Yuck. This week sees not only the release of the latest gross out comedy A Haunted House 2 but also the sequel to 2005’s exceptional but stomach churning Wolf Creek. It’s going to be one of those weekends, folks. It’s one gross out film or another.
But what’s The Best Gross Out Movie Ever? That’s the question we asked CraveOnline’s film critics William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo in this week’s installment of Best Movie Ever. Any genre is fair game – comedies, horror movies, you name it – so long as it’s absolutely disgusting. So put your lunch away or prepare to lose it. Read our critics’ picks and then vote for the best gross out movie ever at the bottom of the page.
Brian Formo:
I was very close to choosing Re-Animator for Best Frankenstein Movie Ever, so it was bound to pop up somewhere in the future bests. Best Gross-Out Movie seems like an appropriate landing spot.
Why? Because most gross out films provide moments that pronounce their own grossness. There might be that extra line of dialogue before an ear falls off — something that braces you for that extra depraved lunge. Meanwhile, I think the reason why Re-Animator is such a riot is because it feels like Stuart Gordon isn’t sure what his audience will find gross. Despite how bonkers it gets there aren’t any direct winks to the audience. You have to fill in with your own beat by squirming, laughing and laughing at your own squirming.
An adaptation of six H.P. Lovecraft stories – about Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) who experiments with bringing the dead back to life, often with disastrous and carnal results – Re-Animator is best known for the scene when “the head goes down on that babe” as suburban square Kevin Spacey explained in between inhales in American Beauty. (Yes, that’s how this film got on my radar back in ’99. How square.)
But while that scene is uncomfortable, awful and magnificent(!) the one that really sets the tone is a simple transition of foolin’ around to rrrrrrrrrrrr foolin’ around. That’d be when med student dangerously-close-to-Dean-Cain, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) annoys his sweetheart, the Dean’s daughter (Barbara Crampton). She says “no, no, no!” as he flicks her hair while they walk down the hallway; Gordon quickly cuts to their sex scene as she, pink-cheeked, shouts “yes! yes! yes!” As a viewer, when Dr. Hill’s (David Gale) headless body holds his severed head in position to give head, the seat cushion squirms say “no, no, no“. The laughter at the body carnage that follows – in all of its intestine-shooting glory – is our time to pinkly howl yes! yes! yes!
Witney Seibold:
Hm… Do I choose the film that grossed me out the most, or the best film that grossed me out? If I were to go with the former, there are a slew of truly disgusting movies in my horribly holistic film-watching repertoire that would turn the stomachs of even the strongest of humanity. I would say that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom still stands at the top of the filth pyramid, followed by Cannibal Holocaust, and that one Kirby Dick documentary wherein Bob Flanagan nails his genitals to a board, in real life, in closeup, complete with the blood and trauma inherent in such an act. The title of that film was, fittingly enough, Sick. Quease-inducing all around, these flicks. I could delve deeper into my personal vaults of vomit, but I choose to spare you, dear reader. If you really want a great list of gross movies (and you must be out there), listen to The B-Movies Podcast episode entitled Don’t Listen to This Podcast.
No, I opt to choose the best gross-out film I have ever seen, and I believe that distinction rests firmly with Peter Jackson’s 1992 comic zombie masterpiece (and still his best film) Braindead, a.k.a. Dead Alive in America. This is a zombie film par excellence, full of all the ragged, bloody strips of flesh your little gore-craving heart desires, but tempered by Jackson’s snappy sense of humor. In the film, a put-upon mama’s boy named Lionel (Timothy Balme) finds his mother turning into a zombie after a bite by a Sumatran rat-monkey. But the simple plot is frequently overwhelmed by the overwhelming gore set pieces. A zombie eats the lips off of another zombie. A heroic clergyman kung-fus a gang of greaser zombies into pieces, and a zombie eats her own ear. The climax of Dead Alive is a sticky, gooey, stabby, choppy, whirlwind vomitorium of flying limbs, spattered blood, and removable ribcages. And this was back in the age of practical gore effects, so those poor actors were really getting coated in God-knows-what, all for the sake of a wonderfully adolescent laugh.
It’s easily the goriest film of all time. And yet, it’s also easily one of the funniest.
William Bibbiani:
Who says gross out movies can’t be adorable? In Tromeo and Juliet, future Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn’s first screenwriting credit, the gross out connoisseurs at Troma combined the tragic romance of William Shakespeare’s most famous play with their typical brand of penis mutations, head explosions and popcorn vivisections to create a disgusting masterpiece that’s as sincere as it is stomach churning.
Narrated by Lemmy from Motörhead (but of course), Tromeo and Juliet finds Tromeo spurned by his lover and falling for Juliet, who is of course betrothed to a meat merchant by her abusive father and getting sexually service by her servant Debbie Rochon (but of course). Their love leads to family dismemberment, transformation into transexual cow monsters, death by television and a final revelation that should be familiar to anyone who saw The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (anyone? anyone?) but actually goes the whole nine yards on the gross out field instead.
Tromeo and Juliet is far from the grossest movie I have ever seen (The Burning Moon, Society and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie are all much sicker, in their own particular ways), but with an atypically witty Troma script by Gunn and source material that’s so dramatic even the notoriously goofy director Lloyd Kaufman couldn’t screw it up, along with a surprisingly heartfelt cast, it’s probably the best gross out movie ever. Now if Troma would finally get around to an adaptation of Titus Andronicus, they’d really have something.
Fred Topel:
Whether we’re talking about gross out comedies, or just the grossest movie, Freddy Got Fingered is the most repulsive movie ever made. It is the winner, because it was intentionally repulsive. Tom Green got huge in the ‘90s by pushing boundaries with scatological stunts, and putting his own cancer operation on television. So when he directed a movie, he went out of his way to repulse the audience.
Man, did people hate Freddy Got Fingered. Even Tom Green’s fan base had enough. He’s flinging a newborn around by the umbilical cord, licking protruding bones and jerking off an elephant, all to see what it would take to lose the audience. It turned out, the answer was somewhere between the baby and the bone licking. I really can’t begrudge anyone for hating Freddy Got Fingered, because that was the point. I thought it worked as an extension of Green’s performance art comedy, but he never directed a movie again and after Stealing Harvard played its theatrical run, he didn’t really do movies again at all.
So there may be Mondo Cane or Cannibal Ferox, out there, but Tom Green achieved a rare feat in Freddy Got Fingered, being so gross that even his die-hard fans were grossed out. And so, Freddy Got Fingered now exists on a Best Movie Ever list. You’re welcome.
