5. Natural Born Killers
So many different Tarantino films could go on this list. Tim Roth lying in an ever-increasing pool of his own blood. The recurrent violence in Pulp Fiction (poor old Marvin). The baseball bats of Inglorious Basterds. Maybe one of his films will slide on as we progress but it is this movie, taken from a story/screenplay by Tarantino but heavily revised by the director Oliver Stone, that makes it here. The film is a violent, nasty little piece which finds blood-letting at every point. The story of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), it follows the two young lovers as they traverse American killing and raping victims along the way. They are pursued by Detective Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore) who also has a violent past before an eventual arrest. This then leads us to a final chapter as we find the two in prison being interviewed by tabloid tattler Robert Downey, Jr. After a prison riot they incite, the two escape, murder Downey, Jr. and settle down to a nice family life. The controversy surrounding this film was/is incredible. The amount of violence and blood-letting took censors by surprise as it was banned in several countries and blamed for inciting copycat murders. To Stones credit, he has come out with some intelligent arguments about the film satirising the medias obsession with serial killers but the violence, along with the filming style, often batters the viewer into submission. Unlike many films on this list, there is no time for breath, no time to take in what has happened, to consider the violence unfolding, were just hit again and again and again. Still, any film that drags a good performance from Rodney Dangerfield cant be all bad, right?!