The Big ShaveMovies like The Big Shave
- Key Features:
- Existentialism, Self-destruction, Violence-brief, Symbolism, Short film, Avant-garde, Nudity-moderate, Violence-high
- Tone:
- serious, gritty
- Target Audience:
- Film students, Experimental film enthusiasts, Cinephiles
- Emotional Arc:
- Discomfort → Horror
The Big Shave

A young man walks into a meticulously clean and sterile bathroom and proceeds to shave away hair, then skin, in an increasingly bloody and graphic bathroom scene.
The Big Shave
After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.

One day, on a whim, Marc decides to shave off the moustache he's worn all of his adult life. He waits patiently for his wife's reaction, but neither she nor his friends seem to notice. Stranger still, when he finally tells them, they all insist he never had a moustache. Is Marc going mad? Is he the victim of some elaborate conspiracy? Or has something in the world's order gone terribly awry?

Peter Winter is a young schizophrenic who is desperately trying to get his daughter back from her adoptive family. He attempts to function in a world that, for him, is filled with strange voices, electrical noise, disconcerting images, and jarringly sudden emotional shifts. During his quest, he runs afoul of the law and an ongoing murder investigation.

There's something in his apartment. A man looking for an insect-like thing devolves into a bout of insanity as his subconscious mind begins to strangle his waking one.

Unable to cope with a recent personal tragedy, LA's top celebrity shrink turns into a pothead with no concern for his appearance and a creeping sense of his inability to help his patients.

An unemployed Brit vents his rage on unsuspecting strangers as he embarks on a nocturnal London odyssey.

The boredom of small town life is eating Bill Williamson alive. Feeling constrained and claustrophobic in the meaningless drudgery of everyday life and helpless against overwhelming global dissolution, Bill begins a descent into madness. His shockingly violent plan will shake the very foundations of society by painting the streets red with blood.

A ticking-time-bomb insomniac and a slippery soap salesman channel primal male aggression into a shocking new form of therapy. Their concept catches on, with underground "fight clubs" forming in every town, until an eccentric gets in the way and ignites an out-of-control spiral toward oblivion.

Two men wake up to find themselves shackled in a grimy, abandoned bathroom. As they struggle to comprehend their predicament, they discover a disturbing tape left behind by the sadistic mastermind known as Jigsaw. With a chilling voice and cryptic instructions, Jigsaw informs them that they must partake in a gruesome game in order to secure their freedom.

A simple man is turned into a genius through the application of computer science.

Eugene is a small town barber, beloved by the local community, but hiding a deadly secret. John is hunting for a serial killer not to expose him but to learn the business! They form a twisted bond and turn the town upside down as Eugene teaches John to kill.

Aspiring actor Edward undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. But his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare, as he loses out on the role he was born to play and becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.

A kindly occupational therapist undergoes a new procedure to be shrunken to four inches tall so that he and his wife can help save the planet and afford a nice lifestyle at the same time.

An outcast teenager, Pauline, practices surgical skills and harbors increasingly violent psychosexual fantasies.

A young man, convinced he's a vampire, goes to live with his elderly and hostile cousin in a small Pennsylvanian town, where he tries to suppress his bloodlust.

An American WWI veteran undertakes a spiritual quest that takes him from Paris to Nepal to the Himalayas and back to his hometown. Upon his return, he discovers he is not the only one who has changed.

A simple, domestic love story about a man who takes his skin off for his girlfriend, and why it probably wasn't the best idea...

Quiet, unassuming Adam is changing in a major way, thanks to his new girlfriend, art student Evelyn. Adam's friends are a little freaked by the transformation.

The story of a heartbroken man who attends a spiritual retreat, only to discover that the course releases more than everyday toxins and traumatic experiences.

An ageing punk-with-a-dog and his brother the conformist decide to get their revenge on a shopping mall. Directing duo Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern, longstanding comic crusaders against capitalism, again set out to surprise and shock the bourgeois audience.

After years of being browbeaten and walked on, a man wakes one day wearing an expressionless mask, fitted with a personality that enables him to take revenge.

Disturbing and mysterious things begin to happen to a bartender in New Orleans after he picks up a phone left behind at his bar.

