiness
and self-discovery. The opening sequence - which cross-cut between three
scenes - set the tone. Gay man and ex-prostitute James (Paul Dawson) in a
bathtub filmed his genitals (while peeing into the water) with a hand-held video
camera. [Spoiler: He was making a video suicide note.] Then, he performed a

James (Paul
Dawson)

yoga-like backwards flip, with his penis suspended above his mouth - and
attempted oral sex on himself. (A peeping tom stalker named Caleb (Peter
Stickles) was photographing him from an across-the-street window.)
In another NYC apartment, a costumed, spike-haired dominatrix (also an
aspiring artist) named Severin (Lindsay Beamish) was whipping one of her
male clients as he masturbated on a bed. In a third residence, Sofia (Sook-Yin
Lee, host of CBC Radio'sDefinitely Not the Opera), a married couples sex
counselor, was having "incredible" sex on a piano with her husband Rob
(Raphael Barker), and then trying multiple positions on their bed and
throughout their living areas. All of the males orgasmed at the same time - one
onto the paint drippings of a Jackson Pollock painting.
Sofia Having Sex with Rob in Their NYC Apartment

Severin (Lindsay
Beamish)
with client

Sofia told her husband that one of her patients named Cheryl (Miriam Shor)
was urged to continue faking orgasms with her male partner Brad (Justin
Hagan): "It's a completely legitimate strategy to buy time...An orgasm isn't
something Brad can give her. She has to claim it for herself." In fact, Sofia was
speaking about herself - she finally admitted that she was pre-orgasmic ("I
never had one") during one of her counseling sessions with James and his
male partner Jamie (PJ DeBoy), an ex-child star.
The film's characters, Sofia, Severin, Rob, and James (among others) met
regularly in the Brooklyn sex salon (titled Shortbus). There were a number of
interlocking relationships that developed:


James and Jamie with Ceth (Jay Brannan) - forming a gay threesome



Sofia with Severin - a same-sex coupling



James with Caleb - including sexual penetration



Rob with Severin - another dominatrix scene

The film's conclusion occurred during a blackout in the city, happening
simultaneously when Sofia was again unable to reach orgasm.
At the Shortbus club during the rousing singing of "In the End" by the crossdressing Mistress (Justin Vivian Bond) of the club, Sofia became excitedly
engaged in a kissing and sexual threesome with another couple: Nick (Jan

Activities At
Shortbus

Hilmer) and Leah (Shanti Carson).
As she finally achieved orgasm, the lights of the city were simultaneously
restored.
Lights Restored in NYC With Sofia's Electrifying Orgasm
While Seated Between Nick and Leah for a Bisexual Threesome

A Gay
Threesome

Sofia - SelfStimulation
United 93 (2006)
D. Paul Greengrass
The trailer that positioned this chillingly realistic 9/11
docu-drama as a formulaic thriller occasioned more dismay than the
movie itself.
This R-rated chillingly-realistic, unflinching, emotionally-moving ultraverite docu-drama by British writer/director Paul Greengrass told the
courageous and tragic story of heroic crew members and passengers on
United's Flight 93 (flying from Newark NJ to San Francisco), the fourth

hijacked plane on September 11, 2001. They were able to thwart the terrorists
and prevent the plane from reaching its intended target - but instead crashed
into a field in western Pennsylvania. The film was made all the more real by
including some of the actual FAA ground crew and military officers involved in
the actual event as cast members, and by retelling the tale in real-time.
Necessarily containing intense and frightening sequences of terror and
violence, the film (although precisely told and respectfully treating its subject
matter without editorializing, theories, stereotypical human interest stories or
personal dramas, or flag-waving politics) was criticized for its trailer that made
the film appear different than it actually was -- as a conventional thriller.
Others wondered whether it was "too soon" after the event (on the 5th year
anniversary) for US audiences to view - and varying opinions contributed to
the emotional debate. Universal also received criticism that it was exploiting a
national tragedy, although others felt it was important to help remember and
be inspired by the shattering event.

