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An error has ocurred. Please try againI don't just focus on everyday gore - of course, you'll still find all of the goriest movies here - but instead I look at extreme cinema in every form. Extremity simply means "the furthest point or limit of something". There are so many ways that a film can push the boundaries and become "extreme". I aim to explore them all while keeping an emphasis on blood and guts.
There are well over a thousand movies here and the list is constantly expanding (which also means it'll remain under construction forevermore). Whether you're a gore grasshopper or a seasoned veteran of extreme film, I guarantee you'll find something of value: from the flicks everyone should know by now to super-obscure gems for the people who think they know it all already. I just hope you have as much fun with the list as I've had making it.
I really appreciate all the comments and suggestions I've received over the years! Keep them coming. We're stuck with Facebook comments at the moment (see bottom of page). You can contact me privately through my Facebook page (submissions from filmmakers are welcome). You can also follow me on Twitter (why not?) and contact me through there.
Curating and composing this list actually requires a lot of time and effort (and a surprising amount of money to stay on the bleeding edge of the most underground releases). Thanks to a long-term illness, I can't work. I'm broke so if you appreciate my work on this project, feel free to donate to my Patreon. If you do, it'll help me stay up to date with the latest movies and ensure I can keep expanding the list.
TAGS & CRITERIA################ Before each film's comment, there's at least one tag. [G] ([Horror]) means that a film is included for its gore. Gore is the most obvious form of extremity and most often found in horror movies. Gore usually involves violence but is separate from action violence because of its deliberate and graphic focus on the direct effects of violence and the accompanying suffering. [AV] ([Action]) stands for "action violence" and means that a film is included for featuring lots of stylised violence typical of action films. To qualify for the [AV] tag and a place on this list, a film has to contain at least a realistic amount of blood and a lot of deaths. [?] ([???]) means that a film is included for its extreme non-violent content. Non-violent content could be deeply disturbing thematic material, extreme sexual deviancy or stuff that leaves you saying "WTF?!". There is no one "extreme" and the [?] tag acts as a catch-all for content that pushes the limits of what has been or can be done in cinema. [M] ([Mondo]) means that the film is a mondo or shockumentary (or occasionally a legitimate documentary). The content of these films will be a mix of the other tags but will either be real-life footage or presented as such (often with no way to tell them apart, which is by design). Mondo is a sort of strange hybrid between a format and a genre rather than a type of extremity but I've included a separate tag for it because some people would rather skip over this stuff.
LIST ORDER################### This list is not ranked in any way. By default, films are listed in my own order and I strongly recommend you read it this way because the comments build on each other, reference previous jokes or acronyms or definitions, and take you on a very deliberate journey from greenhorn to extremity expert. I'm slowly moving all mondo films to page 3 so if you use the default order, you can skip them.
LIST COMMENTS################ I watch everything before I add it to my list. Every movie has an accompanying comment. Sometimes they're mini-reviews, sometimes I talk about how a film is extreme and sometimes I just muse about films or life in general. I use this list as a playground for honing my writing skills, which means using my full vocabulary freely and adopting a true "film critique" style, especially for my longer review comments. Other comments are more conversational in tone. It really depends on what mood I'm in.
A QUICK DISCLAIMER############# To average film fans: A lot of these films are seriously savage. Don't blame me if you lost your lunch, you're feeling a bit hollow, or you couldn't sleep last night. To hardcore gorehounds: I'm not a fan of real-world gore -- though there are movies here that contain it. If the films on this list are too weak for you, I'd suggest upgrading to specialist sites that cater to your interests. Good luck, I guess. To kids: I feel obliged to state that my list is not suitable for anyone under 18. Ultimately, however, it's not my job to watch what you do on the internet or keep you away from extreme films. IMDb is already full of suggestions. I talk about mature stuff in my comments because I'm talking to an audience for extreme cinema. If you're old enough to watch all of these movies legally, you're old enough to read what I have to say about them and their contents.
A NOTE ABOUT TOY STORY########## In multiple places on my list, you'll find duplicates of Toy Story. Toy Story is a placeholder for films that aren't on IMDb (yet). The real title of the film is in the comment.
