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The Most Controversial
Films of All-Time Part 6 |
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The Most Controversial
Films of All-Time Part 6 |
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Controversy-invoking films may be from almost any genre - documentaries, westerns, erotic-thrillers, dramas, horror, comedy, or animated, and more. Standards for what may be considered shocking, offensive or controversial have changed drastically over many decades.The voluntary ratings system of the Motion Picture Association of America can influence a film's public showing in a theatre -- an NC-17 rating or an unrated film may often close down a film's screening and lead to commercial failure.
Note: The films that are marked with a yellow
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The Most Controversial Films of All-Time
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| Film Title, Director, Explanation | Example |
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I Spit On Your Grave (1978) (aka Day of the Woman) This exploitative, X-rated (later released in an R-rated version) notorious gang rape/vigilante revenge splatter-horror film was banned outright in many countries (for its misogynistic theme), and vilified by critics. Its theme of violent revenge placed it in the category of filthy and debased exploitation film (masquerading as an anti-rape diatribe), and reviewers such as Ebert and Siskel (who described the unrated version as vile garbage) attempted to have the film pulled from theaters. It told how NY writer Jennifer Hill (Camille Keaton, grand-niece of comedian Buster Keaton, and married to director Zarchi at the time of filming) rented a remote and woodsy, lakeside dwelling for the summer. After skinny-dipping - she was confronted and repeatedly raped by four men (Eron Tabor, Anthony Nichols, Gunther Kleeman, and Richard Pace) in a graphic, long and violent sequence (40 minutes) that was particularly uncomfortable to watch. Afterwards, she visited a church to ask for forgiveness before the brutal and bloody counter-assault she had planned, followed by the scenes of her angry (yet seductive) revenge against each of the four attackers: a hanging, a lethal bloodletting castration seductively conducted nude in a warm bathtub with a conveniently-placed carving knife, an axing, and a disembowelment with an outboard boat motor. |
    
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JFK (1991) # 5 Director/co-writer Oliver Stone's' complex, provocative docu-film thriller was a controversial, speculatively revisionistic, historical epic surrounding one-time New Orleans DA Jim Garrison's (Kevin Costner) investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963. Its intriguing interpretation was based on the well-publicized and alleged conspiracy theories of the obsessed attorney about the mystery of the death, and on the testimony of a number of unreliable witnesses. The film masterfully assembled and merged, like a jigsaw puzzle, various sources of material (newsreels, photos, black and white, color, 8 mm, 16 mm, etc., minature models, and re-enactments) into one film to create a semblance of truth, but not necessarily real history. However, Stone was attacked and dismissed by the American media, CBS, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek and The Washington Post, for deliberately combining factual and historical footage with hypothetical footage to make it appear to be one seamless, objective and truthful record of events. In response, Stone released the screenplay, annotated with its factual sources. The trial scene in the last half of the film featured three very memorable scenes to disprove the idea that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) acted alone: the scornful rejection of the Magic Bullet theory (the 'official' Warren Commission version of events which Garrison declared unlikely or impossible - and "one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people" - with a diagram of the bullet's zig-zag path presented for evidence), a detailed analysis of the famous Zapruder film, and Garrison's impassioned closing argument, finishing with him staring directly into the camera, and addressing the audience: "It's up to you." |
   
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Kids (1995) # 23 Director Larry Clark's much-criticized dark cinema verite independent film was a well-needed realistic tale about drugs, amorality, sex, obscene talk, and generally decadent behavior among teenaged youth. Clark's first feature film was one of the most truthful films about promiscuous, sexually-pleasurable and fulfilling but emotionless teenage (and pre-teen) sexuality - with lethal high-risk consequences. However, others criticized it as salacious, sleazy and bordering on child pornography with lots of raunchy talk and simulated sex - disguised as a cautionary documentary. It followed a group of teenagers and preteens during 24 hours of a hot Manhattan summer, with a 17-year-old skateboarder named Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick) - a self-proclaimed "virgin surgeon" with HIV whose goal was to deflower as many girls as possible ("Virgins. I love 'em. No diseases, no loose as a goose pussy, no skank. No nothin'. Just pure pleasure"). Easily-seduced Girl # 1 (Sarah Henderson) was an easy target, as was Jenny (a young Chloe Sevigny), who became an HIV-positive-infected teen through sexual contact with Telly, as he went on a search for his next virginal victim at a skinny-dipping pool party, 13 year-old Darcy (Yakira Peguero). One of its more shocking scenes was the ending scene -- hung-over, post-partying Caspar (Justin Pierce), Telly's friend, took advantage of unconscious, stoned-out and helpless Jenny on a bed by raping her (and possibly infecting himself). When he woke up the next morning, he delivered the film’s final line: "Jesus Christ, what happened?" It was released unrated to avoid the stigma of an NC-17 rating. As a buffer against the furor, Miramax (owned by Disney at the time) created a new entity, Shining Excalibur Films, to release the picture. It was also banned by Warner Bros from its cinemas throughout Britain upon release. Clark's next controversial films, Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002), followed similar white teens and authentically explored their sexuality. |
     