Hounddog (2007)
D. Deborah Kampmeier
Outcry over a rape scene involving an Elvis-loving preteen (played by 12-year-old Dakota Fanning) helped sink this drama set
in 1950s Alabama.
Writer/director Deborah Kampmeier's exploitative and solemn Southern drama
was heralded by its own controversial pre-release publicity. On July 21, 2006,
the day the film wrapped its shooting, reports of the scandalous rape scene of
a 12 year-old actress in the film were released. The same kinds of accusations
brought against it recalled the uproar over other controversial films about
exploiting a barely pubescent actress, such as Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby
(1978), or Dominique Swain in the remake ofLolita (1997).
This worn-out movie's tagline seemed appropriate: "Gotta always somehow
make good outta what can poison you." Due to the clamor over the allegedly
graphic rape scene, and other complaints about the sexualizing of a minor
character, the film was re-edited (sanitized).
Even before the film had been viewed, child advocates and the Catholic
League called for a federal investigation to determine if any child pornography
laws were broken during the making of the film. Petitions created online called
for the arrest of Fanning's agent and mother and attempted to block the film's
distribution. At the Sundance Film Festival where the film premiered,
representatives of the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) went
on stage and delivered an horrendous statistic - eight children under age 12
had been sexually assaulted in the time it took the audience to watch the film.
The gothic-tinged, coming-of-age story set in the 1950s American South (in a
small town in Alabama) told about a young, precocious, and thin tomboyish

heroine Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) lacking a mother and suffering from an
abusive childhood in a shack-home. She was being 'cared for' by both her
stern, Bible-carrying, whiskey-swigging grandmother (Piper Laurie, reprising
her scary role from the horror film Carrie (1976)) and her unstable, slovenly
and brutish father Lou (David Morse), who was currently involved with sexy
and battered girlfriend Ellen (or "Stranger Lady") (Robin Wright Penn) (later
revealed to be Lewellen's aunt).
In the first scene, young Lewellen (often seen in underwear throughout the
film, exhibiting herself) offered a kiss to her best friend and swimming hole
companion Buddy (Cody Hanford), in exchange for seeing his private parts
(off-screen). Most of the time, she fantasized about Elvis Presley (famous for
the song Hounddog), and brought beers to her drunken father (who became
crazed and feeble-minded after being struck by lightning on a tractor during a
storm).
The film's most infamous and disturbing scene (heavily edited and shortened
to be respectful, and appearing severely truncated, without any nudity or
explicitness) was less than a minute in length. She was coaxed into
impersonating her idol while naked (her "Elvis dance" to Hounddog complete
with swinging hips and a low singing voice), in order to procure tickets to an
Elvis concert from an older teenaged Wooden's Boy (Christoph Sanders). She
was raped in an abandoned, broken-down shed where she had been lured by
friend and intermediary Buddy, who passively watched (and then covered his
eyes).
The very shadowy and dark scene showed only closeups of Lewellen's
terrified face as the older teen boy unzipped his pants ("I got a thing about
you"), and she begged: "Please, can I have my ticket now....I just want my
ticket, please!" As the rape occurrred, Lewellen's tensed hand gripped an
exposed nail and caused bleeding. Afterwards, she looked up at the hole in
the roof of the shack, as water dripped in. Some accused the film of being
entirely listless since the intensity of the rape scene was so completely
softened.

