00:00Set her up in number five.
00:01I'm going to go check on Tillingham.
00:03Welcome to WatchMojo.
00:05And today, we're looking at movie scenes that were deemed too violent for audiences.
00:10Although, some of these would resurface in director's cuts.
00:13There will be a few spoilers ahead.
00:15We were just trying to kind of get the right balance without tipping the movie also into an NC-17.
00:22Number 10.
00:23The Darkest Timeline.
00:25The Butterfly Effect.
00:30It's fitting that a film about rewriting the past would have four alternate endings.
00:44By far, the most depressing and stomach-churning sees protagonist, Evan, travel back to his mother's womb.
00:49Believing his loved ones will benefit from his absence, Evan uses his umbilical cord to prevent his birth.
00:56Save him!
00:57Now get enough oxygen.
00:59We're losing him!
01:00We're losing him!
01:00No!
01:01The image of Evan ending his life before it even begins is beyond disturbing.
01:06No!
01:08The fact that his sacrifice creates a more hopeful future for everyone else only makes the scene more unsettling, suggesting that the world would be a better place without him.
01:18It's a complex notion that the studio felt was more than viewers could handle.
01:22While the directors delivered a more optimistic ending for theaters, their preferred downer ending was restored on home media.
01:30I couldn't stand my dad.
01:33But I knew that if I went to live with my mom, I'd never see you again.
01:38Number 9.
01:40Peter Foley's Death.
01:41The Dark Knight Rises.
01:43Keep moving forward!
01:45Break him at the stairs!
01:48Christopher Nolan set the gold standard for gritty superhero movies with his Dark Knight trilogy.
01:53He still had to keep things in a PG-13 proximity.
01:57One axed scene challenged that rating.
02:00In The Dark Knight Rises, Gordon's second-in-command, Peter Foley, dies facing off against Talia al Ghul's army.
02:07Shoot them.
02:10Shoot them all.
02:17Despite the absence of blood, Foley is seemingly gunned down in the film, although his death was originally intended to be more graphic.
02:26According to actor Matthew Modine, his stunt double shot a scene in which he was run over, sending him 15 feet in the air before he hit the ground.
02:35Modine claims that Nolan told him that if the scene had been included, it would have got an NC-17 rating because it was so violent.
02:43Call everyone in.
02:44Every car patrol, peacock, Bop-32.
02:47Call them in now.
02:48I'm gonna do what Jim Gordon never could.
02:50What's that?
02:51I'm gonna take down the Batman.
02:52Number 8.
02:54Eric Gets Shot.
02:55Mac and Me.
02:56Are you gonna be okay?
02:58Guaranteed.
02:59Listen, I'm getting out at 9.
03:00Mr. Allen is bringing me home.
03:01Please be there, guys.
03:02We'll be there, Mom.
03:03Even if you've never watched this E.T. knockoff, chances are Paul Rudd and Conan familiarized you with the infamous scene where Eric falls from a cliff in his wheelchair.
03:13Oh, no!
03:14That's not even the worst thing that happens to Eric.
03:23In a bizarrely explosive climax, Eric gets caught in the crossfire, but the aliens have a cure for death.
03:30Eric!
03:31Eric!
03:31Eric!
03:31Eric!
03:32Eric!
03:32Eric!
03:33Eric!
03:33Eric!
03:33Eric!
03:34The scene is so poorly edited that the audience is left asking, wait, when did Eric get hit?
03:47In the original cut, we actually see Eric take a bullet to the chest, while this footage surfaced in some home media prints.
03:54It makes sense why the studio removed it from the theatrical cut following poor test screenings.
03:59Maybe they also would have replaced the guns with walkie-talkies.
04:03We're gonna lose him, Bill.
04:04They don't know how to drive, anyway!
04:06Drop him!
04:07Eric!
04:08Drop him!
04:09Drop him!
04:10No!
04:11No!
04:12No!
04:13No!
04:14No!
04:15No!
04:16No!
04:17No!
04:18No!
04:19No!
04:20No!
04:21No!
04:22No!
04:23No!
04:24No!
04:25No!
04:26No!
04:27No!
04:28No!
04:29No!
04:30No!
04:31No!
04:32No!
04:33No!
04:34No!
04:35No!
04:36No!
04:37No!
04:38No!
04:39No!
04:40No!
04:41No!
04:42No!
04:43No!
04:44No!
04:45No!
04:46No!
04:47No!
04:48No!
04:49No!
04:50No!
04:51No!
04:52No!
04:53No!
04:54No!
04:55No!
04:56No!
04:57No!
04:58No!
04:59No!
05:00No!
05:01No!
05:03Editor Joe Murphy expressed affection for the rat scene, calling it gory and crazy. During the
05:09editing process, though, they found that the rat regurgitating was so horrific that it actually
05:14kind of slowed down the horror of the sequence it was in. So not only was it too barbaric for
05:19barbarian, but the rat simply hurt the flow. 6. Brains and Eyeballs – From Beyond
05:49Please don't eat those. Director Stuart Gordon reportedly had to submit this
05:54body horror film 12 times to the MPAA to get it down from an NC-17 rating to an R.
