The 25 Most Shocking Moments in Film History



(image via reel.com)

The EW Blog calls our attention to Premiere's 25 Most Shocking Moments in film history. Usually we get all curmudgeonly about these sort of lists, which are often horrible "produced-by-committee" affairs (The Corsair sparks up an Ashton Robusto cigar), but Premiere Magazine obviously put a lot of thought into theirs and get much right. They miss, however, some of our favorites, such as:

-- The impossibly intense scene of Ingmar Bergman's masterly "Cries and Whispers" involving the frustrated and enraged aristocratic housewife Liv Ullman and a jagged piece of mirror in her "sex" (Incidentally, this film came out at the height of the rise of feminism).

-- Nino Brown's naked crack factory in "New Jack City." While insisting upon the nudity of all employees at the crack-rock production facility is, we'll admit, a shrewd business practice, the visuals involved -- the sui generis sweaty smocks, in particular -- were enough to make any respectable junkie abstain from further huffing of the rock.

--The eerie two suns of Luke Skywalker's home planet in the first Star Wars movie.

-- How about the quietly shocking sound of Bach's Concerto in F-Minor for Harpsichord skipping on the record-player as the adulterous Michael Caine abruptly kisses the tentative Barbara Hershey in Woody Allen's most perfect film, "Hannah and Her Sisters"?

-- Or the astonishingly vulnerable Coco undressing to the faux-Gallic cheers of "Et-vous, Coco ... et-vous" in a sleazy Manhattan apartment for that smutty camaera man in "Fame." Is that more "Heartbreaking" than "Shocking"?

-- The explosive -- quite literally -- garden sheer emasculation scene done under hypnotic strobe lights in Gregg Araki's unheralded gem "The Doom Generation."

-- Granted, the juicy ear-slicing in "Resevoir Dogs" scene is unforgettable, but how about the collarbone-breaking-adrenaline-pumping scene involving an OD'd Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction"? Or, while we are on "Pulp Fiction," what about jheri-curled Samuel L. Jackson mistakenly blowing the brains out of the hapless kid in the back seat? We jumped in our seat when that happened.

-- Billy Dee Williams gets his throat slashed in the New York City subway (By Billy Dee's own disgusting momentum) as a diversion by Ruger Hauer in the gritty 70s classic "Nighthawks," while Williams' partner, a scruffy Sylvester Stallone, engages in some impotent trash talk with the escaping terrorist.

-- How about Marchello Mastroianni whipping back the various personnages of his libido to the rousing blast of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" Overture in Fellini's 8 1/2? Could that be properly construed as being "shocking"? Or, how about the falling of the Minotaur's sinister bludgeon in the climactic Labyrinth scene at the end of Fellini's pagan alfresco "The Satyricon."

-- Glenn Close tripping awkwardly off the screen to the sound of derisive boos and satanic fin de siecle hisses in the concluding scene of "Dangerous Liaisons"?

-- Burt Reynolds' losing three fingers one-by-one (And the attendant knife-on-meat butchershop sound effects action over Reynolds' muffled bitch-cries) to some no-necked thugs over the whereabouts of the very in-her-prime Rachel Ward in the oft-forgotten classic movie, "Sharky's Machine"?

-- Or, for the more contemporary-film-minded, Tilda Swinton and Benjamin Bratt's impossibly shocking "retrieving-the-spoon-from-the-ass" scene in "Thumbsucker."

What are your "Most Shocking Moments" in Film?