What’s your favourite trilogy? Is it Star Wars? The Godfather? Or Days Are Numbers three part investigation into the history of film censorship in Britain, Banned for Glory (parts one, two and three)? My favourite is most definitely the latter.

Only joking, of course! (Or am I?) But overwhelmed as I am by the amount of related clips on YouTube, I thought it might be nice to revisit that seminal cycle of film writing with some added visual accompaniment. I actually find it rather hilarious that you can watch entire, gruesome sequences from notorious films that were completely banned but a few years ago, on a popular, freely accessible website. This is doubly hilarious when you bear in mind that YouTube not only heavily censors at the behest of questionable government’s (China’s, America’s, our own), but also steadfastedly refuses to show the slightest bit of boob, citing moral grounds (I feel I need to explain at this point that I DO NOT trawl YouTube looking for boobs – I only became aware of their policy after they took off a Charlie Brooker clip regarding the porn industry, so there!).

Anyway, moving swiftly on…

…Can you handle the sheer horror of The Cheese Mites? Believe it or not, this was the first film ever banned in Britain, way back in 1903.

A mere 68 years later, and Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus, A Clockwork Orange, provoked the ire of the nation’s censors. Yes, pedants, it was never actually “banned”, but big Stan did withdraw it, and you couldn’t see the bloody thing for yonks. One place where you could see bits of it at least, was in BBC2′s superb documentary, Empire of the Censors, from 1995.

And viddy here, my droogs (ahem), the film’s majestic opening sequence in it’s entirety!

We all know The Exorcist is rubbish, don’t we? (Don’t we?!) So here instead is the trailer for the “hilarious” Leslie Neilsen spoof, Repossessed. A spoof of a film that was banned in Britain at the time, of course. It didn’t do very well here.

What could possibly drive a man to stalking the streets at night, murdering random passers-by with an electrical drill? Having his nice painting poo-pooed by a snooty art critic, that’s what! At least according to largely tedious Video Nasty, The Driller Killer.

The music from Cannibal Holocaust is both hauntingly sad and very, very beautiful. Why?

Simply the most disgusting scene in all of Video Nasty history, and thus probably the most disgusting scene in all of film history generally, watch here an unfortunate woman give birth to a fully grown man, in British Alien rip-off, Xtro. Or don’t watch if you’re easily offended/half-way normal.

What a palaver there was over the old ear-chopping scene in Reservoir Dogs! After Xtro, it comes as a welcome respite.

And finally… A trailer for one of only a handful of films still technically banned in Britain, the nigh impossible to find ultra-gory, incest melodrama, Nightmare Maker, here going under the longer title of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker. WARNING: This trailer is a bit budget, and a bit weird.

That was a bit gross in places, wasn’t it? I just can’t believe that some lunatic has put that bit from Xtro on YouTube!

Anyway, here’s to when films used to be banned, not like now when you can watch them on your bloody iphone. And please, don’t have nightmares…

(“Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends…” Except it does end, it ends here. I have no idea why I’m quoting Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but anyway… This is the third and final instalment of our in-depth look at the “golden age” of British film censorship. In part one we skipped through decades of stiff upper lip-style censorship to the swinging 60s before having a good old viddy at A Clockwork Orange, and in part two we travelled back to the mid-70s and wet the bed over The Exorcist, before bopping forth to the 1980s where we met the infamous Video Nasties that our mothers and fathers had warned us about. Following the introduction of the Video Recordings Act in 1984, there are more films banned in Britain than at any time in the past, and the BBFC reaches new heights in terms of power and influence. Their complete control over the release and distribution of films of many different stripes, from horror to hardcore porn, continues apace well into the 1990s. Surely it has to end somewhere? Read on to find out…)

Reservoir Dogs (1992) – Yes, Reservoir Dogs. Easily one of the most celebrated, not to mention imitated, films of the last twenty years, Reservoir Dogs WAS banned in Britain, at least for a while. Despite a hugely successful (and record-breaking) cinema run, Quentin Tarantino’s seminal pulp homage to the heist movie met a similar fate to The Exorcist and was unavailable on home video in Britain for several long years (or maybe just a couple of long years) throughout the 1990s. This entire episode seems to be just about completely forgotten now, and indeed, a frustrating Google session heralded next to no information regarding the exact details of this ban. Rather, all I could find out was that there is now a video game (!) of Reservoir Dogs which itself is now banned… in Australia. But you can stick your new-fangled video games, cos its good old-fashioned video tapes that we’re interested in here, buddy.