Love, Elliott
Reviews
The Simpsons: The Saga of Carl (2013)
An emotionally-manipulative episode that doesn't stand up to scrutiny and could've ruined Carl
The Simpsons uses its post-Golden-Age trademark schmaltzy, emotionally-manipulative trickery to convince the audience that the ending of "The Saga of Carl" makes sense as a satisfactory resolution -- but please read further to decide if I have a point before reflexively rejecting this evocative statement out of hand. At one point, The Simpsons' stories and their conclusions were genuinely heartwarming and emotive, but for a long time now, the show has been faking it -- shamelessly combining unearned pathos with insincere interactions, all underpinned with sound cues designed specifically to give even the laziest Hallmark movie the appearance of emotional depth. And it works. It's devilishly effective - like the jump-scare in horror - as shown by the response to "The Saga of Carl" (and the typical real-time reactions to the average romcom, whose sappy Machiavellianism was smartly satirised by The Simpsons itself in "HOMR").
In reality, we have a character in Carl who thinks so little of his "friends" that he rips them off for a life-changing amount of money and then flees the country. Worse: apparently, Carl doesn't consider Homer, Moe, or - yes - even Lenny to be his friends. That putative realisation flies in the face of 24 seasons of world-building and character development. Lenny and Carl are consistently shown to be inseparable, to the point where there have been question marks over the true nature of their relationship. The Lenny of the past 24 seasons (minus two episodes) would've known that Carl had come from Iceland (which, as an addendum, is completely out of left-field and comes across as the progressive writers challenging the viewer not to ask the perfectly logical question: "isn't that incredibly unlikely?"(*1)). Hell, it's well-established that Lenny and Carl know each other and each other's families in quite some depth, meaning that this episode retcons many other, better episodes. The Simpsons has never been great at continuity, nor does it try hard, but this episode is very deliberately throwing out 23 years of character development groundwork and spitting on its corpse.
Carl is not a good guy here. Even if the people he screwed over were literal nobodies he'd never met before, stealing $150k from them for any purpose is a big antagonist move. Exploiting the trust of people who believe you to be a friend in order to steal $150k from them for undisclosed purposes is a massive antagonist move, sufficient to destroy almost any friendship (yet, weirdly, not the one that isn't even a "real" friendship according to both Carl and the show's writers -- who, by the by, can't seem to make up their own minds regarding the implicit, quasi-feminist critique of male relationships and bonding as allegedly shallow and void of meaning). Carl's treachery is to a height befitting his adoptive family -- perhaps in a smarter-than-the-episode moment of dramatic irony. Moreover, by the denouement, we're supposed to believe that the listing of a few trivial good deeds - the kind of things only a friend would do for a friend in the first place - is enough to simultaneously (a) paper over Carl's grand theft lottery, (b) cause the cessation of a near-blood-feud against his family, and (c) demonstrate to Carl, via wholly circular logic, that the friends he robbed are, in fact, friends. It only makes sense if you really want it to make sense and/or are easily taken in by melodramatic exploitation (don't worry: I'm usually straightforward to sucker too, with my readily-suspended disbelief, but this was a bridge too far for me).
The final scene goes full-bore on the aforementioned, played-throughout "hollowness of male friendship" angle, by having them sit and drink in stone cold silence. However, once again, we've never seen a shred of historical evidence to suggest that the only thing these four amigos do together is sit in silence and drink -- quite the contrary. It's yet another massive contrivance for the sole purposes of this canon-shredding episode. An episode that, if taken seriously, is perfectly capable of ruining a popular recurring character. An episode, I might add, in which a solid 5-10 minutes are consumed - wasted - by variations on the one-two-note dialogue theme of "Carl stole our money!" followed by "Let's make him pay!", whereby each pairing of utterances is contributed by a different permutation of characters.
I stand by what I said prior: Carl is not a good guy here. In fact, I've seldom seen anything throughout the series to suggest that Carl is a good guy in general, so this episode acts as something of a decider. In my eyes, by the end of the episode, nothing he's said or done has redeemed him. I'm part of better groups of friends than the four portrayed here and, in both of mine, the events of this episode would be enough to result in the instant and permanent excision and ostracism of the betrayer. If "Carl" (or whomever) had supposedly had deep feelings for us all along but had failed to recognise them, I'd be asking how the hell his conscience permitted him to steal such a sum of money from people he loved on any level of consciousness. If "Carl" had never considered us friends, I'd be wondering why the heck he was still part of our group and why we'd invested so much time in him. And in either case, I'd never again be able to trust someone who could steal something so significant from me, notably without even feeling capable of coming to the group and asking for the money with integrity. Irrespective of the circumstances, we'd be incapable of hanging out again without the rest of the boys attaching chains to their wallets. And what kind of friendship is that?
