5

The MPAA Accidentally Made South Park More Disgusting

Paramount Pictures

Given the track record of Matt Stone and Trey Parker's show South Park, it's no surprise that the MPAA changed their movie a lot -- but no one expected those changes to make the movie dirtier. According to Stone and Parker, every time the MPAA told them a scene was too raunchy for an R-rating, they'd submit what they thought was even worse, and, to their surprise, the more disgusting example was always given the green light.

via Letters of Note
"Cum-sucking ass"? Out. "Donkey-raping shiteater"? In!

For example, there's a scene in the movie where the kids discover a porn flick starring Cartman's mother. Originally the video was of a woman having sex with a horse, but after the MPAA shot it down, they resubmitted a longer version where she ate human feces. They meant it as a big fat "fuck you for trying to tell us what to do," but the censors thought it was fine.

4

The Maltese Falcon Used Secret Gay Slang to Gay Up the Whole Genre

Warner Bros.

The Maltese Falcon set the gold standard for the film noir genre. Take the foppish villain character, Joel Cairo, for example: Vaguely homosexual villains are sadly all too common in modern cinema, but it was unusual for the time. The difference here is that Cairo, played with marvelous sliminess by Peter Lorre, was not "vaguely homosexual" or otherwise ambiguous at all -- he was, for the time, flamboyant, at one point even openly fellating a cane until Humphrey Bogart, plainly uncomfortable with the natural love between a man and a walking stick, looks away in disgust.

Warner Bros.
That's why he was billed as the mysterious "Marmite miner."

3

Taxi Driver Brainwashes the MPAA With Uber-Violence

Columbia Pictures

2

Wes Craven Straight Up Stole a Rating

MGM

The Last House on the Left is an icon of horror that not only launched director Wes Craven's career, but also launched the entire "Let's substitute outlandish torture for plot" genre. It's known for its intense scenes of rape, chainsaw murder, and we don't need a third example because we already have rape and chainsaw murder.

Watching the movie today, you can't help but wonder how Craven ever got away with an R rating. The truth is, he didn't.

When The Last House on the Left was submitted for rating, the MPAA insisted on cutting so much that the final product was only 60 minutes long. After struggling to edit together a coherent story with so little footage, producer Sean Cunningham finally just said "to hell with it," put all the horrifying stuff back in, and spliced in some official MPAA R-rated footage from another movie that was being put together down the hall. You'd assume that somebody is on hand to check these things, or that there's some code that makes the rating footage specific to the film or something -- but nope! Everything turned out fine. No one had any idea The Last House on the Left was released as an unrated film until Craven told the story decades later in a documentary.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
The MPAA then tried arresting him, only to learn that they have no official authority whatsoever.

This bears repeating: Craven stole a rating, released an uncensored version of a film that he had already sent in for review (and was subsequently rejected), then had the balls to market it as being ridiculously violent, and no one at the MPAA ever noticed. Man, we're starting to think you could slap the devil's erect cock in a film and walk away whistlin' Dixie ...

1

Seth Rogen Slaps the Devil's Erect Cock in a Film, Walks Away Whistlin' Dixie

Columbia Pictures

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had an R-rated comedy on their hands with This Is the End and really wanted to avoid the box-office-poison NC-17 stamp. They figured the mass deaths that spark off the movie's apocalypse wouldn't raise any red flags -- they were pretty tame, and nobody really misses Michael Cera -- but later, there's a demonic rape scene.

Columbia Pictures
Not Jonah Hill's first sex scene, believe it or not.

We're not using "demonic" as hyperbole here: About an hour into the film, a demon rapes Jonah Hill. The scene is played up for laughs and doesn't depict anything too graphic, but obviously all rape is considered a bit of a touchy subject. Figuring this scene could cost them dearly with the MPAA, Rogen and Goldberg took advice from their distributor, Sony, and tried a risky tactic: They flooded the censors with needless objectionable material, hoping they would only ask that the outlandish stuff be cut and leave what the filmmakers wanted in the first place intact. So in the demon rape scene, they went out of their way to depict the demon's erect penis.

An erect penis is a huge (well, depending on the dude) no-no in an R-rated film, even during loving, consensual sex. So it seemed like a good plan: throw a demon cock at the censors and slip a rape scene by when they're ducking for cover. But you know how it is -- once you pop, you just can't stop rendering giant evil dicks on film. Right at the end of the movie, we're treated to the sight of a skyscraper-size Satan, his semi-truck of a dick swinging in the burning wind. The magical blue light of heaven slices the member right off, and poor Satan picks up his disembodied wang and wails.

Columbia Pictures
To him, it's like the world is ending.

The men sent their cut to the MPAA and waited for feedback. They hoped the graphic cock shots would get cut and the content they actually wanted to keep would stick around.

The film came back rated R, no cuts.

As Seth Rogen once said: It just takes one fan of dick jokes giggling, and then the whole room will be happy to see your penis.

We might be paraphrasing a bit there.

Ryan Menezes is a writer and layout editor here at Cracked. He broke down and made a Twitter page just for his Cracked fans.

Related Reading: Sometimes censorship can be hilarious. Case in point: "Yippie-ki-yay, Mister Falcon!" And of course there's the utterly wordless Frank Zappa album that somehow earned a "Parental Advisory" sticker. Ready for more of Big Brother's failures? Click right here.

Check out Robert Evans' A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.