As famous as Madonna and as instantly recognisable as the Mona Lisa, Reservoir Dogs is as iconic as a film can be. Indeed, so captivating it was at the time, that it became recognisable and iconic even to those of us who, thanks to the BBFC’s video ban, had yet to see it. I can remember a time in the early-to-mid-90s when no light-entertainment programme screened on British television was complete without some parody, pastiche or tribute to the film. From Noel Edmunds to Newman and Baddiel, they were all at it. The black suits and shades, the colour-coded aliases, and the hitherto long-forgotten 70s hits by Dutch crooners and Gerry Rafferty-of-Baker-Street-fame, use any of these references in a comedy skit, sketch or link and you were guaranteed a laugh of recognition from those who had seen it. For the rest of us, there was the peculiar experience of getting to know a film so well through comedy osmosis. Nowadays it is hard to imagine a single person in Christendom who hasn’t seen Reservoir Dogs, and as a result, I feel we have become a little bit blasé about it. So, to paraphrase the appeal once put to us by the good Dr. Kellogg regarding his Corn Flakes; have you forgotten how good it tastes?

Here are a selection of films I was enjoying circa-1992: Wayne’s World, California Man, Hudson Hawk, Meet the Applegates, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Cape Fear, Honeymoon in Vegas, Death Becomes Her, Unforgiven, Terminator 2, and Captain America (yes, the one with J.D. Salinger’s son in it. I loved it!). There’s some not bad stuff in there, and I was already into my horror films, but I NEEDED Reservoir Dogs to show me the way. I think we all did. A big part of the initial attraction was the fact that Reservoir Dogs was banned, of course. My obsession with The Exorcist was already several years old by this stage, and soon I would begin my quest for the Video Nasties. The difference was, however, that The Exorcist was from the olden days of the 1970s and the Video Nasties were banned way back in 1984, when I was but three-years-old. Reservoir Dogs was being banned right in front of my face and right at the same time that seemingly everybody in the world was raving about it. It was no secret why it had been banned, of course, everybody knew that. As Quentin Tarantino himself would later bemoan, Reservoir Dogs became almost universally known as “that film were the guy gets his ear cut off”. News reports feverishly detailing the allegedly high levels of violence and torture featured in the film would kick off a national debate on screen violence, the like of which had not been seen since the age of the Video Nasty. And, as is often the case, all this free publicity served to make those who hadn’t seen it want to see it all the more.

I first saw Reservoir Dogs on video while it was still banned on video. Unfortunately for me, this paradoxical scenario meant that the video in question was one of those filmed-in-the-back-of-the-cinema-with-a-camcorder jobbies that a friend’s brother had managed to procure (goodness knows what manner of terrorism he was funding!). Still, so desperate was I to see it that I didn’t complain and, despite the horrible sound and picture quality, people in front getting up to go to the toilet etc., I absolutely loved it. It was the summer of 1994, and I had never seen anything quite like Reservoir Dogs before. An intense, exciting and offbeat crime thriller, effortlessly cool and cleverly put together. It’s easy to forget just how astounding all that non-linear storytelling was the first time you saw it. And, as far as I’m concerned, a million and one lazy parodies will never diminish the unequivocal coolness of the opening slow-mo strut to The George Baker Selection’s ‘Little Green Bag’. Then there are the performances, from a crack team of then undervalued character actors and bit-part players, not one of whom would find themselves short of work ever again thanks to Reservoir Dogs, and each one of whom could supply a much lesser film with at least an iota of cool simply by association (astonishingly, the ear-slicer himself, Michael Madsen, would appear as the dad in Free Willy a year later). Of course, top-notch acting talent was absolutely essential in order to deliver Tarantino’s justifiably renowned dialogue, and my young friends and I set about learning it off by heart, returning to school that September full of tales of Madonna songs about big dicks, and having one’s penis glued to one’s stomach. They were our own twisted equivalent of the over-quoted Dead Parrot sketch of generations previous.

