8. Visitor Q

(Takashi Miike, 2001)

What’s The Story? A father gets it on with his prostitute daughter. Then, the family’s lives are turned inside out by the arrival of a strange guest who encourages mom, dad, son and daughter to satisfy their darkest needs.

Necrophilia, murder, dismemberment, heroin and anal rape are on the menu, all washed down with a barrel-load of milk squirted from ma’s wildly lactating breasts. Did we mention it’s a comedy?

What’s It About? It’s a modern-day Gulliver’s Travels shot on DV; grainy images and jagged satire combine to demonstrate how humans are pathetic, self-serving, squabbling, rancid and downright low. 

Miike especially bludgeons the nuclear family, and explains/excuses his OTT imagery as a cultural thing: “In Japan, violence isn’t as controversial as it is in the West, so it’s easier to make a crazy, extremely violent film.”

Weird Fact: Gratuitous sexploitation cinema? Of course not. Miike claims to have been influenced by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s metaphysical chin-stroker Theorem (1968).

7. Even Dwarfs Started Small

(Werner Herzog, 1970)

What’s The Story? Egged on by cackling leader Hombré (Helmut Döring), the inmates of an asylum rise up against their oppressors, tying their supervisor to a chair.

A monkey is crucified. Chickens are forced to eat each other. Plants are torched. Oh, and it’s all set in an alternative universe inhabited solely by dwarves.

What’s It About? There’s method to Herzog’s madness: Dwarfs unmasks man’s beastly nature, trashing his bourgeois values.

The dwarves aren’t freakish, society is. And the cannibalistic hens? “Chickens frighten me because they are so stupid,” says Herzog. “When you look into their eyes, it’s really, really weird.”

Weird Fact: Herzog celebrated wrapping Dwarves by leaping into a field of cacti.

6. Society

(Brian Yuzna, 1989)

What’s The Story? Orange-faced, Jeep-driving class president-in-waiting Bill Whitney can’t shake a creeping sense of alienation in his sterile Beverly Hills ‘hood; or the notion that something vaguely rotten lurks behind the white marble pillars...

Turns out his nearest and dearest are an alien race engaged in murderous, body-morphing sex orgies, sucking precious nutrients from their less monied peers. Good instincts, then...

What’s It About? A none-too subtle wad of phlegm in the beady eyes of America’s vampiric upper classes and their sniffy, gated communities.

The metaphor couldn’t be more direct: Yuzna literally accuses them of being another species, feeding off those below them and spunking their swollen bank balances over each other’s smug little faces.

Not sure about the body-morphing, mind. That just looks cool.

Weird Fact: Society bombed in the States but was a hit in Europe (Yuzna: “Europeans are more willing to accept the ideas buried in a movie. To Americans, it was all a big joke”).

Next: Pi, Donnie Darko...