Top 13 Total Horror Film Gross-Outs!

It’s Friday the 13th and a full moon tonight so we let the crazies loose and are bring back one of our favorite staff posts, The Thirteen! If you aren’t familiar with The Thirteen, it was initially conceived to be a Top 13 list of films about a certain topic. Sadly, we started it last September and it fell by the wayside. Read our past two posts:

13 Songs Used in Films That Take On a Haunting Feeling

13 Female Villains & Anti-Heroes in Film

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Xtro

contribution by Jeremy Jones

A young boy sees his dad abducted by some unseen force. Three years later a meteor hits in the middle of the woods and brings something icky. Written, directed and scored by Harry Bromley Davenport, Xtro is a demented labor of love. The first twenty minutes are the most chunk blowing worthy moments. Including perhaps the grossest thing ever, walking in on your parents having sex. Throughout the film’s running time there are a lot of squishing and squirting sound effects. It made me think of mud seeping between toes.

Society

contribution by Jeremy Jones

When producer Brian Yuzna directed his first feature he swung for the fences. Society is about a young guy who feels incredibly alienated from his family, his classmates and social status. Ever have the feeling people have it out for you? What if you were right? Yuzna waits until the third act to send this movie into overdrive. Body parts expand and contract, mouths turn into suction cups. It’s worth noting that the “shunting” is almost completely bloodless. But there is plenty of petroleum jelly and what I assume is KY. Everything and everyone is glistening, looking fresh from the birth canal or an orgy. Which is far more disturbing than excessive bloodletting. Brian Yuzna wanted no blood used for fear of an MPAA hatchet job. Four minutes were cut from the initial home video release to obtain an R rating. The film was eventually released uncut on DVD.

The Incredible Melting Man

contribution by Jeremy Jones

Steve West, the lone survivor of a space voyage gone wrong wakes up in the hospital. After being exposed to radiation in the rings of Saturn,  body begins oozing off his skeleton. Stripping off his bandages his face looks like a wax head that’s been in direct sunlight for too long. Asides from the melting, there isn’t much onscreen carnage. Sticky Fingers knocks the block off a fisherman and the camera follows the head downstream until it goes over a waterfall ending with a nice splat on some rocks. His scientist friend charged with helping West discovers an earlobe stuck on a tree. Rick Baker did a stand up job on this low budget pic. The sticky soupy mess that is the main actor still looks good. It may not be the scariest thing but you wouldn’t want any to get on your shoes.

The Blob (1988)

contribution by Mike Hassler

The cover for this film haunted me as a kid, this vacant-eyed person reaching out from within a pink ooze. Years later, I took a gander, and it’s a gross-out favorite to this day. A homeless man and his dog check out a meteor crash in the woods, which has never been a good idea for anyone, ever. This is no exception. This is no ordinary meteor, but more of an egg or spore with a gelatinous entity. This pink slime is ever consuming, growing, and has acidic properties — essentially, a living, self contained stomach. Unlike the schlocky 1958 original with Steve McQueen, director Chuck Russell goes for broke with mind bending practical effects and lots of goo and gore. To me, this is a spiritual sequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing; bodies are sucked inside out, melted, crushed…and the best death involves a man being pulled head first into a sink drain.  Nasty stuff.

The Fly (1986)

contribution by Mike Hassler

If there’s a Cronenberg film that doesn’t make you feel squeamish and uneasy, your psychological make-up may be compromised and you should likely seek mental assistance. Though not all of his filmography is gross, many involve bodily harm and metamorphosis. The Fly starts off as a teleportation experiment gone awry, with scientist Seth Brundle becoming one with a common house fly. What begins as positive side effects ends up devolving into a man slowly unraveling mentally and deteriorating physically. By the end, Brundle-Fly is hairless, seemingly melting away, and vomiting on his food in order to melt it for consumption, and in one of the grossest moments he spews on a man’s arm as it melts away into a pile of goo. The full transformation into man-fly as all his skin and muscles crack and plop to the ground in chunks, to reveal a slimy, twitchy monster growing underneath…yuck.  Oh, also!  Though the Cronenberg-less Fly II isn’t very good, it notably has one of the best head smashing moments in film history.

Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh & Blood

contribution by Andy Triefenbach

When I first watched this film it was on a fuzzy VHS tape with no subtitles. It was before other serial killer home footage films like August Underground came out. Not knowing much about the film really got to me. This 1985 film was shot on video and it features a girl having her limbs dismembered. This film is notorious for the fact that Charlie Sheen thought it was real (winning!) and turned it over to the cops. Much like Cannibal Holocaust, the producer had to prove that this wasn’t a snuff film (more believable that this would happen because of this film than Cannibal Holocaust). What still grosses me out to this day are all the watery and gooey sounds made when the killer is cutting off her hands & legs. Eeeeek, still gives me shivers.