The dad from Free Willy, the bastard from Reservoir Dogs

But, was it as violent as the ladies and gentlemen of the press were making out? No, of course it wasn’t. I’m sure I’m not the only person who, after seeing Reservoir Dogs for the first time, couldn’t quite make out what all the fuss had been about violence-wise. Certainly, it’s a very bloody film, but not any more than a film with an 18 certificate has any right to be. And not any more than Sam Peckinpah’s ultra-bloody western The Wild Bunch, from over twenty years before, which I had already seen on TV by this time. How about the infamous ear-cutting scene? Obviously, no scene in which a man gets his ear cut off is ever going to be entirely pleasant, but the trick with this notorious scene, as with so many similar sequences in cinema history, is that you don’t actually see it taking place. Certainly, it’s a brutal and sleazy set-piece, but again, it’s not any more outrageous than what you’d expect to find in a film with an 18 certificate. And it’s also not any more outrageous than the “squeal like a pig for me, boy” male rape set-piece of John Boorman’s Deliverance, again from over twenty years before, which I had also already seen on TV by this time. But, sure enough, it was the hype surrounding the “ear scene” that led to Reservoir Dogs being denied a home video release in the UK at the height of its success. Unsurprisingly, the man behind that decision was James Ferman who, by 1992 had been in charge at the BBFC for nearly twenty years, and had famously condemned The Exorcist to a similar fate. Ironically, another director who had had one of his own films denied a UK video release by Ferman and the BBFC was to unnecessarily and rather childishly add to the hype by walking out of a Cannes screening of Reservoir Dogs during the ear-cutting scene. That director was Wes Craven, and anyone who has ever sat through his The Last House on the Left (one of the nastiest of all the Video Nasties) is entitled to ask; what the hell was his problem?

By 1994 the name Quentin Tarantino was a universally accepted byword for both violence and cool. In addition to his own Reservoir Dogs, another film was responsible for attaching the former, and perhaps less welcome, tag to his name. Natural Born Killers wasn’t directed by Quentin Tarantino (it was directed by another explosive talent, Oliver Stone, on one of his regular off-days), nor was it even written by him. In fact, Natural Born Killers was merely based on a screenplay written by Quentin Tarantino, but it is a testament to the level of both his fame and notoriety at the time that the film was sold under his name, and that the tsunami of controversy it attracted was propelled in his direction. The most controversial film of its era and the centrepiece of the debate on screen violence at the time, Natural Born Killers hit the headlines in this country after it was accused of inspiring several copycat killings in America. Many accused the film of glamorising violence, and the extent to which said glamorisation could potentially damage society was fought over louder and harder than at any time since the release of A Clockwork Orange in the early 1970s. The buzzword of the era was “gratuitous”, and all of a sudden films were assessed for scenes depicting gratuitous violent content; content intent solely on shock and exploitation, and superfluous to the plot. The trouble was that to some all screen violence by its very nature is gratuitous, but then others still are made of stronger stuff and can tolerate higher levels of violence in films and television programmes. How then can you possibly decide what is gratuitous and what isn’t? It was the question that would define the decade in terms of censorship, and whoever could answer it loudest and most convincingly would determine the future of British film censorship into the new millennium.

