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Image by Nimesh Niyomal Perera
Vulgar auteurism, as a genre or movement, is a little hard to describe, but might also be the kind of thing where you know it when you see it. If something was made by an auteur director (you know, the kind of director who – for better or worse – gets 100% creative control), and is also a bit twisted/unusual/sick/out-there, then it might well be a work of vulgar auteurism.
Confused? Read this. Still confused? Then read on! Because the best way to get a handle on what exactly vulgar auteurism is, is to go over some of the movies that qualify. The following all do, in one way or another. They just have the feel of vulgarity while they simultaneously smack of being made by auteur directors. Rather than being ranked by how vulgar they are, they're more or less ranked from good to great.
10 'Crank: High Voltage' (2009)
Directed by Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
Image via Lionsgate
2006’s Crank was already sufficiently distinctive and vulgar, so consider it an honorable mention for present purposes. It was completely outdone in ridiculousness, however, by its 2009 sequel, Crank: High Voltage. The plot sees protagonist Chev Chelios fighting to stay alive and track down the people responsible for stealing his specialized/indestructible heart, all the while having to electrocute himself regularly to keep his new heart replacement working.
Bad taste is the name of the game here, with Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor working in tandem to push everything they can to its absolute limits. Crank: High Voltage tries to shock, offend, and alarm for pretty much every minute of its runtime, and though it gets exhausting at a point, you also kind of have to begrudgingly admire just how “much” it all is; maximalism with no compromise, in effect.
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Crank: High Voltage
Release Date April 16, 2009
Runtime 85 minutes
9 'Southland Tales' (2006)
Directed by Richard Kelly
Image via Universal Pictures
You should go into Southland Tales knowing as little about it as possible, but even if someone tried to spoil it all, they might well find themselves unable to. That’s a long-winded way of saying that this movie is impossible to comprehend, let alone summarize. It feels like a joke, a cry for help, a forward-thinking piece of science fiction, and a satire of… something(?), all at once. And also none of those things.
People seem to more or less comprehend Richard Kelly’s better-known film, Donnie Darko, but that one didn’t really feel like a piece of vulgar auteurism. Kelly went for broke and took no prisoners with Southland Tales, and it’s a mesmerizing – and sometimes even beautiful – piece of nonsense. Or maybe it does all make sense, and you have to be both a genius and someone with the time to watch it 50 times in a row (while taking notes) to make sense of it.
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Southland Tales
Cast Carlos Amezcua , Curtis Armstrong , Robert Benz , Todd Berger , Dave Carlin , Joe Campana
Runtime 145 Minutes
8 'Bad Boys II' (2003)
Directed by Michael Bay
Image via Sony Pictures Releasing
After a heightened but still relatively coherent buddy cop movie (Bad Boys), Michael Bay went nuts, as a director, making Bad Boys II, with this being the film of his that contains the most Bayhem. It’s about 2.5 hours long, is insanely mean-spirited and nihilistic throughout, spares no expense with its action set pieces, and just feels like one overly caffeinated fever dream from start to finish.
Well, it feels like it captures the spirit of something a bit harder than caffeine, but it’s best to keep the descriptions here PG-rated. Bad Boys II, though, is about as far from PG as you can get, pushing the boundaries of the R-rating, really. It’s a blast for those reasons, though; absolute extremity made with the kind of budget usually reserved for crowd-pleasing, family-friendly blockbusters, and its mere existence – however nasty – has to be celebrated, as a result.
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Release Date July 18, 2003
Runtime 147 Minutes
7 'Benedetta' (2021)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Image Via Pathé Distribution
Vibes dictate that genuine pieces of vulgar auteurism have to be made after the year 2000 (or maybe it’s just this list; who are you gonna sue?), but there’s an argument to be made that Paul Verhoeven was doing the whole vulgar auteur thing long before it was cool. His American movies were pretty extreme (the ones he made in the 1980s and 1990s), and his films before then were also generally full-on.
But Benedetta feels like it most qualifies for inclusion here, being one of Verhoeven’s boldest films and, as of 2024, his most recent. It’s a story that combines steamy romance, religion, blasphemy, and some surrealism, all for good measure. Whether you like Benedetta or not feels a bit besides the point, because it exists to make you feel something. Whether that feeling is positive, negative, or both somehow, depends on each individual viewer.
Release Date December 3, 2021
Director Paul Verhoeven
6 '300' (2006)
Directed by Zack Snyder
Image via Warner Bros.
A movie that’s stylish, mindless, and incredibly heavy on on-screen deaths, 300 wasn’t Zack Snyder’s first movie, but it was his earliest feature film that felt like pure, unadulterated Snyder. It needed style, too, because the basic premise is very simple stuff, focusing on a bunch of very buff Spartan soldiers (who are all very good friends and definitely nothing more) facing off against a much larger force of Persian soldiers.