A man on the verge of a promotion takes a mysterious hallucinogenic drug that begins to tear down his reality and expose his life for what it really is.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

A woman grows increasingly fascinated with her body after suffering a disfiguring accident.

A ferocious, misogynistic, and morally deprived serial killer is active in Las Vegas. Obsessed with the collapse of the Twin Towers, and with Nazi tendencies, he even targets underage girls.

Two diametrically opposite brothers set off on a journey to reunite with their estranged father but when their motorcycle breaks down while passing through a small town, they become entangled in local life.

A group of people gather at a Copenhagen suburban home to break all the limitations and to bring out the 'inner idiot' in themselves.

Meursault is a man who feels utterly isolated from everyone and everything around him. This alienation results in sudden, inexplicable bursts of violence, culminating in murder.

A suicidal artist goes into the desert, where he finds his doppelgänger, a homicidal drifter.

Three young people check into the Meadow View Inn for a night's rest, fully unaware of the inn's sick-minded employees and their nefarious intentions.

Looking for work, Aaron comes across a cryptic online ad: “$1,000 for the day. Filming service. Discretion is appreciated.” Low on cash and full of naiveté, he decides to go for it. He drives to a cabin in a remote mountain town where he meets Josef, his cinematic subject for the day. Josef is sincere and the project seems heartfelt, so Aaron begins to film. But as the day goes on, it becomes clear that Josef is not who he says, and his intentions are not at all pure.

A director and screenwriter pen a script and, in the process, blur the line between fiction and reality.

Wallace's whirlwind romance with the proprietor of the local wool shop puts his head in a spin, and Gromit is framed for sheep-rustling in a fiendish criminal plot.

Inside a cafe while smoking a whole pack of cigarettes, a man poses an ambitious question: "What is Love?". A collection of vignettes and situations will lead the man to the desired conclusion.

Hollywood beckons for recent film school grad Nick Chapman, who is out to capitalize on the momentum from his national award-winning student film. Studio executive Allen Habel seduces Nick with a dream deal to make his first feature, but once production gets rolling, corporate reality begins to intervene: Nick is unable to control a series of compromises to his high-minded vision, and it's all he can do to maintain his integrity in the midst of filmmaking chaos.

David, an orderly at a hospital, tells his horrific story of being kidnapped and forced to play a vile game of survival.

When filmmaker Young-soo introduces writer Soo-jung to his friend Jae-hoon, he unintentionally creates a love triangle. While Jae-hoon pursues Soo-jung, Young-soo clashes with his crew. Yet, just as the story appears to end, it starts all over again, this time with plenty of variations.

Upon receiving his draft notice and leaving his family ranch in Oklahoma, Claude heads to New York and befriends a tribe of long-haired hippies on his way to boot camp.

A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where.

An anime-obsessed young man fantasizes about his favorite voluptuous heroines, but his sex-addled dream quickly transforms into a nightmare which threatens to consume him.

At the age of 51 and after 20 months on unemployment, Thierry starts a new job that soon brings him face to face with a moral dilemma. How much is he willing to accept to keep his job?

An average family is thrust into the spotlight after the father commits a seemingly self-defense murder at his diner.

First-time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.

A career criminal who has been deformed since birth is given a new face by a kindly doctor and paroled from prison. It appears that he has gone straight, but he is really planning his revenge on the man who killed his mentor and sent him to prison.

Ambitious overachiever Hanna just needs one more kid before her life is perfect. Instead, her baby daddy unexpectedly dumps her. Suddenly, she finds herself without a place to live, job or family. With every fiber of her being set for victory, Hanna refuses to give up and decides to win him back. But to get there means having to win something much more important, love and desire for herself and who she is.

Cis and Duo discuss leaving the real world while during a samurai sword fight. Part of the Animatrix collection of animated shorts set in the Matrix universe.

Lynch's first film project consists of a loop of six people vomiting projected on to a special sculptured screen featuring twisted three-dimensional faces.

George is the scapegoat of his classmates. One day he cracks and shoots them. His best and only friend Blaise is accused in his place and sentenced to 7 years in a psychiatric hospital. At the day of his release, Blaise realizes he only has one family: his best friend George. But he does not want to hear about his childhood friend, as he tries to integrate with the “Chivers” a gang whose members wear red jackets and boots, drink milk, drive sport trucks and play an incomprehensible and violent game that mixes cricket and mental arithmetic.

