Well, yeah ..... I can understand a first viewing, either because you're interested by the reviews, you like the director's previous work, plain curiosity or whatever. But I can't imagine buying a copy of A Serbian Film for example, for some repeat viewing, but I guess different strokes ..... The only movie in my collection I've only ever viewed once and that was enough is Georges Franju's Blood Of The Beasts. It came as a bonus feature on the Criterion DVD of his classic Eyes Without A Face. Blood Of The Beasts is his 1949 doco about the slaughterhouses of Paris, contrasting the everyday goings on at a slaughterhouse with cuts to tranquil Parisian life. Some info ........ http://ruthlessculture.com/2009/07/08/blood-of-the-beasts-1949-humanitys-capacity-to-dream/
Until I read your post about Blood Of The Beasts, I didn't think about mentioning the following movie in this thread. Why? Because for me, a disturbing movie normally has no redeeming value, other than entertainment, etc. But that need not be the case. I am referring to the movie Earthlings (2010), which is narrated by Joaquin Phoenix. It is listed at Rotten Tomatoes, and available at Netflix. At RT, it has NO professional reviews listed, just one "audience" review. Why? I think because it was never picked up for commercial release. I can't imagine anybody paying to see it. What is it about? It is a documentary about animal abuse, and contained lots of underground grainy video footage. The slaughterhouse is covered, but lots of other stuff too.
It's depressing for sure. One of the weirdest Xmas gifts I ever got. I can't remember much about it other than it was a big downer and kind of gruesome too. I'm not much of a Lars Von Trier fan; not because I find him "disturbing" though.
I hadn't run across Earthlings before, it looks harrowing, I'm not real sure I could watch the whole thing. And the thing is it's wanting to educate. Real filmed violence or as in Earthlings' case, animal cruelty, confronts on a far deeper level and triggers emotions which you can't always come to terms with easily. I've just skimmed through Earthlings on youtube ...... Some people must have an "off " switch, how can they do that every day and not be affected ?
"Martyrs" actually upset me a lot more than "A Serbian Film" did, and that's not to say that "A Serbian Film" wasn't upsetting. I already knew about most of the more infamous stuff in that movie before I saw it, so maybe that's why it didn't upset me as much, but I also got the feeling while I was watching it that the filmmakers were just consciously trying to scandalize people for the sake of it. When I was at sleepaway camp when I was eight I knew a kid who used to do the flip-his-eyelids-inside-out thing to gross people out, and it worked, but you forgot about it ten seconds later. To me, "A Serbian Film" was kind of the cinematic equivalent. "Martyrs," on the other hand, I was completely unprepared for, and it just upset the hell out of me, for reasons I can't even articulate all these years later. Also after I watched it, images from it would flash back in my mind over and over again and just really unnerve me. The level that it operated on was just very hard to be as cynical about -- I could tell while I was watching it that the filmmaker was being sincere in what he was trying to express, and that made it very difficult for me to just dismiss it like it was another stupid horror movie. I know a lot of people got really angry about the unresolved nature of the ending, but at the same time, how could they possibly end it in a way that would make the previous two hours suddenly be all okay? The "happy ending" on that one was that you get to leave the theater.
Another movie made about Sylvia Likens is An American Crime. The whole movie is on YouTube. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Crime I haven't seen The Girl Next Door yet. Not sure if I need (want) to see the story portrayed again.
Due to my intense feelings about animal cruelty, I found the "pig scene" from Traces of Death highly disturbing. And I didn't even attempt to watch the "sex change operation" scene from the same film.... I don't need to see that.
This is a long thread so I haven't gotten all the way through it, but Life is Hot in Cracktown deserves a mention. Director Buddy Giovanazzo's films don't seem to get seen enough. Cracktown is not as overtly disgusting as A Serbian Film or The Human Centipede, but those films exist merely to shock with gross visual effects, attempting to come up with something more over the top than the last film. Don't get me wrong -- Life is Hot in Cracktown will have something to disturb everybody, but unfortunately it is a very real depiction what can happen in the slums of LA and the like. I think it's a pretty damn good film, and one thing it is not is pleasant.
The only thing about that film that made me outraged was the poor acting and direction. It was too awful for me to be offended...now the BOOK on the other hand was pretty disturbing...
I don't know what it is, but I found THE LEGO MOVIE disturbing. And to think that in the 80s the very idea of a animation based on Legos was a joke!
