Subject: Fucked up Movie

Here's a few to add to your Fucked up movie list:

I'll check out those that I don't know, but I'm guessing they're really too mainstream for me. Absolutely Full Metal Jacket and From Dusk 'til Dawn are NOT fucked-up movies under my admittedly vague definition. (Maybe I should pick some other adjective, since most people arrive on the page with their own strongly held opinions about what constitutes a fucked-up movie.)

Actually, there's an interesting parallel between those two: each of them has a terrible actor without whom the movie would be much improved (Matthew Modine & Quentin Tarantino, respectively) and consequently each of them has a very good half in which that character is downplayed. Glue the first half of FMJ (up until Vincent D'Onofrio loses it) to the second of FDtD and you'd have a great movie. (And given the strange transition, it might even be fucked-up enough for me.)

I looked up The Maddening, hoping (from the title) that it would be somehow Different. The review was exactly the sort I wanted.

VERDICT: Cut-rate Psycho with a gas station. Every time one of these movies comes along you have to give it a chance in the hope that it will be a bit different. And, of course, it is nothing of the sort.

I think actually I see the disparity in our definitions. In all the movies you suggest that I know anything about (all, now that I've looked up the plot summaries of the remaining few) one finds some (very) fucked-up people. While this is somehow related, it is definitely not sufficient - there are plenty of mainstream movies with by now very standard types of fucked-up characters in them. Conversely a lot of the movies I mention have no really strange people in them - the Dark Backward, Black Lizard, The President's Analyst, Tapeheads, Blowup come to mind. But the movies are really fucked up!!!

I hope I've made my standards a little more well-defined. If, under this more detailed description, you have some new suggestions, please let me know.

Allen K.