“It made me sick to my stomach”: the movie Quentin Tarantino called “the ugliest I’d ever seen”
Having grown up on a steady diet of gruesome exploitation flicks and low-rent horror movies, Quentin Tarantino has developed a strong cinematic disposition, meaning that there are very few films capable of making him recoil in horror.
Of course, rules always have exceptions, and he’s got a few. For one thing, he was absolutely terrified the first time he saw Bambi, which is a surprisingly recurring theme among impressionable children who go on to become high-profile directors, although the death of the title character’s mother did admittedly ruin the childhoods of several generations.
Tarantino also called Alex Fridolinski’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture the “roughest” revenge movie he’d ever seen, which didn’t deter him from taking inspiration from its hero, Christina Lindberg’s Madeleine, and using her as the basis for Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver in Kill Bill, so at least he got something out of it.
Writing in his book, Cinema Speculation, the two-time Academy Award winner shared his recollections of watching Rocky director John G Avildsen’s 1970 feature, Joe, for the first time. Although it was marketed as a drama, it was as gritty and obscene as American cinema got at the time, and for several years, it was the most hideous thing he’d ever seen, until he laid eyes on a controversial horror.
“At the time I saw Joe, it was easily the ugliest movie I’d ever seen,” Tarantino shared. “A spot it held till four years later when I saw The Last House on the Left. Frankly, it was the squalor of the apartment the two junkies at the beginning lived in that creeped me out the most. In fact, it made me a little sick to my stomach.”
The auteur’s relationship with Wes Craven became complicated over the years, with Tarantino not the biggest fan of the slasher icon’s influential Scream, and he wasn’t too happy when Craven walked out of a Reservoir Dogs screening. If there was one silver lining, it was that his 1972 ‘video nasty’ finally dislodged Joe for the title of being the single “ugliest” movie the Pulp Fiction orchestrator had ever laid eyes on.
Avildsen’s film wasn’t as gratuitous or exploitative as The Last House of the Left, but it was a hard watch for other reasons. The story revolves around a vengeful father who kills the drug dealer responsible for his daughter’s overdose, but confessing his crime to a stranger backfires when Peter Boyle’s Joe leads Dennis Patrick’s Bill Compton down an even darker path when his daughter soon goes missing.
Tarantino thought it was ugly, and he wasn’t alone. Boyle was so disheartened seeing audiences cheer his rage-fueled actions in the movie that he refused to appear in any other roles that glorified violence, which is where their paths diverged. The former noted that Joe is “harsh, and violent, and ugly,” but he saw it as “a kettle-black comedy about class in America, bordering on satire, while also being savagely vicious.”
Putting an even finer point on it, even though it made him feel queasy, Tarantino urged everyone to overlook Joe‘s nastier aspects in favour of “how fucking funny the film is.”
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