The Last House on the Left (1972)
D. Wes Craven

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 Cassell) 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).

In one disturbing and humiliating scene, blue-wearing Phyllis was forced to urinate with her clothes on ("Piss (in) your pants...Do it!"). The camera panned down, showing her wettened blue-jeans. Then, they was stripped naked and forced to have oral sex with each other ("Make them make it with each other!"). The girls went ahead, rationalizing: "lt's just you and me here. Nobody else. Just you and me, okay?" Psychopathic, sadistic gang member Sadie (Jeramie Rain) also performed oral sex on Mari.

Phyllis made a run for it, but was cornered, stabbed in the back by Fred "Weasel" Podowski (Fred Lincoln) and then dis-emboweled (after repeated stabbings) and butchered, after which Sadie reached in and pulled out her gooey intestines to examine them. Phyllis' left hand and half of her forearm were amputated (off-screen).

Meanwhile, red-wearing Mari had Krug's name carved into her upper chest and was then brutally raped (as he drooled onto her face). She vomited and then walked dazedly into a nearby pond to half-submerge and cleanse herself. Krug shot and killed her there, and she floated on the water's surface.

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 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 culprit "Weasel" (who had his hands tied behind his back) 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.

Last Tango In Paris (1972, It./Fr.)
D. Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci's film was a landmark, controversial erotic film with raw (yet simulated) sexual scenes and primitive force - critics and audiences alike asked - was it erotic art or pornography? In the film's story, a distraught, confused, grieving widower and middle-aged (45 years old), overweight American exile Paul (Marlon Brando) plunged into a sado-masochistic, physical (yet impersonal and basically anonymous) relationship with young, full-breasted 20 year-old Parisienne ingenue Jeanne (Maria Schneider). Paul's gutter-language and set of 'no questions asked' rules was notable for the time: "We are going to forget everything we knew - everything" - and their relationship became increasingly more vile, slavish, empty, humiliating, and unromantic (i.e., "You know in 15 years, you're going to be playing soccer with your tits. What do you think of that?").

It was noted for Paul's scatological monologues, its bathtub washing scene and the disturbing and explicit 'butter' scene during anal intercourse, in which she passively acquiesced to rape and forced sodomy (with an application of butter: "Get the butter") in an empty, rented apartment, as he forced her to repeat phrases such as: "the will is broken by repression". Later, Paul reciprocated by letting Jeanne penetrate him anally with her fingers - part of his objective to "look death right in the face...go right up into the ass of death... till you find the womb of fear."

But then they broke up, and their previous secretive and mostly sexual affair was over, but Paul insisted that a new one was beginning, although she wished to break off their relationship. He wanted to resume everything: "There's nothing to understand. We left the apartment, and now we begin and love all the rest of it." He told her some details of his brutalized life, things that he had withheld from her in the past: "Yeah, listen. I'm 45. I'm a widower. I own a little hotel. It's kind of a dump, but not completely a flop house. Then I used to live on my luck and I got married, and my wife killed herself." Their original relationship had lost its anonymity, which she thought had been preferable: "It's better not knowing anything."

He chased her back to her mother's Parisian apartment. He approached her: "And now I've found you. And I love you. I wanna know your name." Suddenly a shot rang out - she spoke her name "Jeanne" at the same moment he was shot point-blank in the stomach. Paul staggered to the balcony where he collapsed and died in a fetal position. The camera tracked backwards to reveal the skyline, and Jeanne standing there with a revolver in her hand (her father's pistol from his military days). Dazed, Jeanne muttered the last lines of the film to herself (in French, translated below), rehearsing her lines that she would have to deliver to the police to explain his death (rationalizing and reassuring herself that it was self-defense when the stranger attempted to rape her): "I don't know who he is. He followed me in the street. He tried to rape me. He's a lunatic. I don't know what he's called. I don't know his name. I don't know who he is. He tried to rape me. I don't know. I don't know him. I don't know who he is. He's a lunatic. I don't know his name."

It was noteworthy as the first "mainstream" film to carry the dreaded "X" rating. In 1974, it became the first film to be prosecuted under Britain's Obscene Publications Act - and the sodomy scene was ordered deleted. In the director's own country, the film was seized and banned, and charged for its "obscene content offensive to public decency". In the mid-70s, it was permanently banned in Italy (with all prints seized), its stars and director were condemned, and Bertolucci was given a 4-month suspended prison sentence.

Pink Flamingos (1972)
D. John Waters

Director John Waters (known as the "Prince of Puke" or "Pope of Trash") produced a unique crop of intentionally bizarre, crude, sexually-grotesque, trashy and bad taste-laden cult films with eccentric oddball characters and harshly-vivid language. Almost his entire filmography is laced with unusual plot lines, freaky casts, larger-than-life performances and extremely grossed-out scenes that could be found nowhere else. Waters faced criticism for pushing conventional boundary lines and exhibiting full-frontal nudity, and his outrageous films led to calls for censorship and outright banning. The sheer repulsiveness and infamy of Waters' films (this film was part of a "trash trilogy" composed of Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977)), however, made them campy midnight movie hits, and led to more mainstream future successes such as Polyester (1981) and Hairspray (1988).

