10 most scandalous films that are still worth watching

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Behind the frank scenes, the transcendental cruelty and insult of the audience's feelings, there is a deep meaning.

1. Golden Age

• France, 1930.
• Surrealism, drama, comedy.
• Duration: 60 minutes.
• IMDb: 7, 3.

The surreal and plotless "Golden Age" by Luis Bunuel caused a scandal as soon as it hit the screens. The believers were especially unhappy. They were angered by the disrespect of Buñuel and his co-author Salvador Dali for the church canons, because the director portrayed Jesus Christ in a very unexpected way, and even inserted scenes of carnal love into the film. All this ended with a pogrom of a Parisian cinema, where the picture was rolled, after which the tape was banned.

2. A Clockwork Orange

• Great Britain, USA, 1971.
• Crime drama, fantasy.
• Duration: 137 minutes.
• IMDb: 8, 3.

Cynical and ruthless young man Alex DeLarge leads a gang of thugs, whose members wear bowlers and white overalls and speak a strange dialect. They stroll the streets of London and amuse themselves with ultra-violent acts. Once teenagers break into the house of a writer and a liberal activist, brutally mock a man and rape his wife. But Alex will have to pay for this crime.

Stanley Kubrick adapted Anthony Burgess's novel in his own spirit. Violent scenes and sexual violence were intended to show what happens when the state gains absolute control over a person. Only ordinary viewers did not really grasp the essence of the director's artistic and intellectual research. Rather, they were so shocked by the cynicism of the picture that Kubrick insisted on the withdrawal of the tape from the English box office, banning its demonstration until his death.

3. The last tango in Paris

• Italy, France, 1972.
• Erotic melodrama.
• Duration: 129 minutes.
• IMDb: 7, 0.

After the suicide of his wife, American Paul meets his new girlfriend Zhanna. They meet regularly, allowing themselves what they cannot do in ordinary life. But gradually the girl gets tired of what is happening and wants to stop everything.

44 years after the film's release, many Hollywood figures condemned director Bernardo Bertolucci. It turned out Bertolucci sobre Maria Schneider / Bertolucci admits rape scene was non-consensual that the director did not agree with the young actress Maria Schneider a very explicit rape episode. The picture, although it received Oscar nominations for Bertolucci and the performer of the second leading role, Marlon Brando, severely crippled Schneider's career. And until her death, the woman claimed I felt raped by Brando that on the set she was deceived, humiliated and used.

4. Salo, or 120 days of Sodom

• Italy, France, 1975.
• Horror, drama.
• Duration: 117 minutes.
• IMDb: 5, 9.

Four representatives of the authorities - the duke, the president, the judge and the bishop - steal young boys and girls, after which they lock themselves up with servants, guards and elderly prostitutes in a huge villa. There they indulge in terrible entertainment, raping, torturing and killing their captives.

The last film of the great Pier Paolo Pasolini was scolded, withdrawn from the box office, and the creators were accused of distributing pornography. The picture is really terrifying: in it the director mixed the perversions of the Marquis de Sade with fascist ideology. And although violence in the film is portrayed in such detail not for the entertainment of the audience, but is presented as a metaphor for unlimited power, it is very difficult to calmly watch what is happening on the screen.

The strangest thing is that some time after the end of filming, Pasolini was found brutally murdered. Who did this is still unknown. It is only clear that the director was hated by many for his political views.

5. Caligula

• Italy, 1979.
• Historical drama.
• Duration: 156 minutes.
• IMDb: 5, 4.

After the Roman emperor Tiberius dies, his heir Caligula becomes the ruler. He turns out to be an insane tyrant, obsessed with power, and the Senate realizes that this cannot go on for long.

Viewers are probably wondering how they managed to lure famous artists into such a mediocre movie: Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and even the legendary Peter O'Toole. The fact is that even at the production stage, opinions about what the tape should be were diverged. Writer Gore Vidal was planning a serious historical drama, director Tinto Brass was going to shoot satire, and producer Bob Guccione demanded from all of them as much provocation and frankness as possible. Guccione didn't like the final version of the film, so he personally filmed 6 minutes of pornographic scenes and inserted them into the picture without warning the rest of the participants.