A psychotic small-time criminal realizes that the everyday robberies, rapes and murders he commits aren't profitable enough, so he figures to hit the big time by kidnapping the daughter of a rich man.

A teenager stops off to see his dealer to test a new drug before heading off for a night of partying. On the way home, he picks up an injured woman, and the night takes a surreal turn.

A lonely metermaid has a psychotic reaction to his medication and becomes convinced he's a superhero. A very select group of people in life are truly gifted. Special is a movie about everyone else.

A gentleman deals with the consequences of a car accident, which has left him with a spinal injury that means he has a permanent smile on his face.

Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.

Paul Exben is a success story – partner in one of Paris's most exclusive law firms, big salary, big house, glamorous wife and two sons straight out of a Gap catalog. But when he finds out that Sarah, his wife, is cheating on him with Greg Kremer, a local photographer, a rush of blood provokes Paul into a fatal error.

After his wife leaves him, a disillusioned director dives into the drug scene, trying anything his friend suggests.

A series of dark and troubling events forces Bill to reckon with the meaning of his life… or lack thereof.

In a small supermarket in a blue collar town, a black man smiles at a 10 year old white boy across the checkout aisle. This innocuous moment sends two gangs into a ruthless war that ends with a shocking backlash.

An ordinary man frustrated with the various flaws he sees in society begins to psychotically and violently lash out against them.

One night per year, the government sanctions a 12-hour period in which citizens can commit any crime they wish -- including murder -- without fear of punishment or imprisonment. Leo, a sergeant who lost his son, plans a vigilante mission of revenge during the mayhem. However, instead of a death-dealing avenger, he becomes the unexpected protector of four innocent strangers who desperately need his help if they are to survive the night.

Bruno is a former paper mill worker who has been unemployed for three years. Concluding that there is too much competition in his line of work, he decides to eliminate his competition permanently.

A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster's beloved Shih Tzu.

Michele Apicella lives in Rome, in an apartment paid for by his father. Abandoned by his wife and his son Andrea, he occupies his time acting in an experimental theater company under the artistic direction of his friend Fabio.

Unemployed and unemployable, Tony is a sympathetic recluse with severe social problems, an addiction to VHS action films and a horrible moustache. Occasionally he snaps and murder is the result…

The son of a wealthy businessman finds solace in drugs and alcohol when he breaks up with his childhood love.

Brian comes under the addictive spell of a parasite with the ability to induce euphoric hallucinations in its hosts.

A 14-year-old video enthusiast obsessed with violent films decides to make one of his own and show it to his parents, with tragic results.

A double amputee attempts to write a letter while her nurse gets in the way. (Note: The Amputee was produced in order to test two different black and white video stocks for the American Film Institute. There are therefore two different versions of the film, each using the same script but shot on different stocks and differing in other incidental ways in terms of performance, sound design and duration. This is Version 1.)

An outrageous cut-rate producer is about to fulfill his lifelong dream to make a movie about the most offensive, dirtiest jokes ever told. As Charlie and his filmmaking team hilariously struggle to write a script and assemble their award-winning cast, the movie-within-a-movie emerges with one dirty joke after another. Only one can take the crown for writing the dirtiest joke ever told, and Charlie will do whatever he can to be that king.

Lukas, a young schizophrenic man, has to deal with a new town, a new relationship, and the paranoia in his head.

A film where anything can happen - the hero and the heroine changes their faces, age, look, names, and so on. The only same thing: The love between man and woman... in an archetypical love story cut from 500 classics from all around the world.

Kira's skin starts to age rapidly, dry out and crumble away. But then she discovers that she can replace her own skin with somebody else's.

A tough young man, who helps to kick poor people out of their houses, falls in love with a girl. She lives with her father in the building about to be demolished.

After completing jail time for beating up a man who tried to seduce his mentally-handicapped teenage daughter, The Butcher wants to start life anew. He institutionalizes his daughter and moves to the Lille suburbs with his mistress, who promises him a new butcher shop. Learning that she lied, The Butcher returns to Paris to find his daughter.

