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This lavish Roman-Empire epic was written by Gore Vidal and co-financed by adult-oriented Penthouse magazine’s producer Bob Guccione, though the script underwent several re-writes after the director and cast found Gore Vidal’s interpretation unsatisfactory (Vidal later disowned it). It advertised itself as “the most controversial film of the 20th century” – and was the most expensive pornographic film ever made.

This was Hollywood’s first big-budget ($15 million that later ballooned to $22 million), bizarre blockbuster sexploitation epic of ‘classy’ hardcore sex and gory violence – and it became both a critical and commercial disaster after a very limited theatrical release (due to fear of prosecution for obscenity). The objectionable film was originally intended to be high-art, with major stars (Malcolm McDowell as the infamous Roman emperor, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole), but was described as a “moral holocaust” by Variety and reviewers considered it worthless fantasy trash.

The fim was notorious for its graphic and steamy sex scenes (including a large-scale orgy, masturbation, explicit sex acts, sexual depravity and decadence including a lesbian

This Italian-made globe-trotting, amateurish “shockumentary” was luridly advertised as a travelogue – with glimpses of dark-skinned, bare ’savages’ engaged in grotesque and bizarre rituals and scenes of human perversity! The film was castigated as pornographic, trashy and vulgar, although by today’s standards would be considered very tame. Footage included the beheading of a horde of bulls and the mass head-bashing of some pigs in New Guinea, force-feeding of native girls to make them more marriageable and fertile contrasted with weight-loss techniques, Singapore’s “House of Death”, hula dancing in Hawaii, the eating of dog in Thailand contrasted with a wealthy pet cemetery in the US, pig-suckling, and the effects of radiation and atomic testing on a small island.

Director Jean-Luc Godard’s controversial and upsetting film (condemned and denounced by Pope John Paul II at one time and picketed at theatres) retold the story of the virgin birth and Mary, for modern times, with Myriem Roussel as a young teenaged basketball player named Marie who worked as an attendant in her father’s garage and her petulant boyfriend Joseph (Thierry Rode), a taxi-cab driver – who have a chaste relationship; one of Joseph’s fares was the angel Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste) who told Marie that she was mysteriously pregnant and would give birth to the resurrected Jesus Christ; a visit to the gynecologist confirmed that she was indeed pregnant without having had sex; outrage came over the reinterpretation of the Immaculate Conception and the fact that Roussel was often in various states of objectively-viewed, non-prurient undress throughout the film; for instance, in one scene, she resisted the human temptation to masturbate.

Director Jorg Buttgereit’s low-budget, cultish and controversial German gross-out, depraved horror film was reviled and banned in many countries for its depiction of necrophilia – sex with corpses, rabbit cruelty, cat disembowelment, and decapitation by a shovel.

In one of the film’s final sequences, suicidal and manic-depressive ambulance driver Robert “Rob” Schmadtke (Daktari Lorenz) simultaneously masturbated and committed hari-kiri with a knife – culminating in an orgasmic semen-blood mixed expiration. During a threesome, his girlfriend Betty (Beatrice Manowski) also found pleasure in making love to a rotting corpse with a sawed-off piece of a broom handle (outfitted with a condom) stuck in its groin as a makeshift penis.

Salò was directed by the notorious Italian poet, novelist, painter and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered before it was released. It was based on a work by the notorious Marquis de Sade – to depict the short-lived, lakeside republic of Salo in Nazi-controlled N. Italy at the close of WWII, where four fascist officials in a secluded chateau near Marzabotto totally controlled, abused, enslaved and victimized an anonymous group of about 30 young and attractive peasant teenagers (both male and female) who were rounded up. The film began with degradation — the male and female youths who were seized in the town were stripped and inspected (”A delicious little ass. Never seen one firmer. A pair of little breasts, to revive a dying man”) and then driven to a secluded chateau near Marzabotto.

The group of four fascist officials (with four similar females) subjected them to sexual and physical tortures, psychological humiliation and violence over a period of a few days. This extreme exercise of power was supposed to symbolize the evil of fascism itself. The imprisoned youth (”Weak, chained creatures, destined for our pleasure”) were warned they were “beyond the reach of any legality”). One girl committed suicide by slashing her own throat to escape the humiliations.

First-time filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s despairing cinema-verite (observational or objective) masterpiece, one of the greatest documentaries of all time, was about the horrid and abusive conditions (”painful aspects of mental disease”) at the state-run Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Bridgewater, a prison-hospital asylum for seriously ill, heavily-tranquilized men (defined by authorities as “criminally insane” or “sexually dangerous”). The film’s title referred to a mock-softshoe song/dance routine (”Strike Up the Band”), performed and acted out at the beginning and end of the film by the inmates and prison officers during an annual vaudeville/variety show (the ‘Titicut Follies’) performance at the institution.

The silent and passive camera witnessed the stripping, dehumanizing and humiliation of mental patients (who were treated like wild animals) by bullying guards, wardens and psychiatrists. One inmate, who was starving himself to death as protest, was force-fed through a rubber tube roughly inserted into his nostril – followed shortly by the image of his face as he laid in a coffin while being prepared for his funeral.

