We all learned about the digestive system – with the large and small intestines – in school. And we’ve all heard of having “intestinal fortitude” or “having the guts” to do something. Well here’s a list that may require some intestinal fortitude as filmmakers show how clever they can be when given the guts to work with. You may not want it but here are the 10 best cinematic uses of intestines, starting – where else? — at the bottom. (Please note there are spoilers.)

10. Dog Soldiers (2002)

Let’s start with a scene where it’s not the ripping out of someone’s guts that’s being depicted but rather the frantic attempts to keep them in. Neil Marshall’s contemporary werewolf tale has a memorable scene where Sgt. Harry G. Wells (Sean Pertwee) gets his guts super-glued back in by Pvt. Cooper (Kevin Kidd). Wells looks down at the damage and blurts out, “Sausages.”

9. Silence of the Lambs (1991)

You’d expect Hannibal the Cannibal (Anthony Hopkins) to do something creative with intestines. In Silence of the Lambs he escapes from a temporary prison and leaves one guard sliced open and strung up like some angel of death. Not a specific focus on the intestines but an artful gutting nonetheless.

8. City of the Living Dead (1980)

The Gates of Hell open after the suicide of a clergyman and now the dead are rising from the grave in this Lucio Fulci spaghetti horror film. In one scene a couple making out in a car see the dead priest hanging from a noose, then he suddenly appears by the car, and through some supernatural power he makes the girls intestines force themselves up and out through her mouth, totally ruining the romantic moment.

7. Dead Snow (2009)

This Norwegian film wakes up a horde of Nazi zombies and sets them loose on a cabin full of young folks. Director Tommy Wirkola lets the blood and gore flow freely. When I interviewed Wirkola in 2009, he told me, “It’s a really cool effect in horror films to use the point of view shot. And we wanted something new with a death scene.” And what he did was to have his female victim wake up as she is being gutted by Nazi zombies. But she exacts a bit of revenge before expiring.

6. The Cell (2000)

Tarsem Singh created this opulent sci-fi horror film about an FBI agent (Vince Vaughn) who convinces a woman (Jennifer Lopez) to employ some experimental technology in order to get into the mind of a comatose serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) in order to find out where his latest kidnap victim is. But the inside of the killer’s mind is a dangerous landscape and at one point the killer cuts open the agent’s stomach, pulls out his small intestine, ties it to a crank, and then begins to slowly pull out the man’s intestines and wind them up as he watches. Ew!

5. Machete (2010)

This shows supreme creativity and ingenuity on the part of Danny Trejo’s Machete. When faced with an onslaught of bad guys in a hospital, Machete grabs some surgical tools and then slices a guy open, grabs hold of his intestines, and uses them to swing off of as he jumps out a window. Machete improvises.

4. Story of Ricky (1991)

This is one of the bloodiest, most outrageous action films of all time with one insane fight after another. But the scene that wins a place on this list involves an opponent who cuts open his stomach and pulls out his own intestines to try and strangle the title character and hero Ricky. In one of the badly dubbed English versions I saw, someone exclaims, “You’ve got a lot of guts.” Indeed he did.

3. Dead Snow 2 (2014)

This Dead Snow sequel merits a high spot on the list for sheer volume alone: four guttings (unless I blinked and missed one). The best instance occurs when two of the Nazi zombies rip out the intestines of a man, and pull the large intestine one way and small one the other, and use them as a siphon to get gas from a bus to a Nazi tank. Talk about German engineering! Plus the bonus strangulation of a man with his own intestines; a zombie field surgeon removing the hanging intestines of a fellow zombie and then stuffing him with straw; and finally our hero pulling one zombie’s intestines out to wrap around another zombie’s neck, and then loop over a power line to electrocute them both. Wow, just wow!

2. Day of the Dead (1985)

Leave it to zombie master George A. Romero to put intestines to good use. Day of the Dead calls into question vivisection and practices of researchers as Logan endlessly experiments on zombie victims. At one point he reveals a specimen – rib cage exposed and all internal organs severed to prove a point – that the zombies are working on instinct and eat even if they have no digestive system to process the food. Logan further hypothesizes that zombies can be controlled and domesticated. The specimen gets loose and as he attempts to get up, all his organs fall out on to the floor in quite graphic detail. And bonus points for the appropriately gruesome death of Captain Rhodes that involves gutting as he’s torn limb from limb.

1. Re-Animator (1980)

But the number one slot for most inspired use of intestines has to go to Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator. Based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, the film gives us med student Herbert West whose tests with a reanimating agent get way out of hand. The whole thing comes to a bloody climax as the reanimated and decapitated corpse of Dr. Hill seeks revenge on West. As Hill dies he shoots his intestines out of his body to strangle West. Gordon delivers the perfect finale to his inspired gorefest.

BONUS:

And to end, here’s a bonus non-human intestine scene: Empire Strikes Back (1980), the scene where Han cuts open the Taun Taun to make a warm place for the injured Luke to sack out. And you thought they smelled bad on the outside.







