Example

Deliverance (1972)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask (1972)

Frenzy (1972)

Fritz the Cat (1972)

The Last House on the Left (1972)

Horror film director Wes Craven's second effort (and his first release as both a writer and director) resulted in this infamous, controversial, taboo-breaking and often revolting 'snuff'-type shock exploitation film; it was about the relentless ordeal of two teenaged girls: 17 year-old birthday girl Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) and Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham); in the film's opening scene under the credits, Mari was showering, preparing to go out with Phyllis and search for pot while on their way to a Blood Lust concert; they were apprehended and kidnapped by a sadistic group of escaped convicts led by Krug Stillo (David Hess); after taken to a woodsy area the next morning, Phyllis was forced to urinate with her clothes on ("Piss (in) your pants"), and then after being stripped naked and forced to have sex with each other ("Make them make it with each other!" with the girls rationalizing: "lt's just you and me here. Nobody else. Just you and me, okay?"), they were brutally tortured and eventually killed; Phyllis was stabbed in the back and then dis-emboweled (after repeated stabbings) and butchered - after which gang member Sadie (Jeramie Rain) pulled out her intestines and examined them; meanwhile, Mari had Krug's name carved into her upper chest and was then brutally raped - she died by walking dazedly into a pond where Krug shot and killed her while she was half-submerged to cleanse herself; the notorious film was censored or severely edited for release

Last Tango in Paris (1972/1973, It./Fr.) (aka Ultimo tango a Parigi)

Director Bernardo Bertolucci's film was a landmark, controversial erotic film that received an X-rating, due mostly to the fact that the film featured a major star who had sex throughout the entire movie; it told about a distraught, confused, grieving widower and middle-aged, overweight American exile Paul (Marlon Brando) who plunged into a sado-masochistic, sex-crazed, physical (yet impersonal and basically anonymous) relationship with young, big-breasted 20 year-old Parisienne ingenue Jeanne (Maria Schneider) after his wife's suicide; the film outraged some viewers for a full-body panning shot up Jeanne's body, including a frontal closeup shot of Jeanne's pubic hair; also for its bathtub washing scene and the disturbing and explicit sodomy scene on the floor using butter as a lubricant during anal intercourse (with his command: "Go get the butter"); later in a similarly-shocking scene, Paul reciprocated by letting Jeanne penetrate him anally with her fingers ("Put your fingers up my ass") - 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"; his set of rules was notable for the time: "We are going to forget everything we knew - everything"; the film ended with his violent death on the balcony when she shot him with her father's gun; in 1974, it became the first film to be prosecuted under Britain's Obscene Publications Act; Brando and director Bertolucci were both nominated for Oscars in the highly-acclaimed and debated cinematic work

Pink Flamingos (1972)
and
Female Trouble (1974)

Director John Waters, dubbed "The Prince of Puke," produced a unique crop of intentionally bizarre, crude, sexually-grotesque, and bad taste-laden cult films with eccentric oddball characters and harshly-vivid language; his gross-out, unrated seminal film Pink Flamingos was about an unusual transvestite trailer park matron-diva named Babs Johnson (played by Divine) who literally ate real dog feces in a competition to become the 'World's Filthiest Person Alive', among other things; other shocking sequences included the feeding of eggs by the "Egg Man" (Paul Swift) to Babs' overweight mentally-retarded mother (Edith Massey) who lives in a play-pen and dresses like a baby, making love with a chicken between Babs' son Crackers (Danny Mills) and Cookie (Cookie Mueller), the scene of Babs' oral incestual sex with Crackers, and the scene at Babs' birthday party in which a gay man ascended onto a performance stage, laid down on his back with his legs in the air, and musically sang or 'lip-synched' to a record ("Mau-mau-mau") by flexing his anal sphincter!

A second quintessential Waters film was the shocking and raunchy camp comedy Female Trouble rated NC-17; it again featured Divine as Dawn Davenport - a teenage runaway delinquent who was raped (Divine played both parts in the scene of a self-rape performed on a dirty mattress on the ground: as the sleazy male rapist Earl Peterson and as the female rape victim); later she was duped into becoming a face-disfigured fashion model (to test the theory that "Crime is Beauty") - and then became a media-obsessed, glory-seeking murderess who was executed in the electric chair in the final scene for killing her daughter Taffy Davenport (Mink Stole) and members of her theater audience during her night-club act performance; Divine wore skin-tight, leather dominatrix outfits throughout the film, and the dialogue was often unbelievable (Taffy: "I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I were suffocating, and there was oxygen in your balls!"); another of the film's notorious characters was overweight, 58-year old gap-toothed Aunt Ida Nelson (Edith Massey) who in one scene orgiastically fondled her large, bare breasts and donned grotesque, tight-fitting leather dominatrix outfits

Savage Messiah (1972, UK)

Breezy (1973)

In the first directed film that he didn't also star in, director Clint Eastwood cast Kay Lenz as a troubled hippie and liberal, guitar-strumming free spirit named Edith Alice "Breezy" Breezerman; in this R-rated, May-December romance story, she became involved in an intergenerational affair opposite William Holden as Frank Harmon who took the role of a middle-aged, divorced businessman - a conservative real-estate broker in the LA area

Coffy (1973)

After the success of the blaxploitation action film Shaft (1971) that was targeted at inner-city black male audiences, this violent soft-core female follow-up version starred Pam Grier (in her first lead role) as an anti-drug vigilante-heroine vengeful against despicable Vegas drug-dealers - using her oversized revolver or sawed-off shotgun; she was one of the first female action stars in this gritty yet formulaic film that was more palatable than Melvin Van Peebles‘ breakout film Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song (1971); this film included heavy doses of sex and nudity, low-cut clothing, and for some viewers a confirmation of the stereotyped societal perception that blacks were sexual animals; director Quentin Tarantino judged it to be one of the top 10 greatest films ever made, and brought back Grier to star in his tribute film Jackie Brown (1997)

Deadly Weapons (1973)

Don't Look Now (1973, UK/It.)

The Exorcist (1973)

Academy-Award winning director William Friedkin created a frightening, horror film masterpiece about a young 12 year-old girl entering puberty and womanhood, who also became possessed; besides its sensational, nauseating, horrendous special effects (360 degree head-rotation, the projectile spewing of green puke, etc.), it also included scenes of Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) forcefully grabbing a psychiatrist's crotch, urinating on the floor during a party, using obscene language, self-mutilating and masturbating herself with a crucifix, and making inappropriate sexual advances; there was also a controversial and lengthy excruciatingly-torturous medical examination sequence with markedly sexual overtones

The Grande Bouffe (1973, Fr/It.) (aka La Grande Bouffe, or "The Big Feast (or Blow-Out)")

The Harrad Experiment (1973)

The Naked Ape (1973)

Sleeper (1973)