On the subject of horrible horror film, I have to nominate I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. I watched it last night and expected it to be either dated but interesting like THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE or crude and powerful like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. Instead it was detatched, distant and boring.

Mike

It's been about twenty years since I last saw it, but that bathtub scene still sticks with me. As I'm sure you can understand.

Oh, if I'd seen it 20 years ago when I was (shudder) 19, the film as a whole probably would have freaked me the hell out. Viewed with fresh eyes in 2010, it has very little going for it outside of the shock factor. And as horrific as the rapes are, they're not nearly as shocking in a world where a big screen, big budget, big star production like HANNIBAL has a guy being fed a fried piece of his own brain.

Mike

Yeah, but Hannibal didn't have anything to say outside of stuff like that. I Spit says a good deal more than merely showing rape (which, I'd contend, still holds its ferocity).

Some other notoriously sick horror films.

Where would you place it in comparison to that lot, Charles?

Really didn't like that movie. I did like Silence of the Lambs a lot. Red Dragon was a shame, because after reading the book as a teen, I had thought out what the movie I wanted to eventually make of it would be like. And it didn't include Danny Elfman doing the score, for a start.

As to your point, while that scene was pretty ick, I only remembered it because you mentioned it, so I don't think it bothered me so much. I haven't seen Spit on Your Grave, but the rape scenes in Last House on the Left were more disturbing than anything in Hannibal.

It's been ten years since I saw Hannibal, and the the only things I remember about it were the Poppers reference (as we sold that crap in the video store), and being incredibly bored by it.

Manhunter (the first Red Dragon adaptation) was great, even in spite of its horrible hair-metal power ballad soundtrack and the occasional boom mic dropping into frame. It's the primary example I give when I try to make the case for the script being the most important ingredient in the production of a movie.

I haven't seen 4 of those (1-3 and 6), and in terms of that depressing feeling that comes to me after seeing this sort of thing, I'd put Martyrs on the list and kick the hilarious Ichi off. Men Behind the Sun was so poorly made and corny that I couldn't take it. A Serbian Film is kind of dumb, immoral and really tries to be offensive (the director said something like the meaning of his film is that Serbia is fucked), so I'd put it around the true torture porn of the Guinea Pig series, I guess, only it's shot like a mainstream Hollywood feature. Cannibal Holocaust has a real point to make (like Martyrs and Salo), but is so dumb that I can't imagine anyone not laughing through most of it. It continues to shock only because of the butchering of a real life 100 year old tortoise. Speaking of which, that guy should watch Fernando Arrabal's Viva la Muerte, a surrealistic classic that features its lead actress having a living cow sliced open on her. She rolls around in the intestines for a few minutes. (Arrabal was Jodorowsky's mentor.) The darkly comical I Stand Alone is probably more shocking than Irreversible, but the latter deserves mention. The latter is a great rape-revenge film that both delivers on the genre front while critiquing it (a line that Paul Verhoeven often walks). Salo is a philosophically rich film that actually is both viscerally and ideologically disturbing.

Related to another thread where comicon locals are discussing a comic store that's not carrying a pornographic Alan Moore comic, I recall Borders carrying more than half of these titles when they still had a decent size DVD section. Any metalhead in El Paso could just walk in and buy this stuff. God bless capitalism.

And I really like Hannibal. It's not scary, is real silly, but also a lot of fun.

I agree, about Hannibal. Well, sort of anyway. Nothing that's going into my own collection anytime soon, but it was actually more entertaining than the also-silly and immensely overrated Silence of the Lambs.

K