Polish director Roman Polanski’s first American feature film and his second, scary horror film (following his first disturbing film in English titled Repulsion (1965)) – was about a young newlywed couple who moved into a large, rambling old apartment building in Central Park West, where the title character Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) experienced a nightmarish dream of making love to a Beast. Becoming paranoid and hysterical, she believed herself impregnated so that her baby could be used by an evil cult in their rituals. The creepy film ended with the devil’s flesh-and-blood baby being cared for by the mother!

The film was one of the first with the theme of Satanism and the occult, before the onslaught of films such as The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), and Demon Seed (1977). Its most memorable sequences were the surrealistic dream sequence during which Rosemary was impregnated by Satan (husband Guy’s appearance changed into a grotesque beast-like figure resembling the Devil, with yellowish eyes and clawed, scaly hands), and the final scene in which she discovered her Anti-Christ child in a black-draped crib.

The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures reviled the film, condemning it for “the perverted use which the film made of fundamental Christian beliefs, especially surrounding the birth of Christ, and its mockery of religious persons and practices” – these criticisms were due in part to sequences depicting Rosemary’s guilt over her lapsed Catholicism, anti-religious references to the Pope made by Roman Castevet (Sidney Blackmer) (”You don’t need to have respect for him because he pretends that he’s holy”), the portrayal of Rosemary’s pregnancy as a sexually-transmitted disease, and the film’s view of Satanism as the birth of the Anti-Christ.

This film was most notable for reportedly being the first to speak the word “homosexual”. Director Basil Dearden’s non-judgmental, ground-breaking film-noirish thriller was a daring landmark film with its head-on presentation of the ‘un-talked about’ topic of homosexuality in the early 60s, when Britain still had anti-sodomy statutes as law.

The film was advertised with the tagline: “The Screen Comes of Age!” – with its story about a self-confessed, beleaguered, non-practicing homosexual and wealthy London lawyer (barrister) named Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde, in a role as the screen’s first gay hero – and remarkable since the virile Bogarde later was revealed as gay in his private life) who risked his marriage and career to track down a creepy, slimy blackmailer (Derren Nesbitt) over accusations of closeted homosexuality. Peter McEnery co-starred as Jack “Boy” Barrett (Farr’s chaste ‘boy friend’ from his past as a Cambridge student, who eventually committed suicide by hanging himself in a police jail, where he was incarcerated for embezzling money to silence the blackmailers), and Sylvia Syms as Laura – Farr’s stressed, estranged but supportive wife.

In one of the film’s most tense moments, Laura asked her husband: “I want to know the truth. I want to know why he hanged himself … Someone found out he was a homosexual and blackmailed him? … It takes two to make a reason for blackmail. Were you the other man? Were you?” He burst out an admission of his past indiscretion to her: “I stopped seeing him because I wanted him. Do you understand? Because I wanted him!”

Director/co-writer Sam Peckinpah’s provocative, brilliant yet controversial breakthrough Western was shocking for its graphic and elevated portrayal of violence and savagely-explicit, orgiastic carnage, yet hailed for its truly realistic and reinterpreted vision of the dying West in the early 20th century (at a time when mass-produced murder was possible with the Gatling gun). The film opened with innocent village children intrigued by putting red fire ants and scorpions together and setting fire to the swarming pile.

The much-imitated, influential film was book-ended by two extraordinary sequences, both massacres. The gang of desperadoes were first assaulted in the film’s opening ambush following a failed bank robbery in a Texas border town, and then brutally destroyed in the film’s conclusion – as united comrades in a selfless, redemptive act – by a savage and vindictive Mexican warlord named Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) after a double-crossing arms deal. The two scenes included some of the bloodiest, most violent shoot-ups ever filmed. Peckinpah choreographed each of the film’s two bloodbaths as a visually prolonged, beautiful ballet – a semi slow-motion, aesthetically breath-taking, non-gratuitous, lyrical, extreme celebration of bodies spurting blood and being torn apart by bullets. The slaughter of innocent bystanders (in a temperance parade), and the use of women as shields (in the all-male film) were served up as counterpoints to the media’s honest display of violence during the late 60s, with the Vietnam War, assassinations, urban riots, and other events filling the airwaves.

This much-forgotten cop-thriller gangster film was Michael Cimino’s first film after the disastrous Heaven’s Gate (1980). It was criticized for alleged racism toward the Chinese-American community in its story of angry Vietnam vet and Captain Stanley White (Mickey Rourke), a racist police officer who pledged to “clean up” the violence in mid-80s New York’s Chinatown. With the aid of an exotic Asian-American reporter Tracy Tzu (Ariane in mostly gratuitous nude scenes), White staged a relentless, lawless anti-crime crusade against the community and its powerful Asian Mafia (Triad) leader Joey Tai (John Lone), who was responsible for the murder, corruption, extortion and drug dealing.

Based loosely on Robert Daley’s novel of the same name, Chinese-Americans protested the racial stereotyping, xenophobism (”chinks” and “slant-eyed” and “yellow niggers” were terms used in the film) and sexism before the film opened. Protesters from a coalition of organizations picketed various premieres around the country. Some groups worried that moviegoers would get the notion that Chinatown was unsafe – and feared an economic downturn in the community. [Ridley Scott's action crime thriller Black Rain (1989) faced similar protests and accusations of racism and xenophobia, in its story of crooked NYPD cop Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas) returning a villainous Yakuza murder suspect and counterfeiter named Sato, and immediately blamed for the criminal's escape by the Osaka police.]