Andrea Beasley-Brown, better known to film fans as the Midnite Movie Mamacita, is the Valley's guru of grindhouse films, B movies, and underground cinema.
She's currently the programming director at Madcap Theaters, and also serves as director of horror programming for Phoenix Comicon and festival director of the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival.
In other words, she knows her freaky films, which is why we're tapping her for various "top five" film lists. The idea is MMM sends us the titles of her top five films, we call her and gab about each one, and then post her commentary and some trailers for you.
This week, we start with the Midnite Movie Mamacita's list of the "Top Five Gross-Out Films," which include The Human Centipede, showing this weekend at Madcap Theaters.
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) Six Entertainment, 2009:
"The whole concept of this movie is pretty foul: people sewn together,
ass-to-mouth, to create an intestinal tract that's pretty disgusting. I
thought it would be torture porn, but by the end of the film, you
actually have sympathy for some of the characters."
(Click here to view the trailer)
Cannibal Holocaust (F.D. Cinematografica, 1980):
"In the '70s, a bunch of Italian directors went to South America to
make exploitation films, and this was the grand daddy of them all. One
disturbing and controversial aspect of the film is the animals that are
killed in the movie were really killed on screen. I can't watch it all
the way through, because I have to stop when they start killing
animals. There's one scene where a girl is impaled on a huge wooden
stake. People thought it was real because it looked so amazing, but it
was just really slick special effects. The movie has multiple rape
scenes and exploitation of women. It's not a warm, fuzzy film at all."
A Serbian Film (Contra Film, 2009):
"This has not been released in the U.S., and I'm not sure if it will
be. I saw it at the SxSW film festival. The movie's a metaphor for how
Serbians feel about how they're treated. It's about a guy who works in
porn, and he gets trapped in a weird story where they're using him to
create a very violent and disturbing porn movie. The most shocking
thing in the movie? Two words: newborn porn. That was kind of like,
'Whoa -- what the fuck?'" (Click here to view a very graphic and nudity-filled trailer).
"The director of this film, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was murdered a few weeks after this was made. The film is based on a bunch of Marquis De Sade stories. They take a bunch of teenagers and children and humiliate them, make them eat poop, and torture them before killing them. It's a really sick masterpiece."
Visitor Q (Alphaville, 2001):
"The director, Takashi Miike, is one of Japan's most outrageous
filmmakers. It was hard to narrow it down to just one gross-out film
from his repertoire. Visitor Q is about a screwed up family where the
father has sex with his daughter, who is a prostitute. And there's a
major lactation fetish in the film. I remember copious amounts of
breast milk going everywhere -- completely gratuitous. There's also some
necrophilia, and some interesting things done to a dead body. It's
completely out there, crazy Japanese madness."
