Author: 80C
The “WORLD-FAMOUS EXTREME MOVIES ENTRY LIST”, c.2012
Mostly here to preserve early 2010s fare. The following is the long-gone list of “entry-level” tolerance-builder movie that circulated in the early 2010s and which kickstarted the usernet’s craze for extreme cinema. Not my list, it has been reconstructed from memory. It was generally watched bottom-top in reverse order. 6 entries.
1.A Serbian Film
2.Salò, o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma
3.Sweet Movie
4.The Human Centipede 2
5.Cannibal Holocaust
6.The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Temptative personal picks for “Extreme Cinema”. Not based on “filth” only, based on cinematography and occasionally historical significance. Many are already here, feel free to scavenge and dig your way into the EUM database at will, lots of good picks, sleeper hits, so-bad-its good, and genuine oddities (like that “Daisies” movie, oh gosh, who knew Czechia was so lively already in those times compared to the rest of parochial Europe before the tanks went in?).
1.La Montaña Sagrada. \ Any Jodorowski movie is worth it, from “Fando y Lis” to his last “autobiographical” ones, also very good. This one however is something in a league of its own, and is maybe the masterpiece of “psychedelic”, unfiltered, Surrealist cinema.
2.Von Trier’s “The Hospital” \ Another movie director worth exploring for you meme edgelords willing to refine taste and yet retain the penchant for actual portrayals of power dynamics and (especially) deception.
3.Oldboy \ Very good cinematography overall. Lots of psychology to be interpreted, far from given, not just filth. Notice the scene where diegetic divisions of time (and perverted female gaze) collapse one another.
4.Funny Games \ You can’t go wrong with Haneke. He pushes violence aside from the centerpiece, leaving only its devastating effects leak out afterwards, thus maximizing the acknowledgement of suffering. Sadism had never been so philosophical, ontological, self-reflective, and (well) sadistic in itself. No clearcut explanations, everything open to draw insights. This one movie in particular excels in all of this. I interpreted it as a metaphor for civilizational collapse in humanity’s inextricable sadism (and victimism): the new gatherings coalesce and destroy the old fundaments, and then from neighbor to neighbor, and so on. This goes beyond simple cases and examples (beyond the name references) and becomes a-historical, even though there is also a cunning metaphor on the glorification of destruction to be carefully thought again in its consequences. Brilliant meta-descriptive movie.
5.Sympathy for Mr.Vengeance \ Olboy’s proletariat counterpart drawimng on the anxieties of the 1990s KOrean Asian crisis and reaching something else more universal in the process. Pretty much more screwed than Oldboy, better than the latter on this aspect.
6.Sweet Movie \ Multi-lingual, multi-perspective, multi-narrative, multi-perverted, and genuinely freakish and genuinely fucked-up movie here in this list, this noticeably raised the bar for all Cinema. And genuinely disturbing cast (ie: the Viennese commune: they were not reciting, they were themselves on camera). Good movie that finally dispelled any notion of the world as being fucked-up as an exception, but rather fucked up as a norm and then exploited under its saccharine narratives and products of grand narratives, the one alienating and madness-inducing by lack of discipline (Miss Canada, our decaying and morally bankrupt Service Society), the other murderous by design (the ship’s captain, the USSR, the authoritarian regimes).
7.3-Iron \ Emotional Claustrophobia, the movie.
8.Ichi the KIller \ The perfect union of Japanese kitsch, slapstick, crazed scriptwriting, and the most surreal gangster-themed movie ever shot of this quality. Its unlikely commistion of genres alone qualifies it here.
9.Female Trouble \ Divine and John Water’s flashy demented genius at making fucked-up tragicomedical grotesque as the norm and insanity as a method reached an apex here after the already noteworthy example of “Pink Flamingos”. This is the finest example of trash ever put to screens, enough to even inspire philosophers and essaysts writing their treatises and works (eg: “Gender Trouble”).
10.Salò \ Maybe not the best, but genuinely nihilistic, mindbending, and still cringe-inducing after all these decades. If this is the movie that had anyone from Haneke to Breillat to lots of other filmakers ranging from New French Extremity to rental DVDs pulp slashers inspired, then sure you can bet that this movie not only qualifies for this list but also for your and whatever future attention. Loved or hated, this is a cognition-buster if you are just barely starting your journey in this kind of cinema.
These are the ones I saw in my youth, there are many others especially more niche or newer ones from artsy filmakers that are worth visiting, like Vogt or Paetzold’s movies. And do not forget other East Asian filmmakers and Center- and Eastern-European ones, plus the occasional Spanish-language high-effort nasty noir that sometimes pops out on several different national cinematographies. Many of those would make it to my list if extended, many others simply are not there because I had not watched them and hence cannot tell.
P.S.: (This is the only message I will post here ever; Yep, I know, “based, LOL” etc. spare me the accolades, no need for those anyway)
—> Thank you webmaster (and respective movie staff survivors), it has been quite a long wild ride.
The Serbian film on the list of all good edgelords.