BAN THIS SICK FILTH!
Inspired by The El Duce Tapes and the infamous headline, ‘Ban This Sick Filth’ is a season of our most controversial films that will make the great and good clutch their pearls.
Shattering norms, challenging conventions and blurring boundaries, there are no easy rides here, ‘Ban This Sick Filth’ is a collection of aggressive, transgressive cinema; a season of visceral and offensive films that will outrage, offend and leave you with plenty to talk, think, and angry-tweet about after.
Starting with El Duce himself, dive into a dirty documentary and decide whether he was a troll or a troubled soul. Or maybe choose to enter an explicit and post-apocalyptic Mexican womb of doom and depravity in We Are The Flesh?
Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling received a hamstrung EU release due to controversy around the pops it took at the Catholic church (plus lots of kids getting offed), and Horrors of Malformed Men is full of taboo-breaking depravity and freaks.
Sister Streetfighter: Hanging By A Thread’s villains are so villainous they even have artwork up in their lair so indecent censors asked us to remove it, and The Baby is a far-out infantilism freak out you will never forget.
Craven’s shockingly savage The Hills Have Eyes is here alongside the perhaps even more brutal The Woman - Ketchum and McKee’s painful and powerful gorefest that drove a Sundance viewer to outraged apoplexy.
Nico Mastorakis’s The Zero Boys has a Hans Zimmer score and the most gruesome massacre in history, The Driller Killer is an OG video nasty that was even debated in the House of Commons, and Toys Are Not For Children is creepy Electra complex-having, stuffed-toy-humping, so-grubby-you’ll-need-a-shower-after exploitation. And there's plenty more filth in there too.
So kick back and dig into a collection of titles that caused a stir in the media, in audiences, with censors or all three!
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The El Duce Tapes
In the early 90s, aspiring filmmaker (and General Hospital co-star) Ryan Sexton lugged a giant camcorder into some of the seediest clubs and filthiest apartments in Hollywood. There he filmed hour upon hour of VHS footage of the jaw-droppingly offensive Shock Rock band The Mentors, focusing on th...
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Cold Light of Day
February, 1983. Detectives are called to a residential address in the London suburbs following reports that the drains have been clogged by human remains. One of the property’s residents, Dennis Nilsen – a mild-mannered and unassuming civil servant – is brought in for questioning, leading to the ...
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Don't Torture A Duckling
From Lucio Fulci, the godfather of gore (The Psychic, The Beyond), comes one of the most powerful and unsettling giallo thrillers ever produced: his 1972 masterpiece Don't Torture a Duckling.
When the sleepy rural village of Accendura is rocked by a series of murders of young boys, the supersti...
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Horrors of Malformed Men
Medical student Hirosuke Hitomi slips out of the asylum in which he has been wrongfully confined and stealthily assumes the identity of a recently deceased nobleman with whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. Hirosuke eases his way into the nobleman's household and his dead double's marital bed. B...
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Sister Street Fighter: Hanging by a Thread
1974 • Japan • Directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Released only three months after the original film, the sequel 'Sister Street Fighter: Hanging By a Thread', once again follows Koryu Lee as she investigates another smuggling ring, this time involving diamonds implanted into the derrieres of prosti...
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The Baby
Still traumatised by the loss of her husband, well-meaning social worker Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer: The Loved One) throws herself into her latest assignment: the case of "Baby", a 21-year-old man with the mind of an infant - who crawls, cries and has yet to make it out of nappies. But Baby's fa...
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The Woman
Almost a decade after Lucky McKee burst upon the indie horror scene and became a 'Master of Horror' in the making thanks to his directorial debut May, he teamed up with legendary cult author Jack Ketchum for his most shocking and brutal film to date: The Woman, an instant cause célèbre on its Sun...
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The Zero Boys
1986 • United States • Directed by Nico Mastorakis
From cult director Nico Mastorakis, the man behind such eclectic offerings as the controversial Island of Death and the Oliver Reed-starring actioner Hired to Kill, comes The Zero Boys – the genre-bending ’80s classic with gruesome sequences tha...
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The Driller Killer
1979 • United States • Directed by Abel Ferrara
In career that has encompassed such controversial classics as Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant and Welcome to New York, none of Abel Ferrara’s films have quite managed to match the shock, extremity and downright notorious nature of The Driller Killer. Ferrar...
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Toys Are Not For Children
Psychological trauma and aberrant sexuality abound in this twisted 1972 tale of a young woman whose severe daddy issues send her on an unforgettably bleak downward spiral. Yearning for the love of her absentee father, Jamie inhabits an infantilised world surrounded by toys, including those which ...
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Inferno of Torture
Exploitation legend Teruo Ishii (Horrors of Malformed Men, Orgies of Edo) delivers one of his most extreme visions of violent eroticism in this, the sixth in his abnormal love series. Tattoos and torture await women forced into servitude in Ishii's Inferno of Torture. Unable to repay a local lend...
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Orgies of Edo
Legendary Toei director Teruo Ishii tells three stories of moral sickness set during Japan's prosperous Genroku era in this bloody follow-up to his sexploitation classic Shogun's Joy of Torture, and the fourth entry in Toei's 'abnormal love' film series. Ishii's politically incorrect moral lesson...
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Elvira: Mistress of the Dark
1988 • United States • Directed by James Signorelli
She’s back! Elvira, Horrorland’s hostess with the mostest, finally busts out on ARROW with her big screen debut, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark!
Having just quit her job as a Los Angeles TV horror hostess, Elvira receives the unexpected news tha...
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Tetsuo - The Iron Man
A strange man known only as the "metal fetishist", who seems to have an insane compulsion to stick scrap metal into his body, is hit and possibly killed by a Japanese "salaryman", out for a drive with his girlfriend. The salaryman then notices that he is being slowly overtaken by some kind of dis...
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Tetsuo II: Body Hammer
Sequel to 'Tetsuo', this time has the Iron Man transforming into a cyber-kinetic gun when a gang of vicious skinheads kidnap his son. When the skinheads capture him, they begin to experiment on him... speeding up the mutative process!
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There's Always Vanilla
In There's Always Vanilla, young drifter Chris and beautiful model Lynn embark upon a tumultuous relationship which seems doomed from the outset.
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Who Saw Her Die?
Sculptor Franco Serpieri (Lazenby) welcomes Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi, 'Deep Red') - his young daughter from a failed marriage - to Venice, unaware that a disturbed child-killer is stalking the city's canals. When Roberta's body is found floating face-down in the river, the lives of Franco and his ...
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Killer Nun
1979 • Italy • Directed by Giulio Berruti
Aging blonde-bombshell Anita Ekberg ('La Dolce Vita', 'Pick-up Alley') gives a full-bodied performance as a sex-crazed sister with some seriously bad habits in the lurid cult classic 'Killer Nun'. One of the most notorious 'nunsploitation' films, 'Killer...
