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The Most Controversial
Films of All-Time Part 9 |
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The Most Controversial
Films of All-Time Part 9 |
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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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Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Polish director Roman Polanski's first American feature film and his second, scary horror film (following his first disturbing film in English titled Repulsion (1965)) - was about a young newlywed couple who moved into a large, rambling old apartment building in Central Park West, where the title character Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) experienced a nightmarish dream of making love to a Beast. Becoming paranoid and hysterical, she believed herself impregnated so that her baby could be used by an evil cult in their rituals. The creepy film ended with the devil's flesh-and-blood baby being cared for by the mother! The film was one of the first with the theme of Satanism and the occult, before the onslaught of films such as The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and Demon Seed (1977). Its most memorable sequences were the surrealistic dream sequence during which Rosemary was impregnated by Satan (husband Guy's appearance changed into a grotesque beast-like figure resembling the Devil, with yellowish eyes and clawed, scaly hands), and the final scene in which she discovered her Anti-Christ child in a black-draped crib. The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures reviled the film, condemning it for "the perverted use which the film made of fundamental Christian beliefs, especially surrounding the birth of Christ, and its mockery of religious persons and practices" - these criticisms were due in part to sequences depicting Rosemary's guilt over her lapsed Catholicism, anti-religious references to the Pope made by Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer) ("You don't need to have respect for him because he pretends that he's holy"), the portrayal of Rosemary's pregnancy as a sexually-transmitted disease, and the film's view of Satanism as the birth of the Anti-Christ. The incredible irony of the film was that the plot would be similarly played out a year later - Polanski's pregnant actress/wife Sharon Tate would be terrorized and murdered by the strange cult of Charles Manson followers in her Benedict Canyon home. A real-life tragedy also occurred when the Bramford apartment building (actually the Dakota apartments - the actual locale in the film) was where Mark Chapman shot John Lennon in 1980. |
   
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Salo (1975, It.) (aka The 120 Days of Sodom)
Salò was directed by the notorious Italian poet, novelist, painter and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered before it was released. It was based on a work by the notorious Marquis de Sade - to depict the short-lived, lakeside republic of Salo in Nazi-controlled N. Italy at the close of WWII, where four fascist officials in a secluded chateau near Marzabotto totally controlled, abused, enslaved and victimized an anonymous group of young and attractive peasant teenagers (both male and female) and subjected them to sexual and physical tortures, psychological humiliation and violence over a period of a few days. This extreme exercise of power was supposed to symbolize the evil of fascism itself. The nihilistic film was filled with debaucheries and cruel sexual perversions (ie., a mock wedding ceremony in which the couple was denied consummation and then anally raped). Other outrages included strangulation, scalping, tongue-extraction, eye-gouging and nipple-burning, including the forced eating of human excrement. In one scene, the youths were stripped, collared, leashed, and forced to act like dogs. It aroused outrage and disgust when it was released. It was prosecuted by various film certification boards and banned outright in numerous countries. |
     
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September Dawn (2007)
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. |
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Song of the South (1946)
This remarkable Disney film was based on the "Uncle Remus" stories of Joel Chandler Harris, and was presented as one of their earliest, innovative live-action and animation mixtures. Set after the Civil War at a time when slavery was abolished, its animated sequences featured Uncle Remus characters (i.e., Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox, and Br'er Bear) accompanied by live-action portions with folk story-teller Uncle Remus (Special Oscar-winning James Baskett). The film's song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" won the Academy Award for Best Song. Remarkably, it has never been released for home video consumption in the US (although it has been available in European and Asian markets). After this film's last theatrical release in 1986, it has simply vanished and been unavailable for purchase. Recently, a Disney spokesman reiterated the fact that the film may continue to be unavailable due to "the sensitivity that exists in our culture" and fears of political-correctness repercussions. Although it has been rumored that the NAACP banned this Disney movie, that was untrue -- they simply expressed their disapproval of the portrayal of African-Americans in the film, and their concern about its potential to present an image of an idyllic master-slave relationship. The main objection was its stereotypical depiction of blacks in the live-action sequences, although others have mistakenly thought that the movie actually depicted slavery and tacit approval of the master-slave relationship. |
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South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
This R-rated, adults-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, with 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. Even 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.] The film's story opened with the viewing of a film within a film by third-grade boys - an R-rated movie featuring Canadians Terrance & Phillip - as a result, they were 'corrupted' and their parents led censorship efforts that ultimately pressured the United States to wage war against Canada. It was an incongruous combination of an animation starring four pint-sized 8 year-olds (Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny), a musical (with twelve songs including the Oscar-nominated "Blame Canada"), a political satire (Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was depicted as the homosexual lover of Satan), a parody of Disney films (i.e., Beauty and the Beast) and Broadway, and a diatribe against misguided censorship (i.e., the motion picture ratings system) and American parenting. Angels were portrayed as nude females, and one child was incinerated when lighting his flatulence. |
  