06:01The police are here.
06:08Perhaps the most revolting scene that he trimmed down involved his wife, Carolyn Purdy Gordon,
06:15who played a doctor. She stumbles upon protagonist Dr. Tillinghast, chowing down on a juicy brain.
06:21Tillinghast proceeds to bite out her eye and suck out her brains through the now vacant socket.
06:39The director recalled a woman from the MPAA sitting him down saying,
06:44this is disgusting. With the release date looming, Gordon reluctantly cut about 30 seconds from this
06:49scene. Gordon said that they really took out some of the best stuff, which thankfully saw the light
06:55of day in future releases. 5. Don't Feed the Plants – Little Shop of Horrors
07:06Like its stage counterpart, the Little Shop of Horrors movie was destined for cult status.
07:19Some things work better on stage than in film, however. In theater, a musical can end tragically
07:25as long as the cast returns for a final bow. There's no curtain call in movies. So, for test
07:31audiences, there was no closure to be found when Audrey succumbed to her wounds. Seymour lost the
07:37final battle against Audrey too. And bloodthirsty alien plants took over the Earth.
07:49Despite the best efforts of director Frank Oz and screenwriter Howard Ashman, they relented that the
07:55film wouldn't be commercially successful without a cheerier ending. That's what audiences got in 1986,
08:02but the original ending was eventually revived in all of its ghastly glory.
08:254. Monkey Cat – The Fly
08:42You know that a movie has gone too far, when even David Cronenberg is like, yeah, let's cut that.
08:49Is it life or is it Memorax? It's too bad Ronnie missed it.
08:56Considering how much gnarly body horror that The Fly got away with, you might assume there was no
09:01line. This deleted scene wasn't just vile, however. It made Seth Brundle a slightly less
09:06sympathetic protagonist, attempting to stop his transformation into a fly.
09:27It didn't go well, prompting Brundle to destroy his latest creation with a lead pipe. The audience
09:41already had to sit through the demise of one baboon, whom Brundle was more empathetic toward. The
09:47filmmakers deemed the monkey-cat scene, needless animal cruelty that robbed Brundle of whatever
09:53humanity he had left.
10:073. Cauldron Born – The Black Cauldron
10:11Disney's first PG animated feature notoriously removed 12 minutes from its final cut. For years,
10:26there were rumors that the deleted footage would have resulted in a PG-13 or R rating. Further
10:32research suggests that many of these moments were cut due to pacing. However, there was at least one
10:52shot that likely would have pushed the film beyond the PG limits. During the Cauldron Born climax,
10:58the Horned King's undead army rises. While this scene was toned down for theaters, partially recovered
11:04artwork shows the Cauldron Born attacking henchmen. One man's flesh melts away in dreadful detail, leaving
11:11only bones.
11:32We may never get a director's cut of The Black Cauldron, but these stills might be the most violent imagery in
11:38Disney's entire animation library. We'll gladly take Kong's lair over the Spider Pit. In the 1933 classic,
12:05Kong sends several sailors plummeting from a log bridge into the pit below. The sequence was
12:11intended to go on longer, with giant insects and other stop-motion creatures attacking the men.
12:25It's been rumored that this scene was included in early screenings of King Kong, but it was
12:41supposedly more than audiences could bear. In any case, Marion C. Cooper felt the scene wasn't needed,
12:47scrapping it. Peter Jackson would include a Spider Pit sequence when he remade King Kong in 2005. Although,
12:54the original Spider Pit scene has been mostly lost outside of some stills and artwork,
12:59Jackson and his team employed their technical wizardry to recreate it.
13:031. Much of the gore
13:32Event Horizon
13:38Captain Justin just activated the door, it's on a 30-second delay.
13:41Justin!
13:41Although Event Horizon would ultimately be rated R. Audiences in 1997 didn't realize how much bloodier the
13:54theatrical cut could have been. Director Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt claim that some viewers
14:00fainted at test screenings, presumably due to the excessive gore.
14:15The suits at Paramount were also caught off guard, insisting that Anderson trim down the runtime,
14:20along with the brutality. With the film gaining a cult following, Anderson expressed interest in a
14:26director's cut.
14:27What you'll see is kind of an incomplete version. We kept the Burning Man pretty much for all of it.
14:32You'll see he transforms into Weir at one point, but in the version we tested, we actually mapped
14:39flames and bloody skin onto Weir, so he appeared to be the Burning Man.
14:44While some of the deleted scenes were recovered, others were lost without a trace. Reflecting on some of the footage that got cut,
14:51actor Jason Isaacs said, there are things that are definitely illegal to do now. Probably illegal to do then.
14:58And I prefer the version of the movie we ultimately ended up releasing where it's just a little more vague.
15:05We don't kind of like refer to hell so specifically. I think it's kind of clear,
15:09but I think it's cooler that we don't have to actually talk about it.
15:12Do you think these scenes were too violent, or were the censors too thin-skinned? Let us know in the comments.
15:21We'll see you next time.
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