Waters' unrated seminal film Pink Flamingos was one of the most outrageous and the ultimate example of 'poor-taste' - it contained incestuous oral sex, an illegal adoption ring complete with caged women in the basement during their pregnancies, making love with a live chicken during a copulation scene between Babs' son Crackers (Danny Mills) and Cookie (Cookie Mueller), public urination, the eating of real dog feces, and a close-up of a man's singing (opening and closing) anal sphincter. Animal activist groups protested the revolting film for its treatment of chickens. When this film was re-released in 1997, it was rated NC-17 by the MPAA.

It told about an unusual overweight transvestite trailer park matron named Babs Johnson (played by Divine or Harris Glen Milstead) who literally ate fresh poodle-dog feces in a scatological competition to become the 'World's Filthiest Person Alive' in the film's conclusion, among other things. Other characters in her mobile-home trailer included her delinquent son Crackers, her voyeuristic traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), and her half-dressed, mentally-ill, brain-damaged, corpulent, and gap-toothed mother Edie (Edith Massey) who sat in a playpen crib and ate hard-boiled eggs all day long.

Shocking sequences included the over-the-top birthday party scene featuring bizarre sex acts, and the murder and cannibalistic consumption of a quartet of policemen (reminiscient of Night of the Living Dead (1968)). Babs delivered a stunning "filth politics" speech to TV reporters: "Blood does more than turn me on, Mr. Vader. It makes me come. And more than the sight of it, I love the taste of it. The taste of hot, freshly killed blood...Kill everyone now! Condone first degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat s--t! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!" before executing her non-PC competitors: blue-haired Raymond (David Lochary) and red-haired Connie Marble (Mink Stole) in front of the press.

The Exorcist (1973)
D. William Friedkin

Friedkin adapted William Peter Blatty's best-selling, 1971 blockbuster book about satanic demon possession (based on a true-story of a 13 year-old Maryland boy in 1949), and created one of the most disturbing, frightening, shocking, and exploitative films ever made. The horror film masterpiece, the first major horror blockbuster, was one of the most opposed and talked-about films, especially during its pre-release time period. Viewers and the studio took note that there were accompanying ominous events, including the deaths of nine persons associated with the production (including Jack MacGowran and von Sydow's brother) - and a request was made to exorcise the set.

Its controversial content, sensational, nauseating, and horrendous special effects (360 degree head-rotations, self-mutilation/masturbation with a crucifix, the projectile spewing of green puke, a mixture of split-pea soup and oatmeal, etc.), for its depictions of desecrations, vivid representations of evil, and for its intense scenes of exorcism (accompanied by blasphemies, obscenities and graphic physical shocks). One of the most controversial scenes was the long sequence of invasive medical testing performed on the hapless patient - criticized as medical pornography.

A sweet pre-teenaged girl Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) became possessed by a malevolent evil spirit - and after urinating on the carpet in public and experiencing a shaking bed, was soon transformed and disfigured into a head-rotating, levitating, green vomit-spewing, obscenity-shouting creature. Her divorced, film-star mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) was at wit's end, until she called on a dedicated, faith-questioning Jesuit priest Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) to exorcise the malevolent devil from her daughter's body. An elderly priest Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), whose archaeology project released the Satanic being, also risked his life (and died of heart failure) to administer rites of exorcism with incantations and holy water.

In a supremely self-sacrificial act during the cathartic finale of the horror film, the formerly-rebellious priest Father Karras taunted the demon inside the possessed devil-girl Regan as he wrestled against her. He provoked and welcomed the demon to leave her body and come into his own so that he could destroy the Evil. He hurled himself toward the bedroom window - his body was thrown through the glass and he fell to his death on the steep concrete steps below.

The film was enormously popular with moviegoers at Christmas-time of 1973, but some portions of the viewing audience fled from theaters due to nausea, convulsions, fainting or sheer fright/anger (Headlines proclaimed: "The Exorcist nearly killed me!"), and it was reported that one patron in San Francisco literally attacked the screen in an attempt to kill the demon. Mass hysteria led to paramedics being called to some theatres, and others were picketed in protest.

The film's showings also led to a reported increase in temporary spiritual possessions or psychoses by individuals, and an increase in requests for priests to exorcise everything from loved ones and pets to houses, neighborhoods and appliances. Evangelist Reverend Billy Graham stated that he "felt the power of evil buried within the celluloid of the film itself". The film was also banned on video in the UK for fifteen years.