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- Aug 18, 2002
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Anchor Bay are releasing an interesting video nasties boxset - The Box of the Banned:
www.anchorbay.co.uk/perl/search.pl?CO=ABD4437
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000A ... ntmagaz-21
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Good overview:
www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/st ... 74,00.html
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I alos hear Grindhouse are going to be releasing new fancy versions of The Beyond and Cannibal Holocaust which should be interesting:
www.houseofhorrors.com/grindhouse.htm
Synopsis...
For the first time ever together - six of the most shocking, depraved and corrupt movies which were banned under the Obscene Publications Act during 1983/4 - Along with an all-new feature length documentary Ban The Sadist Videos which was a headline for the Daily Mail at the height of the frenzy. Films include:
# I Spit on Your Grave
# Zombie Flesh-Eaters
# The Driller Killer
# The Evil Dead
# Last House on the Left
# Nightmares in a Damaged Brain
DVD Extras...
# Ban the Sadist Videos: A new documentary on the video nasties
# Fear, Panic and Censorshp
www.anchorbay.co.uk/perl/search.pl?CO=ABD4437
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000A ... ntmagaz-21
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Good overview:
Who's nasty now?
They were the films that would corrupt a generation with their depravity - or so said Mary Whitehouse. But were the video nasties, with their comedy cannibals and terrible effects, really that bad? Steve Rose reports
Friday September 9, 2005
The Guardian
Along with attempting to breakdance, sharing an illicit John Player Special, and drenching yourself in Kouros, a common rite of passage for teenage boys in early-1980s Britain involved sitting in a bedroom watching, and rewatching, gruesome low-grade horror movies. A generation of young males (it was almost exclusively a male thing) thrilled to the sight of bright red blood spurting out of freshly created orifices, psychos on the rampage with domestic hardware and undead monsters feasting on human sashimi. Their parents, meanwhile, were likely to be downstairs reading newspaper stories with titles like "Rape of Our Children's Minds" that listed in prurient detail the exact same scenes their offspring were playing back in slow motion upstairs.
As a cultural phenomenon, video nasties followed a similar pattern to moral panics over new media. Just like computer games or the internet, the explosion in popularity of the video format in the late 1970s outpaced government measures to regulate it. And back in the days when you had to pay a substantial fee to join a mainstream video club, hundreds of independent companies sprang up, producing and distributing cheap video movies to which cinema's rules of censorship didn't yet apply. Under these conditions, grisly horror movies thrived like maggots on a severed limb.
Between the bouffant-haired pincer movement of Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher, the golden age of disgusting filmic gore was destined to be brief, though the increasingly conspicuous and rapacious video companies could have hastened the end themselves. In 1982, Vipco put out a full page colour ad for Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer - the notorious drill-bit-entering-forehead shot that would become the defining image of the video nasty era. Shortly after, the distributors of Cannibal Holocaust allegedly wrote a bogus complaint letter to Whitehouse hoping to generate some free publicity.
One of the most remarkable aspects, looking back, is the way the meaning of the term "video nasty" started off vague but was forced to become preposterously precise. It was first used by a Sunday Times journalist in 1982, and as the media frenzy gained momentum, Whitehouse and the other moral custodians each put forward their own definition of what a video nasty was. The then-termed British Board of Film Censors defined obscenity as that which may "tend to corrupt and deprave", which hardly clarified matters. So when the police took action, and started conducting raids on video shops, not only were different titles seized in different parts of the country, comical errors were committed by film-illiterate coppers. Some confiscated the innocuous Dolly Parton musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas; others saw pornographic connotations in the title of Sam Fuller's second world war drama, The Big Red One. Finally, an official list of 39 titles was settled on, so prosecutors and collectors knew what to look for.
To be fair, "video nasty" is a fairly accurate description of most of the titles on the list. Of course, they were on video, but most of them really were pretty nasty - in terms of quality as much as content. Italian horror movies, especially, are wearyingly derivative, as the interchangeable titles suggest (pick any combination of the words "zombie", "cannibal", "apocalypse", "blood" and "dead" and it's probably been made). You can imagine Mrs Whitehouse (who admitted she'd never actually watched a video nasty) being shocked out of her pop sox by descriptions of a cannibal beast eating its own entrails, or a woman's eye being impaled by a shard of glass - but had she seen the real thing, she would more likely have laughed. The acts were unspeakable, but the special effects were even worse. They're the sort of thing that could only be have been appreciated by an audience of excitable adolescents.
In the quest to break new taboos, though, many go beyond simple gore. Violence against women seems to be an overriding theme. Some depicted rape, torture, racial murder, bestiality and beyond - with no apparent objective beyond simply putting it on the screen. It's hard to imagine there was a substantial market for the most extreme titles, but as a result of their inclusion on the list, movies such as Don't Go in the Woods or The Gestapo's Last Orgy, have endured far longer than they would have otherwise.
But for every negligible exploitationer on the list, there was a classic. Dario Argento's Tenebrae and Inferno, for example, display a visual finesse and operatic bravery that lift them above the other Italian entries. One of the most notorious titles on the list, Cannibal Holocaust, combines its gruesome imagery with an intelligent, politically motivated plot in which sensation-seeking film-makers enter the Amazon jungle, and slide from ethnographic inquiry to colonialist oppression before ending up as lunch. The theme, and the way the movie is constructed from the explorers' "found" footage, were directly borrowed by The Blair Witch Project.
Many of the superior blacklisted US horrors took pains to put their horror into some sort of social context. Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, for example, which inspired a slew of similar rape-revenge movies, transposed Bergman's Virgin Spring to post-hippie, post-Manson American suburbia. Sam Raimi's comically gory The Evil Dead is still regarded as one of the finest horror movies in existence, and even Ferrara's Driller Killer, for all its notoriety, mapped out some plausible triggers for its protagonist's pathology: artistic impotence, sexual frustration, punk rock. Who could have foreseen that 20-odd years on, Craven would have a mainstream thriller raking it in at the box office (Red Eye), or that Raimi would go on to direct Spider-Man and its sequel, two of the highest-grossing movies of all time?
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· The Box of the Banned DVD collection (Anchor Bay, £29.99) is released on September 26
www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/st ... 74,00.html
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I alos hear Grindhouse are going to be releasing new fancy versions of The Beyond and Cannibal Holocaust which should be interesting:
www.houseofhorrors.com/grindhouse.htm