September Dawn (2007)
D. Christopher Cain
LDS spokesmen denounced this little-seen account of the
1857 Mormon massacre of California-bound settlers as a "distortion of
history."
The backdrop of this independent film (with a fictionalized Romeo and Juliet
romantic subplot) immediately brought about controversy. The histrionic
melodrama told about the infamous September 11, 1857 Mountain Meadows
Massacre in which about 120 California-bound settlers (Gentiles) were brutally
murdered by Utah Mormons. It was reportedly based on the official 27-page
confession of convicted Mormon John D. Lee. Conveniently, the massacre that occurred on September 11th - helped the story draw close parallels to
Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in modern times.
It has been disputed whether the slaughter was ordered by the LDS church
leader Brigham Young or not, but the church has admitted that a group of
religiously-zealous Mormon militia (with the help of local Native Americans) led
the massacre in southern Utah Territory. In the film, Jon Voight starred as local
Mormon bishop Bishop Jacob Samuelson and Terence Stamp starred as
Young, who implicitly spoke out: "I am the voice of God, and anyone who
doesn't like it will be hewn down," and demanded an oath of silence regarding
his murderous orders.
As with many other controversial films, the angered LDS church didn't preview
the film, but instead issued a statement (with their version of the historical
event) calling the film a "serious distortion of history." It believed that the film, a
simplified good vs. evil treatise, was a piece of anti-Mormon propaganda and
not historical truth-telling.

Martyrs (2008, Fr/Can.)
D. Pascal Laugier
This unrated, gory, nihilistic horror film was accused of
being one of the most violent movies ever made - part of a hardcore
trend in French films called the "New French Extremism" that portrayed
intense pain, hatred and suffering.
Writer/director Pascal Laugier's controversial, unrated, gory, nihilistic horror
film was accused of being one of the most violent movies ever made. It was
similar to the graphic, torture-porn film franchises in the US begun with Saw
(2004) and Hostel (2005), although more compelling with greater intellectual
significance. When the divisive film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in
2008, it caused many audience members to walk out. The final 15 minutes of
the unpleasant film was considered unflinchingly horrendous in its portrayal of
cruelty.
The plot was a brutal tale about two abused young females, who developed a

close friendship with one another after being placed in an orphanage:


badly-battered young 10 year-old Lucie (Jessie Pham), who in 1971
had escaped from her captivity in a torture room-chamber in an
abandoned, unused brick slaughterhouse



another abused victim Anna (Erika Scott)

Fifteen years later in 1986, crazed 25 year-old Lucie Jurin (Mylène Jampanoï)
came upon an isolated house and savagely, cold-bloodedly murdered with a
shotgun an entire middle-class French family - the Belfonds (the two teens
Marie and Antoine, and Mr. Belfond and his wife Gabrielle). Afterwards, she
phoned Anna Assaoui (Morjana Alaoui) and told her that she had vengefully
killed her tormenting, sadistic captors from years earlier. Lucie continued to be
haunted and terrorized by an imagined ghoulish, masochistic "Creature"
(Isabelle Chasse) - a scarred, filthy, emaciated, stringy long-haired female who
caused flesh wounds.
The Creature returned and the suicidal Lucie slit her own arms with a razor
blade, jumped through a glass window, and ripped open her own throat with a
box-cutter - giving her peace when she died in Anna's arms in the pouring rain.
Anna then discovered stairs behind a cabinet in the house, leading to an
underground chamber. Pictures of female torture victims (martyrs) lined the
corridor of the laboratory. Down another trap door, she found where the
imprisoned 'Creature' was chained up - she came upon the tortured woman
with scars and a metal blindfold contraption nailed to her head. Anna brought
her up into the house, gave her a bath, and attempted to painfully remove the
steel bolts from the blindfold. Strangers dressed in black arrived and shot the
raving, maniacal 'Creature,' then took Anna as their new prisoner.
Anna was introduced to the depraved leader of a secret torture society elderly Mademoiselle (Catherine Bégin), who believed that the quasi-religious
group could learn the secrets of the afterlife from tortured and suffering young
women, although most-times, they frustratingly only created victims. After a
long period of torture and degradation, most subjects would "see things that
don't exist" such as creatures, monsters, or cockroaches.
Anna was chained up in the same concrete cell where she had found the
'Creature.' She was force-fed greenish slop, slapped, and regularly brutalized.
Her hair was cut and she was sponge-bathed. Eventually she submitted
without resistance, and began hearing voices: "You're not scared anymore."
For the final stage of her suffering, in the film's last horrific 15 minutes, Anna
was dragged away, clamped down to a steel medical gurney, and her skin
from her entire body (except for her face) was flayed by a surgeon while she
was alive - this caused her to achieve transfiguration.
The members of the secret society were summoned to the house to learn of
Anna's "authentic martyrdom" on the previous day. She was praised as being
only the 4th individual in 17 years to have attained the stage of martyrdom,
and the first to relate what she had seen. She had experienced a state of
ecstasy lasting 2 hours and 15 minutes. Although still alive, she was now no

