7 Movies That Were Way Weirder Than Advertised

2013's Spring Breakers looked like the easiest sell in the world. Take a bunch of pretty young women, two of them former Disney child stars, and dress them in tiny bikinis for just about the entire film. Then team them up with big name leading man James Franco, and drop them all in a hip and edgy-looking crime thriller. How could audiences resist?

Well, quite easily, as it turned out. Spring Breakers was the biggest, most mainstream-friendly work yet from indie filmmaker Harmony Korine, but despite casting the squeaky-clean teen idols Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, the writer-director was by no means reining in his experimental and confrontational proclivities.

The loud and brash marketing did little to prepare audiences for how abstract Spring Breakers proved to be, shot and edited in a disorientating, not entirely linear manner with lines of dialogue frequently repeated. This may evoke the intoxicated mindset of the characters, but it left much of the audience (fans of Gomez and Hudgens in particular) totally confused.

Bad word of mouth soon killed the film at the box office. Even so, Spring Breakers has since developed a strong cult following, recognising Korine's film as an intelligent and provocative satire on the social mores of the millennial generation, and the troubled world they have been born into.