Meanwhile, back in the mid-90s, Natural Born Killers enjoyed a successful, if obviously very controversial, cinema run in the UK, but would find itself banned on video in the British Isles following the Dunblane massacre of 1996. The film was not thought to be connected to the killings in any way, but the release on video of a major Hollywood film bearing such a title and featuring such explicit content was thought to be just too much in the aftermath of such a terrible tragedy. I was as eager to see Natural Born Killers as I had been to see Reservoir Dogs. It didn’t matter that Quentin Tarantino hadn’t actually directed it himself as at that point I would lap up anything that was even vaguely connected to the generously chinned, notoriously verbose film nerd. More often than not this could be a painful experience, as anyone who has sat through True Romance (what do you mean it’s actually quite popular?) or Crimson Tide (he had a hand in writing both of them) can attest. From Dusk till Dawn (in which he starred) isn’t much better. So it was to be with Natural Born Killers, and despite the whole Tarantino-Oliver Stone connection, NBK, as it is often annoyingly abbreviated to, is the absolute pits. Pushing aside the whole violence debate for a moment, the film is little more than a flashy, vacuous, sorry mess which disappears up its own “MTV Generation” bumhole before the first 15 minutes are even up. It was a waste of everybody who made it’s time, and it was a waste of my time too, when I eventually got to see it.

Quentin Tarantino, the handsome devil

However, as should already be clear, I still really like Reservoir Dogs. In fact, I still really like Quentin Tarantino. As I was saying earlier, when Reservoir Dogs arrived on the scene in 1992, I had never seen anything like it, and both the film and its director helped lead me away from the sort of mediocre mainstream fodder I was enjoying as a young adolescent and get me into more sophisticated stuff. Even though I couldn’t actually buy or rent a copy of Reservoir Dogs at the time, I could buy a biography of Quentin Tarantino (he was an absolute megastar back in the day) and find out about other great films that way. My already nascent interest in the likes of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola was encouraged, and through Tarantino I learnt about loads more great films I had to look out for, many of which were sometimes screened on British television and many of which I would have otherwise missed (Breathless, Jim McBride’s swaggering American remake of Godard’s A Bout de Souffle, and the Reservoir Dogs-inspiring gangster drama Pope of Greenwich Village, to name but two). And, of course, Quentin’s own films were great, as well. Pulp Fiction arrived in 1994, and managed to be even more phenomenally successfully, effortlessly cool, and fantastically inspired than its predecessor. Better yet, it would pass the censors with minimal trouble (although James Ferman later expressed regret over not cutting John Travolta’s “shooting up” scene, describing it as an “advert for heroin”), and I could see it on video the following year (I was too young to see it in the cinema, although I remember my sister going and being really confused by the whole non-linear storyline thing. “John Travolta dies in it, but then he comes back to life at the end”, was her interpretation of events at the time). I’ve probably seen Pulp Fiction more times than any other film, largely due to the period I watched it almost every day in early 1996. Quentin Tarantino was the first film director I loved in the same way one might love a rock group or footballer, and because of this I’ve continued to follow his career closely. His next film up was Jackie Brown in 1997, which may have seemed like a bit of a damp squib to many, but I can assure you is every bit as good as his first two films, and is my personal favourite of his (a crime caper as moving as it is riveting. No other hotshot Hollywood brat would dare follow up the biggest hit of their career with a film centred around a lonely, 40-something black air stewardess, played by a relatively obscure, long-forgotten blaxploitation icon). Jackie Brown is as close as he’s ever come to eschewing the “conventional” crime genre and his trademark pulp references and aesthetic, to some extent at least, in favour of something more personal and intelligent. His latest efforts (Kill Bill Pts. 1 & 2, Death Proof) may have thundered off in completely the opposite direction to Jackie Brown in terms of depth and feeling, but he’s a still a popular filmmaker to be treasured. Ignore floppy-haired indie fops who sidle up to you at parties and say “Oh, but Kill Bill is just made up of bits of other films that he’s ripped off!” They probably haven’t even seen Kill Bill, and they certainly haven’t seen any of the films it apparently “rips-off” (they read about them in The Guardian, who are also just showing off). Kill Bill, and all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, reference (being the operative word, as opposed to rip-off) a host of other films and genres, but that’s because Quentin Tarantino loves films. He’s studied films his whole life and capturing the essence of a genre, distilling the flavour of an entire cinematic era is one of the things he does best. It is one of the things all great modern directors do best; Martin Scorsese references Michael Powell and Quentin Tarantino references Martin Scorsese. The idea that if you presented evidence of the films he’s supposedly pilfered from to Tarantino himself that he would shrink away in exposed shame is utterly laughable. He would be the first to admit his influences because, again, the man loves films. And in an era where the majority of directors working in mainstream cinema are seemingly either coked-up music video graduates or sad-sack comic book aficionados, a successful film director whose first love and primary interest is film is, strangely and sadly, increasingly a rarity.

Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers are both now freely available on video (and DVD), of course. Indeed, these days they are both regularly screened on UK terrestrial television, and nobody bats an eyelid. And it’s not just them, neither. The majority of films once banned or heavily censored in this country are now also freely available on multiple formats from numerous outlets, and the growth of multi-channel television has even allowed a one-time cinematic pariah of the stature of I Spit on Your Grave a chance to grace the British airwaves. So, what the hell happened?

James Ferman

The simple answer might possibly be this; James Ferman retired as the chief executive of the BBFC. Whilst not the definitive answer (if it were, it would suggest that Ferman had been some kind of Stalinist, all-powerful film dictator, which he most certainly wasn’t), it does stand up to considerable scrutiny, especially when one observes the tide-change that occurred in British film censorship following his retirement, in 1999. Ferman’s legacy is a muddled one, but that is somewhat suitable when one considers what a complex character he was (he passed away in 2002). Often cast as an out and out bogeyman and reactionary (he is chiefly remembered as the man who banned The Exorcist for over twenty years), Ferman was also derided in some circles as weak-willed and overly liberal. The counterpoint to his banning of The Exorcist was perhaps his decision to pass David Cronenberg’s heady mix of violence and eroticism, Crash, completely uncut in 1996. The truth, as I see it, is that Ferman was both; a liberal and a reactionary. And, if you ask me, that’s exactly what an assured and effective film censor should be.

There was a time, largely when I was a teenager, when I believed that all forms of censorship were inherently wrong. No one has the right to tell others what they can and can’t watch, freedom of speech maaan, I thought. These days I believe in sensible and considered censorship to a degree, and I have come to recognise James Ferman as a pioneer of this school of thought. Oh, don’t get me wrong, Ferman has a number of blots in his copybook, perhaps above all else the whole Video Nasty debacle. But many of his decisions were measured and intelligent, and he approached the task in hand psychologically as well as morally. Previous BBFC chiefs had seemingly made their decisions on a purely black and white basis (was a film too violent or wasn’t it?), but Ferman wasn’t afraid to think outside the box. Some of the conclusions he reached were a little odd, a prime example being his decision to lumber Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam odyssey Full Metal Jacket with an 18 certificate. The sticking point was that Oliver Stone’s similarly-themed Platoon, which was no less violent, had been granted a 15 certificate. Ferman’s reasoning? Oliver Stone had personally fought in Vietnam whilst Stanley Kubrick hadn’t. Therefore the violence in Stone’s film was based on actual life experience, whereas Kubrick’s was a fiction and thus harder to validate.

Whatever you think of that decision, and I’m not so sure myself, you can’t deny that James Ferman was right in his desire to bring a more logical approach to film censorship. An example of a Ferman decision that displays more in the way of sound pragmatic thought was his refusal to cut the term “penis-breath” from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Ferman was of the opinion, correctly as it turns out, that it was a term of abuse too obscure for children to pick up on, and it could be left in the film without any worry.  Like that other long-serving BBFC head honcho, John Trevelyan, Ferman could boast considerable influence in major Hollywood circles, and although he was often perceived as a schmoozer, he wasn’t afraid to rein in the likes of Spielberg, demanding cuts be made to the wildly popular Indiana Jones films, which he considered a touch too violent for children. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the films to receive the most attention during Ferman’s reign was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. A much more considerable than it might at first sound 28 seconds was shorn of this supposedly family-friendly adventure romp, most of which taking place in the grisly opening sequences (a blinding and a hand amputation). I can’t help but feel sympathetic to Ferman in his fight against major studio films which set out to have their cake and eat it. If you want your film to have a U rating, it should look like a U rated film, you can’t sneak in unsuitable content and hope to keep a more lucrative rating (films with a lower rating generally stand to make a higher gross).