longer communicating.
Just before revealing Anna's testimony - what she had related (about the
afterlife, what "lay beyond death") to the society's leader, Mademoiselle asked
her assistant Etienne (Jean-Marie Moncelet) about the indescribable: "Could
you imagine what there is after death?...Could you?" - she then committed
suicide by shooting herself in the mouth (her last words were: "Keep
doubting").
The film ended abruptly, with the definition of "martyr" - "noun, from the Greek
'marturos': witness."

Antichrist (2009, Denmark)
D. Lars von Trier
A couple descends into a maelstrom of violent sex and
sexual violence after their son's death, but art-house audiences mostly
took its provocations in stride.
Outrageous Danish director Lars von Trier's controversial, compelling, nihilistic
psychological-horror film (with only two characters) portrayed the tortured pain
of a grieving, devastated, and unhinged mother. Although approaching the
levels of violent torture-porn (filmed most explicitly with professional porn
stars) seen in films like Saw, there was also a perverse beauty in the
cinematographic expertise envisioned in the NC-17 film, shot by Oscarwinning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.
At its premiere showing at Cannes, there was an uproar at the press
conference regarding its "explicit sexual gore." The provocative film sharply
divided critics. In particular, viewers were shocked by its genital abuse,
including the bashing of a man's penis and scrotum, a bloody masturbation
scene, the drilling of a hole through a man's ankle, and a self-abusive
woman's excisement of her own clitoris. However, female actress Gainsbourg
earned a Best Actress prize by the Cannes jury for her bold performance,
although many considered the film extremely offensive.
During filming of the unrelenting, uncompromising and despairing film - a
retelling of the Genesis creation tale in part, von Trier was reportedly suffering
from depression and attempting to exorcise his own personal demons. His
artistic work reflected the pain of his own feelings, and suggested that the
natural world ("Eden") was inhabited by Satan (the Anti-Christ), allowing for
intensely cruel and inhumane behavior between individuals.
The chapters in the film were labeled: Grief, Pain (Chaos Reigns), Despair
(Gynocide), and The Three Beggars (related to the three animals). The film