Editing was carried out without the participation of the director, who had already been fired by that time, and they took not the best shots (sometimes even defective ones). The resulting film turned out to be infinitely far from what Vidal and Brass wanted to see, did not recapture their grandiose budget, and critics smashed it to smithereens.

6. The last temptation of Christ

• Canada, USA, 1988.
• Drama.
• Duration: 164 minutes.
• IMDb: 7, 5.

Trying to understand his destiny, an ordinary carpenter from Judea named Jesus Christ leaves to wander with his friend Judas. The man does not yet know that he is destined to go through the difficult path of the Messiah and suffer a lot.

Director Martin Scorsese has long dreamed of making a film based on the novel by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, but not a single studio dared to film it. Finally, the director was taken under the wing of Universal on the condition that Scorsese's next picture will be commercial.

The film was predictably hated by Christians, because the director freely dispensed with the canons. Christ, superbly played by Willem Dafoe, is portrayed primarily as a simple man torn apart by doubts. The scenes where Jesus watches Mary Magdalene receive clients, as well as the scene of the closeness of Christ and Magdalene, were considered especially offensive. The film was boycotted, cinemas refused to show it, and in some countries it was even banned.

7. Fun games

• Austria, 1997.
• Drama, horror.
• Duration: 108 minutes.
• IMDb: 7, 6.

Young spouses with their son come to a country house on the shore of the lake. There they are taken prisoner by two young men who identify themselves as Peter and Paul. The young men make a bet with the family that the hostages will win if they survived the next 12 hours.

In 1997, during the premiere of Michael Haneke's film at the Cannes Film Festival, special red stickers were placed on the tickets, warning that the audience was expecting something truly creepy, and pregnant women and the faint of heart were asked to refrain from watching. Nevertheless, a full hall was packed, only not everyone sat through to the end (even the famous director Wim Wenders left the show), and Haneke's creation was called the most terrible picture of the decade.

8. Irreversibility

• France, 2002.
• Crime drama, thriller.
• Duration: 99 minutes.
• IMDb: 7, 4.

A man named Marcus, along with his friend Pierre, goes in search of the sadist who beat and raped his wife. Moreover, the story unfolds in retrospect.

The dramatic thriller Gaspard Noé was first shown at the 55th Cannes Film Festival. At the same time, the film immediately set a record for the number of people who left the cinema. It is difficult to blame the audience for such a reaction: the famous rape scene with the participation of Monica Bellucci is not only staged extremely convincingly and in all unsightly details, it still lasts for 10 minutes. No less disgusting was the murder episode: there the head of one of the characters is literally smeared with a fire extinguisher.

9. Antichrist

• Denmark, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, Poland, 2009.
• Drama, horror.
• Duration: 108 minutes.
• IMDb: 6, 6.

The main character has a hard time going through the death of her child. Then her husband, a psychotherapist, takes the woman to an old house in the forest to help, but it only gets worse.

At the premiere of Antichrist, people fainted because of too natural cruelty. And this is understandable, because the cutting off of the genitals and the fall of the child from the window are not yet the scariest scenes that can be seen in the film. In addition, after this picture, the director Lars von Trier was again charged with misogyny. Many viewers decided that Trier was trying to say with his tape that women are the main evil in the world (although he wanted to convey that is not at all).

10. Life of Adele

• France, Belgium, Spain, 2013.
• Drama, melodrama.
• Duration: 179 minutes.
• IMDb: 7, 7.

High school student Adele meets the mocking young artist Emma. Girls fall in love with each other and soon begin to sleep together, and eventually live. But gradually they realize that not everything is so smooth between them.

The three-hour melodrama directed by Abdelatif Keshish amazed the audience with its frankness and almost pornographic love scenes. Moreover, both actresses - both Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarcopoulos - subsequently stated that the experience they had experienced traumatized them terribly, and they would definitely no longer work with Keshish.