I firmly believe that those who've given this episode glowing reviews and high ratings over the years have failed to consider the significance of the "heartwarming" events in light of their practical and ethical implications. And, yeah, absolutely, it's a fictional cartoon programme, but part of what made the Golden Age so poignant and special - and different to most other cartoon sitcoms on the air - is that it was based entirely in realistic emotional valence, realistic character interactions, and realistic themes and feelings underpinning the sometimes-outlandish scenarios. "The Saga of Carl" loses whatever tenuous grip the show still had on its thematic realism(*2).
Finally, was anyone really crying out for a Carl origins story anyway? I certainly wasn't. Lenny and Carl work best when used as a classical comedic double act: pure setups and punchlines, taking turns as the straight man (as a figure of speech!). They aren't - and I'd contend they were never intended to be - suited to deep, introspective exploration of their psyches. I suppose it makes sense and is appropriate that when an origins tale does come along for one of them, it's far out, far flung, and superficial. But I'd at least expect it to be funny, and this episode doesn't even deliver that to any notable extent (N. B. the focus of my fellow reviewers on the nicety of the plot as opposed to the humour). I'd suggest that a more obvious and grounded origin for Carl might've left more room to focus on tighter, funnier, faster jokes, as opposed to a weak "mystery" half comprised of accusations and threats ad nauseaum, followed by a second half comprised of a warped short-form Simpsons-on-holiday episode. The most damning indictment of both the episode and Carl as a character is that he makes Homer and Moe (in Season 24, no less!) look like beacons of magnanimous morality as they not only refuse their right to destroy the paper on which Carl had frittered away their money but lie regarding the contents of that paper in order to spare Carl's feelings and the reputation of his adoptive family.
(*1) It is, naturally, extremely unlikely (especially given that we've previously seen his sister, who looks like a feminine version of him). It's interesting to note that Carl casually refers to himself as a native of Iceland; one wonders if this would've flown by unscrutinised had Lenny declared himself indigenous to Somalia in an alternate universe inversion of the plot. Carl is adopted, of course, which would have to imply the same for his biological sister, but how that very improbable sequence of events came to be is never explained. Nor is his implausible devotion to his adoptive family's absurd, millennia-old lineal sin. As is tradition, we'd never received the slightest hint towards any of the huge revelations in "Saga of Carl" in any previous episode. If Carl were so desperate to buy the goldmine of evidence in his place of birth, you'd think he would've scrimped together the cash by living like a miser in Springfield. But no, stealing from his friends and/or acquaintances was, seemingly, the better option.
(*2) Groundedness had long since disappeared with episodes like "Saddlesore Galactica". But it's debatable whether The Simpsons was ever "grounded". Season 1 made liberal use of artistic license in portraying the environments in accordance with concurrent plot points. And the very fact that the characters are, by default, yellow is a sure sign that naturalism was never a goal. Frankly, to have a cartoon be totally grounded in reality is to waste the opportunities of the medium to do stuff you couldn't in live action anyway (e.g. Does anyone think that Homer strangling Bart would make good sitcom material for filming in front of a studio audience?). But there was nevertheless an essentialist realism to the Simpsons and the characters, dialogue, interactions etc. That, at one point, made them far more like an extant American household than any cheesy '70s family comedy (as admittedly idyllic as many of the latter were and, especially today, are).
American Dad!: Stan's Best Friend (2012)
American Dad does the "Scott Tenorman" format of animated comedy
Hopefully, as soon as I invoked the South Park classic "Scott Tenorman Must Die", the manifold similarities between that and this became obvious to anyone who has seen both episodes. Both use their 20 minute runtimes almost solely to build up to a superlatively dark reveal at the climax. The major flaw of this template is self-evident: the whole episode lives and dies on how well the big reveal goes down. It's a high risk/high reward strategy because the line between sadistically funny and just sadistic is hair thin. But when the gamble pays off, you end up with television history. "Scott Tenorman Must Die", being one of the most prominent and also earliest examples of this long gambit in adult animation, executed on its concept to perfection, leading to the most highly-rated episode of South Park to date and a TV moment that nobody will ever forget. I don't think it's a spoiler to say upfront that "Stan's Best Friend" is no "Scott Tenorman".
It's incredibly hard to know where the line in comedy is -- and it was still hard even ten years ago(1). It's completely subjective. We've seen enough comedians and their raunchy or off-colour routines over the years to learn that people will laugh at literally anything -- at least some of them, some of the time. But it's about playing the numbers and knowing your audience. With some people, the closer to the edge you go, the harder they laugh. With others, there's a point at which they recoil away. And with a subset of those others, there's a point that's so far beyond their usual breaking point that they find themselves laughing again despite themselves at the sheer level of intransigent excess. I suppose the AD writing room was hoping that they'd be able to find the intersection between the first and second groups by going to the edge that the sickos love and then so far over it that the rest follow involuntarily.