Set in the Mojave Desert, the film follows a broken-down comedian playing clubs across the Southwest, working his way to Los Angeles to meet his estranged daughter.

A gang of thugs devise a cruel hoax that goes horribly wrong as Melvin, a nerdy emaciated janitor at the local health club, is cast through a third story window into a vat of hazardous toxic waste.

Casey is attacked at random on the street and enlists in a local dojo led by a charismatic and mysterious Sensei in an effort to learn how to defend himself. What he uncovers is a sinister world of fraternity, violence and hypermasculinity and a woman fighting for her place in it.

Katja's life collapses after the deaths of her husband and son in a bomb attack. After a time of mourning and injustice, Katja seeks revenge.

Malcom's done with his life. Only the noise of Crystal Meth gives him a reason to keep going - everything else it has long regardless. Equipped with a bag full of weapons and self-made bombs, he makes his way to the nearby mall to really stir things up. On his personal war campaign, he not only changes his life radically, but also the fate of other people who are in the wrong place at the same time: a teenager whose favorite pastime is smoking pot in his dreary existence, a housewife, where their best days have been left behind, a greedy businessman whose only desire is to increase his wealth and a depressed pervert.

A former mental patient's repressed anger reaches the boiling point, leading him to embark on a mission of revenge against the thugs who once subjected him to severe physical and mental trauma.

Armed only with a bow and an ensemble of animal skins, Martin sets off into the forest in a misguided attempt to overcome his midlife crisis. A chance meeting with a fugitive named Musa leads to a twisted trip through the fjords with police, drug runners, and Martin's family not far behind. As an unlikely friendship develops and wildly original set-pieces unfold, Martin's quest for manhood leads to deep and hilariously uncomfortable realizations about the presumed masculine ideal.

Paul Dean has created a deadly parasite that is now attached to his stomach. He and his female companion, Patricia Welles, must find a way to destroy it while also trying to avoid Ricus & his rednecks, and an evil government agent named Merchant.

Over three episodes, three respectable middle-aged men find themselves behaving badly. A teacher hides his pornographic magazine from a female student. A jogger steals milk and blames it on a newspaper delivery boy. A drunk man desperately searches for a public toilet late at night.

Nazi skinheads in Melbourne take out their anger on local Vietnamese, who are seen as threatening racial purity. Finally the Vietnamese have had enough and confront the skinheads in an all-out confrontation, sending the skinheads running. A woman who is prone to epileptic seizures joins the skins' merry band, and helps them on their run from justice, but is her affliction also a sign of impurity?

Three surreal depictions of failures of communication that occur on all levels of human society.

During the 1980s, a failed stand-up comedian is driven insane and turns to a life of crime and chaos in Gotham City while becoming an infamous psychopathic crime figure.

Vietnam vet Jon Rubin returns to New York and rents a rundown flat in Greenwich Village. It is in this flat that he begins to film, 'Peeping Tom' style, the people in the apartment across the street. His obsession with making films leads him to fall in with a radical 'Black Power' group, which in turn leads him to carry out a bizarre act of urban terrorism.

Depressed Alain Leroy leaves the clinic where he was detoxified. He meets friends, acquaintances and women, trying to find a reason to continue living.

A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the U.S.-Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.

Filmmaker Alan Smithee finds himself the unwilling puppet of a potentially bad big budget action film, for which he proceeds to steal the reels, and leaves the cast and crew in a frenzy.

A low-budget film crew working in New York City find themselves being preyed upon by a sexually conflicted serial killer.

A gang of Nazi bikers prepares for a race as sexual, sadistic, and occult images are cut together.

In Justine's family everyone is a vet and a vegetarian. At 16, she's a gifted teen ready to take on her first year in vet school, where her older sister also studies. There, she gets no time to settle: hazing starts right away. Justine is forced to eat raw meat for the first time in her life. Unexpected consequences emerge as her true self begins to form.

The twisted paths of three very different men brutally collide due to a chain of unspeakable murders: a grieving father who has been doomed to seek vengeance and a police detective who boldly crosses the narrow boundary between law and crime meet a religion teacher suspected of being the murderer.

A group of tormented patients stage a coup at an oppressive, dismal asylum after they're not allowed out on an excursion.