Nekromantik

contribution by Chris Melkus

When you think about what qualifies as “gross” you generally think about physical stuff; stuff that you see or hear or taste that disgusts you instinctively. But Nekromantik is gross in both that sense AND by merit of being about the (arguably) the most disgusting taboo of them all: necrophilia. Nekromantik focuses on the most bizarre love triangle ever; two damaged lovers and a corpse who had no relationship with either of them in life. It’s a no-budget flick that still manages to be surprisingly stomach turning, thanks to the use of real animal offal as well as being pretty violent as well. It’s also surprisingly emotional and thoughtful, packed with psychological meaning and commentary on modern culture. It’s a German film, so none of this should come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the country’s history of exploitation cinema. Still, this movie is a genuinely difficult watch, and not just because of the taboo breaking either.

Street Trash

contribution by Chris Melkus

Street Trash is infamous in horror movie circles, and rightly so; it’s one of the most iconic “splatterpunk” films in the genre, arguably setting the gold standard. It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise to find out that the creators of Street Trash were Troma fans, since it feels like it was heavily influenced by The Toxic Avenger’s garishly, neon day-glo visuals and use of mutagens as a plot element. But where The Toxic Avenger was essentially a really weird superhero story, Street Trash is just straight horror with a big ol’ nasty stench of black comedy. The premise is: a mysterious new “drink” that gets passed off as liquor is killing off vagrants in spectacularly gruesome ways. That’s pretty much it. And when we say “gruesome” we mean it in the most absurd ways ever witnessed in cinema. Let’s just say that even Willy Wonka would’ve been more than a little freaked out by this movie, that’s how disturbingly weird the deaths are. Don’t go look up the trailer; you’ll spoil a good half of the best parts of the flick – just go watch it, and see if you don’t feel a little traumatized afterwards.

Slime City

contribution by Chris Melkus

And really, if you’re going to watch Street Trash, you should follow it up right away with Slime City, which is (again) a more horrific riff on The Toxic Avenger. In fact, SLIME CITY is basically The Toxic Avenger except instead of becoming a superhero, Toxie just becomes a homicidal maniac who commits mutated carnage on the streets. Actually, come to think of it, Slime City is basically The Incredible Melting Man + The Toxic Avenger. The budget for Slime City is even lower than Street Trash but, like that movie, a lot of the SFX are incredibly creative. There aren’t really as many insane death scenes but the climax of the film is truly awesome and the rest of the flick is so bad it’s ripe for riffing, unlike Street Trash, which isn’t really that bad of a movie. Again, don’t try to hunt down a trailer for this one, you’ll just ruin the fun of discovering for yourself how disgustingly weird this movie is.

Begotten

contribution by Cherry Bombed

Theosophical horror flick, Begotten, starts off with a close-range scene of God cutting his gut wide-open with a straight razor. I’ve seen Begotten at least twice, and as many before me have said, the film is beyond grotesque, and nearly impossible explain. Everything including the soundtrack to this film will give you a case of the sicks. And if you make it through the opening scene (when God disembowels himself for almost eight minutes while black liquid oozes everywhere), the experimental black and white flick will reward your loyalty by continuing to reach for the gross-out gauntlet. Begotten’s stomach-churning sights can never be un-seen.

Human Centipede 2

contribution by Cherry Bombed

If you thought the first Human Centipede film, (which is about to become a trilogy due out later this year starting Eric Roberts. Thanks Tom Six. I think), was vomit inducing, then stock up on barf bags because you haven’t seen anything, yet. Shot in black and white, Human Centipede 2 smashes through so many cinematic taboos; you just give up trying to count how many times your brain considered quitting you, because you kept watching it. So gross is HC2 that New Zealand had it banned. If you do make it to the end, and many of you won’t, HC2’s conclusion will cause an immediate vacancy in your stomach – so don’t eat at least eight hours before watching this film. You have been warned.

Dead Alive

contribution by Cherry Bombed

When it comes to gross-out films, one of the first titles that likely comes to any self-respecting horror fan’s mind is Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. Also known as Brain Dead, Dead Alive features more blood splatter, puss-filled explosions, decaying zombies (including one rabid baby zombie), than probably any other film to date. Dead Alive is all about the motto, “more gore that ever before”. The movie culminates in a balls-out, nothing-is-sacred, bloodbath, like you’ve never seen. Dead Alive is a super-sick, gross-out classic.

Aftermath

contribution by Andy Triefenbach

Rue Morgue Magazine introduced me to many foreign horrors in the mid 2000’s and while I heard about this entry, it wasn’t until I attended Festival of Fear when Unearthed Films put all of Nacho Cerdà’s short films on DVD, including Aftermath. The film opens on a disemboweled dog with its guts coming out of its mouth. The first 2 minutes had already punished me for the blind buy I made. Little did I know that it would push more of my boundaries. With Christopher Baffa’s cold and sterile approach of lighting and a coroner who does unimaginable things to a corpse, Aftermath is a film not for the faint of heart yet it’s representation of the flesh vessels we become after death will give you the ickys all day long.