In Iraq, you can eat boiled sheep’s head. In Korea, you can drink wine marinated in mice fetuses. And in Italy, you can eat cheese infested with flies. But only in the movies can you eat your own brain. That’s what we’re looking at today, folks: The 10 most disgusting, stomach-turning, vomit-inducing meals in movie history.
10. Cool Hand Luke
Nobody can eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in under an hour? But the late, great Paul Newman isn’t “nobody,” and in Cool Hand Luke he impressed his prison cellmates by doing just that. It was a crowd-pleasing comedic scene in the movie, but as Roger Ebert wrote after the passing of Newman: “The egg-eating scene strikes me as all but unwatchable. The physical suffering and danger are sickening.” (Unfortunately embedding is disabled on this one, so you’ll have to click through the still below.)
9. Matilda
Chocolate cake is awesome, unless you’re forced to eat an entire chocolate cake in front of all your classmates. It’s a hard scene to watch, particularly for what’s meant to be a children’s film. Props to Bruce Bogtrotter for holding it all down.
8. Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
Just as in Cool Hand Luke, a bet is involved in here, although this one was real. In Les Blank’s short documentary, Herzog does as he once promised: To eat his shoe if fellow documentaries Errol Morris ever finished his film, Gates of Heaven. Herzog boiled his shoe with herbs, garlic, and beef stock for five hours before eating it at the restaurant Chez Panisse (he did not, however, eat the sole).
7. Road Trip
Ten years before Ed Helms got backdoored by a Thai transvestite in his The Hangover II, Todd Phillips directed Road Trip, a movie that illustrates why you should never send your food back, especially for something as minor as powdered sugar on your French toast. Apparently, the most efficient way of removing that powdered sugar is with one’s ass. This may be Horatio Sanz’s feature-film highlight.
6. Funny Farm
Lamb fries are a traditional dish in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, and they are often served with cream gravy. What most people don’t realize is that “lamb fries” are actually sheep balls, which Chevy Chase found out the hard way in Funny Farm, after breaking a restaurant’s record of eating 28.
5. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
One of the most stomach-turning meals in cinematic history, inspired by the James Bond flicks, was a four-course dining experience that included live baby snakes, beetles, eyeball soup, and chilled monkey brains. Poor Short Round.
4. Oldboy
There’s no CGI here. Choi Min-shik actually ate four live Octopuses at a sushi bar for this scene. It’s disgusting, perhaps, for Americans, but eating live octopus in Korea is common, although it is usually sliced first.
3. Hannibal
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this meal is that, in theory, it could actually happen. You can survive, at least for a while, with your brain exposed. But don’t expect to see this meal served on “Top Chef” anytime soon.
2. Monty Python and the Meaning of Life
You’d imagine that moules marinieres, pate de foie gras, beluga caviar, eggs benedict, a leek tart, frogs’ legs amandine and quail’s eggs on a bed of mushrooms all mixed together in a bucket with the quail eggs on top and a double helping of pate would be enough to make anyone vomit. In Monty Python, however, Mr. Creosote has already vomited several times before the dinner even arrives. Gotta warn you, though: After a meal that big, you should probably avoid the mint.
1. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
Revenge is meant to be sweet, but I’m not sure what a person tastes like. In The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Helen Mirren’s character, so overcome with grief and rage after her husband kills her lover, has the lover cooked up and forces her husband to take a bite. “Try the c*ck,” she says. “It’s a delicacy.”