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Straw Dogs (1971)
This disturbing film further ignited controversy over screen violence and misogynistic sexual abuse of women in the early 70s. The unflinching film from Sam Peckinpah (following his equally divisive film The Wild Bunch (1969)) starred Dustin Hoffman as David Sumner, a bookish, mild-mannered American mathematician on sabbatical living in a rural England town - the childhood village of his teasingly-seductive young bride Amy (Susan George). After she flaunted herself flirtatiously in view of the local townsfolk, one of the local thugs (one of whom was an ex-boyfriend) assaulted the provocative wife in a graphic double rape scene, which led to a cathartic eruption and escalation of violence. The film was accused of implying that she brought on the assault (possibly as a means to insult her impassive husband) and actually might have enjoyed the first rape (a glamorization of rape). The climactic, stunning and barbaric ending also appeared to morally endorse vigilante violence, especially because of the main character's redemptive yet unsatisfying homicidal rampage. It was re-edited for an R-rating and faced censorship bans in England for 30 years. |
 
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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
This unconventional, revolutionary, and seminal blaxploitation film (released just before the Hollywood-financed Shaft (1971)) from the early 70s with an all-black cast was directed, co-produced, edited, scored, and written by African-American independent film-maker Melvin Van Peebles (his film debut) - he also starred as the macho black hustler title character. The Hollywood establishment refused to financially back this gritty, low-budget, sex-filled, realistic film with never-before-seen images, soft-core sex and inflammatory racial politics, so Peebles self-financed it and sought monetary backing from Bill Cosby. It was the first highly profitable independent film made by a black filmmaker. After he refused to submit the film to the ratings board (the MPAA), he rated his own film with an X-rating - and Peebles used this to his marketing advantage in its tagline advertising on posters: "Rated X By An All-White Jury!" However, only two theaters in the entire United States would screen the film at first - until it became a big hit and highly profitable. The radical Black Panthers praised the film, while the mainstream black-oriented Ebony Magazine denounced it - Hollywood studios were ultimately forced to acknowledge the monetary potential of the untapped, urban African-American market (similar to the effect Easy Rider (1969) had on its countercultural audiences) as a result of this influential film. The documentary-style, cheaply-made film shot on location in about three weeks was an anti-White, anti-authority diatribe - explained in the film's opening: "This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man...Starring: The Black Community." It was supplemented with jump-cuts, experimental lighting, freeze-frames, tinted and overlapping images and montages as it chronicled the successful (uncharacteristically) flight of a black fugitive nicknamed "Sweet Sweetback" (due to his large-sized manhood and insatiable sexual prowess) through Los Angeles - and toward and across the Mexican border. The film opened with underaged Sweet Sweetback as an orphan boy (Melvin's 13 year-old son Mario) engaging in explicit sex (and losing his virginity) with an older prostitute in an all-black brothel, and further explicit sex acts throughout the film featured poorly-lit full-frontal nudity. The film ended with the superimposed text: "Watch out -- A Baad Assss Nigger is Coming Back To Collect Some Dues..." Peebles reportedly received VD during the making of this film. In Mario's own autobiographical film Baadasssss! (2003) years later about the making of the landmark independent film, he revealed the upset caused by the explicit scene he was forced to engage in. |
 
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Hooper's low-budget, seminal exploitation horror film (with a quasi-documentary feel) was made on a budget of $300,000 - and became highly profitable (approximately $31 million) through its advertising campaign ("Who will survive - and what will be left of them?"). Surprisingly, there was little blood and no close-ups of the fatal blows, although it became the 70's most controversial cult horror film and the precursor of later slasher films. Its unpleasant storyline was loosely based on the real-life Wisconsin serial killer and skin-fetishist Ed Gein - as was Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The skillfully-directed film told about a family trio of unsympathetic, cannibalistic, homicidal, ex-slaughterhouse workers/fiends: a Gulf station attendant, a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), and Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) - who slaughtered college-aged kids (and anyone else) who happened to trespass in their area - and then intended to eat their human flesh and sell the remains as 'sausage'. The R-rated, painful-to-watch, nightmarish film opened with a sober narration about a crime spree - vandals desecrating graveyards in a remote section of Texas. During a visit to Sally Hardesty's (Marilyn Burns) grandfather's grave, she and her wheelchair-bound, sadistic and fat brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and friends Pam (Teri McMinn), Pam's boyfriend Kirk (William Vail), and Sally's boyfriend Jerry (Allen Danziger) investigated her grandfather's run-down, deserted farm. The murders began with the first appearance of Leatherface from behind a sliding door in another deserted house (where there were skeleton bones and human remains strewn about) - he wore a bloody butcher's apron and a mask stitched out of human skin - and wielded a roaring chain saw. The masked man suddenly appeared and sledge-hammered Kirk's head, and then hung a screaming Pam on a meat hook through her upper back. After carving up the dead Kirk with a chain saw, Jerry was also killed with a sledgehammer after discovering a deep-frozen, half-dead Pam in a large chest freezer, and Franklin was slaughtered through his stomach with the chain saw. Running in terror, Sally unfortunately ran into Leatherface's house, where she was soon held captive in the infamous dinner scene (and had her finger cut as a blood-appetizer for the weakened, withered, vampiric and patriarchal Grandfather (John Dugan)). In the film's climax at dawn, a bloody and deranged-looking Sally escaped in the back of a pickup truck and left the killer spinning on the highway with his buzzing chainsaw. The horror flick deeply divided critics - some praised it for its depiction of deprived, 'off-the-main-highway' rural America and the social effects upon its people. Others deplored it for its effective yet mindless slasher mentality. It was banned twice in France for potentially inciting violence, and for 25 years in the UK. |
 
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3 | Part 4 | Part
5 | Part 6 | Part
7 | Part 8 | Part
9 | Part 10
Created in 1996-2008 © by Tim Dirks. All rights reserved.
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 