10 Outrageous Films That Must Be Seen To Be Believed

"Like a septic tank explosion, you won't believe it until you see it!"

lifeforce movie
Cannon Films

In this era of $250 million blockbusters, it’s difficult to imagine a time when people paid to see films about conjoined twins, Nazi villainesses and nude vampires. Not only were Basket Case, Ilsa: She Wolf Of The S.S. and Caged Virgins sizeable hits, but audiences enjoyed them on the big screen rather than at home.

Looking back at the pictures of yesteryear, you sometimes wonder what the filmmakers were thinking. A werewolf movie featuring Christopher Lee, Jimmy Nail and Sybil Danning is odd enough, but Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf also has Danning disrobe for a lycanthropic menage a trois that’s one the funniest, least erotic nude scenes ever. Lee and Danning play brother and sister in the movie, but you probably guessed that.

Danning also appears in Hercules (1983), playing a villainess who taunts Lou Ferrigno’s hero while wearing gaudy costumes that simply must be seen to be believed. However, the film’s most memorable sequence occurs right at the beginning, where baby Hercules is saved from drowning by a pair of giant hands that emerge from a waterfall. Meant to be epic, the effects in this sequence are so laughably cheap that the scene never fails to bring down the house.

There are many other films capable of stunning an unprepared viewer. Here are 10 of them.

10. Night Of The Demon

lifeforce movie
Vipco

Night Of The Demon is your typical low-aiming exploitation movie, loaded with sleaze, fake gore and bad acting. The plot involves a dim-witted academic who leads some students into swamp country to look for Bigfoot – with hilarious consequences.

Looking more like Lou Ferrigno covered in yak hair, this movie’s Bigfoot is one stealthy beast, capable of sneaking up on an unsuspecting lumberjack and divesting him of his axe before splitting his cranium in two. Clearly circus trained, he’s also able to make two knife-wielding girl scouts stab each other repeatedly while banging their heads together.

He is the romantic sort, though, which the students realize when a local girl describes her midnight encounter with our horny beast that lead to the birth of Bigfoot Jnr. This sets up a present-day reunion of sorts when junior knocks down the door and begins dismissing the class one by one, ripping out intestines, burning faces, tearing out throats and impaling bodies on pitchforks – while nobody attempts to escape.

 
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Contributor

Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'