10. La Grande Bouffe (1973)
A Franco-Italian movie starring some of the biggest and most respected Continental stars such as Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Ugo Tognazzi and Phillipe Noiret. These four actors play four jaded men who no longer enjoy life and hole themselves up in a large house to commit suicide by eating, drinking and shagging themselves to death. Various women pass through the house, including two young prostitutes who are sickened by the group's excesses and flee, and a buxom young school teacher called Andrea, who can tune into what the men are trying to achieve and tacitly agrees with them to be there to the bitter end. I have always thought that director Marco Ferreri is woefully under-appreciated in the arena of European art house cinema. La Grande Bouffe remains his best known and celebrated film. It is full of scatology, toilet humour and sexual excesses. Scenes such as the toilet exploding - spewing forth human excrement, and Andrea masturbating one of the four men until he dies, have earned it an NC-17 certificate. A cult badge of extreme naughtiness for cinema's Francophiles.