Did average American Dad fans find the A-plot with the Frankenstein puppy funny? Going by the reviews here, no. But we have a tiny sample size, a self-selecting sample, and the fact that people with extreme reactions, positive or negative, are far more likely to do something like post a review (in that sense, I seem to be an exception). The ratings tell a different story. An episode like "Stan's Best Friend" is profoundly polarising. The fact that many people clearly rated the episode so lowly implies that there must have been a decent number of dissenting high ratings for the current overall score of 6.9 to occur (or a massive group of strangers conspired to create a cosmic "nice", I guess). Without a doubt, 6.9 is a below average score for an American Dad episode from this era, but it's not horrendous or anything. I think the average around that time was about 7.5. (If you ask me, the show's golden age was the first four or five seasons, but I digress.)
The big difference between "Scott Tenorman Must Die" and "Stan's Best Friend" - besides the latter going too far in the eyes of some - is that "Scott Tenorman" managed to be pretty consistently funny, despite the first two acts only serving as a device to create the crescendo. I think that consistency was key to making "Scott Tenorman" an all-time great as opposed to a fondly-remembered gimmick. Episodes like these have intrisically limited longevity, so, despite the formula seeming to be an obvious "distract and then devastate", you can't afford to produce filler on the way up, because it's all that's left on repeat viewing. In that sense, I believe that "Stan's Best Friend" is a little too reliant on its big moment shock factor. The rest of the episode lacks in what feels like true A material. If you're going to do the "Scott Tenorman" formula, you've really gotta go big and commit: "Stan's Best Friend" does this at its gruesome apex but not consistently through the remainder of the episode.
For what it's worth, I do feel the same way as many of the other reviewers: the big reveal was more uncomfortable than funny to me (which I actually found impressive in its own way because I've never been made to feel uncomfortable by an animated sitcom before(2)). But, seeing the episode's intent and recognising its potential, I haven't docked points for failing to meet my subjective tastes in the big moments. Generally, I'm in the first group of people I mentioned above - the sick ****s - but "Stan's Best Friend" just doesn't match up well with my personal sense of humour (for me, by the way, this has nothing to do with the fact that it's a dog involved in the climax; I think I'd feel the same if it were a person instead(3)). I wasn't offended in any way; I just wasn't entertained either. And with the rest of the episode being somewhat mediocre, a middling score, like the 7/10 I've given, seems warranted and diplomatic. American Dad did this formula far better and even more faithfully in the following season's "Love, AD Style" (the one in which Roger falls in love with Hayley).
(1) I'd argue that in today's climate, you *can't* know. Even asking "can I get away with saying x?" is enough to ruin you as if you'd actually said x. So instead you find out where the line is when you get fired, either immediately or retroactively after enough time has passed for the joke to have become "unacceptable" somehow. As a result, we're going to see a continuation of the trend towards less experimentation and adventure in comedy.
(2) Except a certain live action clip in a certain episode of South Park, which was quasi-traumatic, but which doesn't count because it was a live action insertion into an animated show. And what a bizarre choice that was, too. It'd make a hell of a lot more sense nowadays. But I bet that episode no longer airs uncut, if it airs at all.
(3) I feel quite strongly about this. I love dogs and have had several, but people who care more about dogs than people - like this woman I know who openly prioritises her pet dog over her husband - are incomprehensible to me. They actually kinda concern me. Most of the time these people harmless enough, I suppose, but they just don't understand that a dog's loyalty is deterministic: it's essentially bred into their DNA that they have to love you. Is that really love? I'm not saying you or I can't appreciate a dog's love for what it is, but it's just not the same as a human with a full understanding of you as a person choosing to give you their heart. People who try to trick themselves into believing those *are* the same (typically "dog mommies" or, worse, "cat mommies") are often unhealthy and unhappy.
The Simpsons: A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas (2020)
Knew it'd be polarising long before reading the reviews
A conceptually interesting episode that, by its very nature, was always going to polarise viewers. "A Springfield Summer" is a Simpsons metanarrative: the kind of experimental idea that has been tried with increasing regularity as the series has grown older, but has rarely worked. The classic era writers seldom tried this stuff and when they did, they made damn sure it was going to work -- right up until, arguably, "Principal and the Pauper".