It's two hours of pure masculinity, almost comical melodrama, and super elaborate action sequences that really do feel like the pages of a graphic novel coming alive on screen. 300 is probably style over substance, but the style’s all you need when it proves to be this much fun, and it was also the film that fully established Snyder as a filmmaker with a keen eye for attention-grabbing visuals.
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Director Zack Snyder
Runtime 117 minutes
5 'Watchmen' (2009)
Directed by Zack Snyder
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
What’s this? More Zack Snyder? Yes! He’s really good at this whole vulgar auteurism thing, especially during the 2000s, because he followed 300 up with Watchmen. This was another film adaptation with difficult and revered source material, but this movie generally works better than some give it credit for. It’s not a perfect adaptation of the Watchmen graphic novel, but it’s pretty strong overall, in all honesty.
It condenses a complex story into under three hours, shaving off some character development, overall depth, and reworking the ending, sure, but the spirit of the thing remains. What you also get with 2009’s Watchmen is a series of phenomenal-looking action scenes alongside generally jaw-dropping visuals. Criticize the writing or the condensation of the source material if you want, but it’s harder to deny just how grand, ridiculous, and even beautiful this whole thing looks and feels.
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Release Date March 4, 2009
Director Zack Snyder
Runtime 163 Minutes
4 'Pain & Gain' (2013)
Directed by Michael Bay
Image via Paramount Pictures
Just as Zack Snyder deserved two of his movies mentioned here, so too should Michael Bay be a two-timer within this current ranking. Fittingly, his other hugely vulgar and distinctive movie, Pain & Gain, just so happened to come out a decade on from Bad Boys II. Anyone in the mood for two super nasty, darkly funny, and overall ridiculous movies back to back could treat the pair as an appropriate – yet exhausting – double feature.
Essentially, Pain & Gain makes light of a horrible true story, yet maybe justifies this approach by making the criminals at its center look exceedingly stupid. It’s the sort of thing where you're laughing at them, rather than with them, but even those able to get on board with the mean-spiritedness of it all will probably be able to concede that The Wolf of Wall Street – also from 2013 – probably did this kind of thing a little bit, or with, at least, more nuance. Pain & Gain, on the other hand, has no time for nuance. **** your nuance.
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Pain & Gain
Release Date April 26, 2013
3 'Brawl in Cell Block 99' (2017)
Directed by S. Craig Zahler
Image via RLJE Films
When you go into a prison movie, some extremity and brutality are to be expected… but perhaps not to the level of Brawl in Cell Block 99. Everything is intense, savage, and admirably grim here, with the plot involving an imprisoned man going through a series of hellish and violent tasks by powerful enemies he has that are also within the prison’s walls.
There’s more to it than that, sure, but maybe less than you'd expect. Brawl in Cell Block 99 aims to evoke a certain kind of feeling and sustain it – ironically, without taking prisoners – for a runtime that exceeds two hours. It’s all a lot to take in (you have to get used to Vince Vaughn being surprisingly great in a very serious role, after all), but that’s par for the course with vulgar auteurism, baby.
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Release Date September 23, 2017
Director S. Craig Zahler
Runtime 132 Minutes
2 'Sin City' (2005)
Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller
Image via Miramax
Robert Rodriguez has always been an auteur director, and that’s something that you kind of have to admire. Even when he’s making Spy Kids movies that are technically appropriate for everyone, he never backs down from – or sands down – his directorial trademarks, and so everything with his name attached feels wholly like a Robert Rodriguez movie (okay, besides maybe Alita: Battle Angel, but that gets a pass because it’s generally pretty good as a sci-fi/action flick).
Perhaps the most visually distinctive Robert Rodriguez movie, though, is one he co-directed with Frank Miller: Sin City (Miller created the comic series the film was based on). It’s a movie heavy on style, violence, sex, and grit, combining so much and having it all work surprisingly well as a coherent whole, especially considering there was more than one credited director here.
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Sin City
Release Date April 1, 2005
Runtime 124 minutes
1 'Babylon' (2022)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
A beautifully unrestrained epic that IS one of the best movies of the 2020s, and will only become more well-liked as time marches on, Babylon is ridiculous in the best of ways. Damien Chazelle went to both new highs and new lows as a director here, and anyone going in expecting something like La La Land might've been alarmed by the content… though perhaps not so surprised by what Babylon was going for thematically.
The pursuit of perfection in a creative field, explored in Whiplash and somewhat touched upon in La La Land, is applied to a whole industry in Babylon. It unpacks Hollywood during the transition from silent cinema to the talkie era in all its gory glory, celebrating film as an art form while critiquing the machine that churns such art out, destroying individual lives in the process. It does this while being gross, overlong, epic, spectacular, and moving. Perhaps nothing else feels like it epitomizes the idea of vulgar auteurism quite as well as Babylon does.
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Release Date December 23, 2022
Director Damien Chazelle
Runtime 189minutes
English (US) ·