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Kinsey (2004)
This serious and engrossing biopic was about controversial, Midwestern human sexuality researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) who laid the groundwork for the coming sexual revolution, with its tagline: "Let's talk about sex". It stirred up continuing protest about the impact of his pioneering work, interviews and liberal publications on morality and behavior. Kinsey startled the world with the publication of his Kinsey Report (aka Sexual Behavior in the Human Male) in 1948 and its follow-up Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). The non-erotic, non-exploitative, and non-prurient film was attacked by morality extremists for its candid and frank drama about the famous Indiana University doctor's obsessive life-work. It illustrated how Kinsey's own wife Clara McMillen (Oscar-nominated Laura Linney) had painful sexual problems with her inexperienced husband during their honeymoon, and then later was engaged in an extra-marital affair with her husband's bi-sexual assistant Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard) - who also had a homosexual encounter with Kinsey and appeared in a full-frontal scene; and that a young Kinsey was punished with a confining genital strap to prevent him from masturbating by his ultra-moralistic, bullying, and repressive minister father (John Lithgow). In the film's final heartbreaking interview scene with an older, middle-aged lesbian subject (Lynn Redgrave in a cameo), she expressed how she was freed from homosexual guilt ("You saved my life"), after experiencing lesbian feelings. Concerned Women for America (CWA) protested that the film was "an attempt to cover up sex researcher Alfred Kinsey's horrifying reality." They accused the film of misrepresenting how Kinsey actually had encouraged pedophiles to molest children (in the name of science). Other neo-Puritanical proponents thought the film was another example of how Hollywood was normalizing perversion, attacking Christian values about sexual morality, and promoting a "pro-homosexual agenda." And an advertisement for the film was initially rejected by PBS' WNET in New York because the film was deemed too commercial and provocative. |
    
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The Kiss (1896) (aka The May Irwin Kiss, The Rice-Irwin
Kiss and The Widow Jones) This most popular short film (an Edison Vitascope film made in Edison's Black Maria studio) was thought to be scandalizing. It was the first filming of a couple's kiss that was recreated from the two well-known stage actors' (May Irwin and John Rice) performance in the hit Broadway play The Widow Jones. The Edison catalogue advertised it thus: "They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time." Many disapproved and considered it inappropriate to view two physically-unattractive people magnified on the screen during an extended kiss. As one contemporary critic wrote: "The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting." |
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The Last House on the Left (1972) This low-budget, crude, taboo-breaking and often revolting 'snuff'-type horror film (Wes Craven's debut feature film and a loose remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960)) told about the long and upsetting ordeal of two teenaged girls: Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) and Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) who were searching for pot on their way to a Bloodlust rock concert when kidnapped by a group of escaped convicts led by Krug Stillo (David Hess), brutally and sadistically tortured (including chest-carving Mari with a knife), forced to have sex with each other, raped, dis-emboweled (with one of the gang members pulling out bloody intestines), and eventually murdered in the woods. The grainy, hand-held 16 mm footage accentuated the realism and horror - and led to intense criticism for its graphic depiction of violence and disquieting, exploitative nature (one of the girls was forced to urinate on herself), which the film tried to defuse by claiming: "It's only a movie". Craven insisted that the film's painful and protracted violence was "a reaction on my part to the violence around us, specifically to the Vietnam War." This ugly scene was intercut with views of 'surprise party' preparations for Mari by her parents (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr). Ironically, in a later scene, the escaped convicts took refuge in the home of the upscale small-town parents, the hospitable Collingwoods - where there was animalistic payback revenge/slaughter of the gang. In a grotesque sequence, the father chipped teeth out with a chisel and pursued with a chainsaw, while the mother dismembered the penis of one of the culprits with her mouth (during fellatio) and slashed another one's throat with a razor. The film faced censorship difficulties everywhere, but especially in the UK, where an uncut version of the DVD is still unavailable. |
      
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3 | Part 4 | Part
5 | Part 6 | Part
7 | Part 8 | Part
9 | Part 10
The Most
Controversial Films of All Time: Films always
have the ability to anger us, divide us, shock us, disgust us, and more.
Usually, films that inspire controversy, outright boycotting, picketing,
banning, censorship, or protest have graphic sex, violence, homosexuality,
religious, political or race-related themes and content. They usually
push the envelope regarding what can be filmed and displayed on the
screen, and are considered taboo, "immoral" or "obscene"
due to language, drug use, violence and sensuality/nudity or other incendiary
elements. Inevitably, controversy helps to publicize these films and
fuel the box-office receipts. 
are the films that "The Greatest Films" site has selected as the 