The main problem with "A Springfield Summer" is not the idea but the execution. I agree with other reviewers that the guest star, and primary protagonist, is unremarkable at best, annoying at worst. While the writers try to poke fun at their personification of urbanite elitism, you feel like their hearts aren't really in it -- and it's not overly surprising given that the lead is an avatar of them to an extent. When they do offer what seems to be an olive branch (or fig leaf?) over the trite conceit of a big city vs little town culture clash, by finding in favour of the latter, it feels like a patronising contrivance (yes, the contrivance is dressed up as satire but I don't wholly buy it). (As a Briton, I'm somewhat qualified to give a neutral take on that cultural element.)
I don't think I laughed at all during "A Springfield Summer". But I also didn't cringe at the deadpan repetition of liberal talking points from a decade ago -- because there wasn't much (any?) of that here. In that sense, the episode made a pleasant watch. I was one of the loyalists who didn't strike The Simpsons off my essential calendar until it became a combination of intolerably bad and relentlessly political circa season 30, so I'm still happy to give episodes a fair try, and my standards for a good one have been suitably tempered by years of mediocrity. Having reached the end of "A Springfield Summer" without feeling dejected or irritated, I'm obliged to give it an above average score (which may say more about the show's decline than the episode itself).
So the thing about the political criticisms of Simpsons is that it's true that the show has always been political. But to deploy that as a catch-all counterargument is disingenuous. For one thing, the messaging has never been as ubiquitous or unbalanced as it has been over the past few years. Where earlier seasons made a token attempt at bipartisanship in their parody, season 32 told you who to vote for with a level of contempt for dissent that had me visibly cringing. As numerous liberal, Democrat-voting Simpsons fans pointed out at the time of this year's "Treehouse", the show was essentially telling you to quit watching it if you don't agree with its electoral suggestions. Sage advice. (Some of the aforementioned Democrats, by the way, were being disparaging of the show's attitude.)
The other aspect is that Simpsons has always occupied this sort of space of "as liberal as we can go while maintaining a TV viewership on a commercial network". Since (Anglosphere) society in general has been trending more liberal and at an increasing rate of increase throughout The Simpsons' entire run, the show has moved its own position very significantly by simply tracking trends. Additionally, the writers have pushed this process further themselves at times and have never made any substantive attempt to resist it -- but then, why should they? They like the zeitgeist and its heading. A lot of people don't, however. In fact, I'd suggest that a supermajority don't.
As an aside, if you've ever wondered how society seems to keep changing in opposition to the will of the majority - almost as if democracy is a sham - read some of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, like Gramsci, Derrida and Marcuse. Their philosophies were driven by an ideological desire to end Western civilisation, by - and this is the critical part - subverting the will of the people to create the kind of atomised, diverse, globalised and nihilistic societies we have now. Most of those guys were very upfront about their goals in their own writings: Gramsci described the process by which it's still happening as the "long march through the institutions", and, hell, Derrida was more or less motivated entirely by being bullied at a French school. Their work has infinitely more explanatory power in terms of why entertainment sucks now than anything with the word "woke" in it. Have you noticed that losing money on projects doesn't seem to bother the producers? Could it be that ideology is actually more important than profit? "Get woke, go broke" is a fantasy.
Many people feel that as society is leaving them behind, so is The Simpsons with "jokes" about "mansplaining" and entire episodes about, for example, how historical literature fails to live up to the liberal standards of contemporary literature. I don't see a way Simpsons could ever really recover and retain the kind of mass following it had in the past without becoming iconoclastic and swimming back against the tide (in the way that it arguably used to, to some extent, yet in reverse). But nobody on the staff team wants to do that. Fair enough: their show and, potentially, their bed.
Be prepared, however, because The Simpsons has become the cartoon canary in the coalmine: if you want a look at where its edgier competitors are going to be in ten years, look no further. Such is the nature of political forces beyond the understanding of you or I: forces that are in no way subject to our whims and are actively hostile to our best interests.
Anyway, I wanted to discuss "A Springfield Summer" but because I haven't reviewed a Simpsons episode in so many years, I had to cover all of the background detritus that burdens any serious discussion of the show today. A solid episode by the standards of the day but almost solely by virtue of its inoffensiveness. To call the episode remarkably polite is accurate and yet profoundly mocking of a show that was once considered a genuine work of counterculture. To look at it now, that'd seem an incredible claim -- and it is as much a reflection of the trajectory of The Simpsons as the trajectory of our civilisation.