David Gregory’s informative and absorbing follow-up to his
Video Nasties documentary, Ban the Sadist Videos! focuses on the BBFC, the
British Board of Film Censorship. Thanks
to their chronic nitpicking of gory and violent images in horror movies,
Britain becomes the most censored nation in the free word. The head censor in charge, James Ferman,
takes to his job all too well, gleefully cutting stuff out of movies as he sees
fit. In actuality, the things he found
objectionable (like throwing stars, nunchucks, blood on female flesh, etc.) seems
pretty arbitrary.
Gregory also shows how the British government used Video
Nasties (mostly thanks to the country’s sensationalized tabloids) as the public
scapegoat for violent real-life incidents.
The infamous Bulger case, where two boys killed a toddler, is blamed on
Child’s Play 3, even though the kids never even saw the movie! There is then a movement to further crackdown
on horror films, which leads to an unlikely champion in Ferman, who winds up
defending them.
There are a couple of interesting side notes here, like the
rise of the black market for movies without certificates. I also enjoyed seeing the logistics of putting
censorship into action (the board has to go back and watch thousands of videos that
have already been released, leading to a huge backlog). Gregory also does a side-by-side comparison
of Evilspeak and its eventual censored version.
I wish there were more of these comparisons, because seeing the actual
cut footage gives you a good idea of what the censors found objectionable.
No comments:
Post a Comment