Top Five Most Intense PG Movies: C.C.C. Issue #54

Top Five Most Intense Films Rated PG

Ratings on movies don’t mean much to me, but they do have a purpose: to give viewers an idea of what content they’re in for. But sometimes, these expectations are subverted, and the rating seems slightly off, or altogether wrong.

A recent example I came across was the extended edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which sported an R-rating, simply for being a bit more violent, but look back at the Lord of the Rings movies, which were complete with decapitations and mass murder and characters getting beaten and tortured, and you’ll find they’re all PG-13.

It can be a fine line between PG-13 and R—sometimes an R-rating can seem excessive, other times a PG-13-rating can seem too lenient—but movie studios take ratings very seriously these days. They can mean the difference between a movie making tens of millions of dollars with an R, versus hundreds of millions of dollars with a PG-13.

These five movies I’m looking at were given PG ratings back when they were released, but if they were released today, those ratings would most definitely not be assigned.

Honourable Mention: Swamp Thing (1982)

I bought this movie on blu ray, labelled as being PG, so imagine my surprise when there was full nudity of Swamp Thing’s love interest bathing in the swamp.

Turns out the theatrical cut was indeed given the PG rating, but all the nudity and sexual content was cut. The international cut, however, left that footage in, and when it was first released on DVD, the international cut was accidently the version released with the PG rating. They later corrected this problem, after parents complained.

After reading up on this online, I’m still confused. The version I’ve seen on blu ray is the 91 minute theatrical version, which definitely had nudity, but the international cut is a couple minutes longer and has more nudity, I guess? Or did Shout! Factory screw up too and package the wrong version in my blu ray? Whatever, all I know is I saw boobs.

5. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

One of the funniest comedies of all-time is this first feature-film from the British comedy troop Monty Python, and you might be thinking, what’s the big deal about it having a PG-rating? There’s no excessive coarse language, the majority of the humour is clean, and there’s no sexual content. But then there’s the violence. Sure, it’s exaggerated, cartoonish, played off for comedy, but let’s recount two scenes in particular that stand out as some of the funniest parts of the whole movie.

The first is Arthur’s battle with the Black Knight. The Black Knight has all of his limbs chopped off (“A mere flesh wound!”), blood squirts out of the remaining stumps, and the blood is bright red. Over the top? Yes. Extremely gory? Yes. Then there’s the killer rabbit that takes a guy’s head clean off and blood shoots out of his neck—perhaps even more horrific, given that guy actually died, whereas the Black Knight somehow survives getting his arms and legs cut off (“We’ll call it a draw.”).

I totally get why the studio overlooked these extreme violent scenes and gave it a PG, because it really isn’t deserving of an R overall, but today, if a movie features any excess of blood, it seems to instantly be R.

4. Gremlins (1984)

This horror-comedy-B-movie creature-feature produced by Steven Spielberg (you’ll see that name again a few more times) starts out innocent enough, with the adorable Mogwai named Gizmo purchased by a travelling salesman and given to his son Billy for Christmas. But then he gets wet, new Mogwai spawn from him, they eat fried chicken after midnight, and become horrific scaly gremlins that act like homicidal Looney Tunes characters.

It’s not even the scary appearance of the gremlins or the damage they inflict on each other, such as in the tavern scene where a gremlin shoots another point blank with a gun. It’s the scenes where they terrorize the human characters, and actually kill people, that make the PG-rating questionable. They swarm a guy dressed as Santa, launch an old woman out a window on her stair lift, and try to kill Billy’s mom. She even throws one of them in a microwave and blows it up. It’s definitely way more intense than todays “family movies”, both in terms of creature gore and violence against people.

3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

All three Indiana Jones movies (I’m not counting the fourth) have intense action and horrific moments. Even in the first sequence of Raiders, the guy who tries to screw Indy over by taking the idol gets impaled on some spikes and his bloody corpse is shown in full, which was pretty surprising and gruesome, then in the middle action scene there’s the guy hit by the airplane propeller, and at the end there’s the guy whose face melts. I can’t leave out the guy who turns into a crusty corpse at the end of Last Crusade, but I have to go with Temple of Doom as being the most intense, simply for having the greatest quantity of beyond PG elements.

First there’s the controversial depiction of Indian culture/Hinduism, then the dining scene where they eat monkey brains and eels and baked snakes and whatnot, then the child slavery, but the most gruesome and horrific moment is undoubtedly when the high priest reaches into a guy’s chest and pulls out his beating heart.

Honestly, this is as violent as anything out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Producer George Lucas said he was going through a divorce at the time of coming up with the story for the second Indiana Jones adventure, which is why it was darker. Whatever the case, this is definitely the darkest Indiana Jones movie of them all, and not made to cater to the little kiddies like the watered-down Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

2. Jaws (1975)

Before he was scaring the pants off adventure-loving movie-goers with Indiana Jones, Steven Spielberg pushed the boundaries of the PG-rating with the project he thought was going to be a flop but ended up scaring people out of the oceans for decades. Jaws is a brilliant horror movie because it focuses on the characters and keeps the monster hidden for the most part, allowing it to pop in here and there in the first and second acts for maximum scares. The idea of a killer shark doesn’t necessarily scream instant R-rating, but rotting heads popping out of sunken boats and severed legs sinking to the bottom of the ocean sort of do, don’t they? Apparently not! 

The producers of Jaws fought for a PG-rating, and looking back on it, I definitely agree with that choice. It’s not in your face with the gore and therefore really didn’t warrant being R. Having said that, 2013’s The Conjuring got slapped with an R-rating simply for being terrifying; it didn’t have any blood and guts, or swearing, or nudity, it was just that scary. Jaws was similarly received when it came out, but it actually did have a little blood and guts. By today’s standards, it’s definitely a PG-13, not PG. 

1. Poltergeist (1982)

Finally, we come to the root of the problem, Steven Spielberg himself. He is the one who contributed the most to the MPAA creating the PG-13 rating. It was with both Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984 that got them to make it, but I think this is the movie that really got the MPAA’s eyes to open.

There’s debate about whether Tobe Hooper really directed this movie or if Spielberg produced and directed most of it or just produced, but that doesn’t matter in this discussion, because here are the facts: in this movie, a boy is taken out of his room by a living tree which tries to eat him, a woman is in a muddy pool of water with skeletons (which were real, not props), a possessed clown tries to strangle that same boy who almost got eaten by the tree, and most gruesome of all, a guy peels his own face off! Am I forgetting anything? Oh right, the plot hinges on a poltergeist stealing the family’s daughter and pulling her through a portal in her closet into another dimension of ghosts and demons.

Monty Python, Gremlins, Indiana Jones, and Jaws are examples of why the PG-13 rating exists. This is another case. Originally, Poltergeist was given an R-rating, but because PG-13 didn’t exist yet, Hooper and Spielberg were able to argue for PG. To put this in some perspective, I saw this movie for the first time when I was 13, and it still scared the crap out of me. Imagine families going to see this with young kids in the theater? It happened, and it probably traumatized more than a few of them.

The Poltergeist remake was PG-13, but it was weak sauce compared to the original, which still holds up and is, like The Conjuring, scary without featuring excessive blood and gore, but that movie gets an R, while this gets a PG, which is defined by the MPAA as follows: “Some material may not be suitable for children. Parents urged to give ‘parental guidance’. May contain some material parents might not like for their young children.”

So the moral of the story is, if parents out there like their kids seeing other kids being terrorized by killer trees and killer clowns and people taking their own faces off, then Poltergeist’s PG-rating is totally fine, I guess.