opened with a gorgeous black-and-white prologue in slow-motion, during
which a young toddler accidentally fell to his death from a window while his
parents were engaged in intensely-passionate sex (complete with a close-up,
thrusting penetration shot) in the bathroom shower and bedroom. After a
month of grieving, self-punishment and self-blaming guilt, the couple (named
only He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg)) went to their remote
woodsy cabin (named "Eden") to face their self-destructive, worst fears.
Both soon realized the difficulty in reconciling their vastly different emotional
and intellectual approaches to grief. As it turned out, the traumatized female
was an occult researcher who had spent the previous summer there with her
son, writing her "thesis" on gynocide (the systematic mass murder of
suspected witches during the Middle Ages).
During their stay at "Eden," their marital relationship deteriorated and she lost
control of herself, as she said: "Everything that used to be beautiful about
Eden was perhaps hideous. Now I could hear what I couldn't hear before - the
cry of all the things that are to die." In the unholy forest, images of a mother
deer with a stillborn baby fetus hanging out of its uterus, dying acorns falling
on their roof, a dying, self-disemboweled fox speaking in a deep voice: "Chaos
reigns!", and a cawing crow signaled serious and disturbing problems for the
couple.
Even He was losing his grip on sanity as he attempted to make
psychotherapeutic sense of their misfortune, while relentlessly stripping her of
all her defenses and leaving her psyche naked. As he struggled to identify her
worst fear -- he crossed out various possibilities (Nature? Satan? Herself?)
while he revised his diagnosis. At one point, She expressed her top fear that:
"Nature is Satan's Church," but also said that she felt "cured." During sex, she
demanded that he inflict sadistic pain upon her by hitting her, and internalized
the view that women were inherently evil - the conclusion drawn by
witchhunters in the 16th century.
The disturbing scenes of genital abuse (scrotum bashing/bloody ejaculation)
and cruel torture followed, demonstrating her long-simmering resentment and
anger. Apparently, she partially blamed their earlier sex act for their child's
death. She called herself a "scheming woman" that was "false" in many ways
(false in legs, thighs, breast, teeth, hair, eyes), before performing a
clitoridectomy on herself with a pair of rusty scissors. The Three Beggars were
revealed to be related to the woodland creatures in a constellation -Grief=deer, Despair=crow, and Pain=Fox, and after they entered the house,
He dispassionately strangled his wife with his bare hands and burned her
body on a large open-air pyre.
In the film's black and white epilogue, He hobbled away from the cabin into the
woods, ate wild berries next to the three animals, and was surrounded by a
horde of zombie-like women (with blurred faces) climbing the hill around him.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2010)

D. Tom Six
This twisted, repellent Dutch shocker about a mad doctor
who turned three young victims into a 12-limbed abomination proved
that it's still possible to appall horror buffs.
One of the more perverse, twisted and repellent ideas for a film was found in
this exploitative, torture-porn horror film by Dutch director/writer Tom Six. It
brought to mind David Cronenberg's body-horror films, Japanese horror, and
the S&M tone of films such as Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) that told of
torturous "medical experiments" (performed mostly on naked females) by an
evil Nazi at a death camp.
In his horrific midnight movie, two American girls Lindsay (Ashley C. Williams)
and Jenny (Ashlynn Yennie) traveling in Europe on a road trip experienced a
flat tire at night in the rain, and came into contact with demented retired NaziGermany surgeon Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) at his luxurious modern villa. After
drugging the drinks of the two girls, and tying them up on hospital beds in his
basement operating room, he explained (via overhead projector slide-show)
how he was a master at separating conjoined or Siamese twins. A third
subject, who repeatedly swore and shouted in Japanese (subtitled) at the
sadistic doctor as he lectured to the trio, was previously-kidnapped Japanese
tourist Katsuro (Akihiro Kitamura).
Heiter bragged about an experiment in which he had transformed three
rottweiler dogs into a "beautiful three-hound construction." He told them in
clinical detail how he would proceed with his surgical operation on them, his
lifetime goal, to create a "Siamese triplet" (a multi-legged human bug). He
would first cut the knee-cap ligaments, so that knee extensions would no
longer be possible. Further modifications would require incisions on the chinscheeks of subjects B and C. He would then attach the three subjects via their
gastric system (mouth to anus!) - forming a human centipede ("Ingestion by A,
passing through B, to the excretion of C").
Advertisements for the mostly-panned and grotesque film claimed it was
"100% Medically Accurate." Although the film's disturbing surgical procedure
was described in great detail, the actual results were mostly implied rather
than explicitly shown. The tension-inducing film was greeted with hatred and
discussion, and although it received various awards, it was also described as
garbage.
The emphasis was upon the cold-hearted, unfeeling, maniacal and monstrous
god-like doctor, Frankenstein-like, in his obsession to create a new life-form. A
second part (or sequence) was released direct-to-DVD a few years later, The
Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence (2011).