Fuck me, I love old VCRs

Family films are one thing, but what of films that were never intended for mass consumption? As discussed in the second instalment of Banned for Glory, James Ferman was the head of the BBFC during the Video Nasty outrage, and thus can be considered the key player in the full blanket banning of 39 films of violent, and “potentially damaging”, content. Along with his long-standing and stubborn refusal to grant The Exorcist a release on UK home video, the Video Nasty episode is what Ferman is most famous for, and many think of him in the same light as rabid moralists like Mary Whitehouse, or unscrupulous scapegoat-seekers like Margaret Thatcher, due to his involvement in it. I think this is unfair. With exciting images and media of many varieties leaping out at us from all four corners of our living rooms in this day and age, it’s easy to forget just what a blistering new concept home video was when it first appeared in the late 70s. And when the BBFC were at last granted the power to control it in 1984, they had to consider the influence that a vast new number of films could weld in the home for the very first time. History may have shown that Ferman’s decision to ban The Exorcist in the home on the grounds that it could be used as a tool to frighten and psychologically torment young children was perhaps later proven unfounded, but it was a sensitive and sincere decision nevertheless, so we should cut the man some flack. The destructive potential of home video was at the time unchecked, and I can’t help but feel that Ferman made a safe, but essentially justifiable decision. With the Video Nasties he, and the BBFC, took a more scatter-shot and perhaps less easily justified approach. It did seem that the board were bowing to pressure from certain moral groups and at least several films on the list really didn’t deserve to be there. These weren’t mainstream films after all, they weren’t made with a family, or even general, audience in mind, and so long as the owner of the video cassette in question was responsible with regards as to who could access it then there shouldn’t be a problem. For the more troublesome films on the list, especially the handful depicting real animal cruelty, perhaps a full ban was the best thing. Censorship is always a difficult issue, and especially when dealing with the censorship issues surrounding a nascent and unfamiliar technology, difficult and unpopular decisions have to be made.

It is also somewhat unfair that James Ferman is chiefly remembered as a “banner” of things, when several films were saved from censored limbo during his time at the head of the BBFC. Indeed, many Video Nasties did not languish in illicit unavailability for long, with the board reappraising many under Ferman’s duress. The first film out of the traps was Joe D’Amato’s Absurd, a loose sequel to his earlier Anthropophagus The Beast (which remained firmly on the list, in all it’s foetus-munching glory). Absurd was considered passable on second thoughts and little more than a blatant rip-off of John Carpenter’s Halloween. Three minutes of more unsavoury footage were cut in 1983, the very same year the Video Nasties list was first drawn up, and Absurd was sent on its way. A few more titles escaped their bans following a retrial throughout the 80s and early 90s, most notably Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse and Dario Argento’s Inferno, a pair of excellent, intelligent horror films from two of the genre’s biggest names. Several American slasher films were also deemed tame enough for a video release under Ferman and notably the Canadian effort Visiting Hours (starring William Shatner. Oh, yes) was screened on ITV a few years after being removed from the list, making it the first Video Nasty graduate to air on UK television. Most of the list would remain banned until after Ferman’s retirement, however, but outside of the Video Nasties he would eventually pass a small handful of notorious films, including Straw Dogs and Roger Corman’s possibly pro-LSD, freak-out fest The Trip. Without question, however, of all the things Ferman was to un-ban during his reign, the decision to make hardcore pornography legal in Britain was the one that made the largest and deepest impact (I just read the end of that sentence back. Hello Freud!). It’s staggering to think that hardcore pornographic films and literature were totally illegal in the UK until 2000, but it was James Ferman who finally decided that we were all big enough and ugly enough to be allowed to watch consenting adults rutting like mad animals in the comfort of our own homes, just in time for the new millennium (not literally rutting IN our own homes, unless you happen to be one of those “sex people”). The ban was not fully lifted until after Ferman had resigned, but it was he who set the wheels in motion, and the biggest decision he undertook in his tenure was also his last.

Some hardcore porn. Yesterday.

I don’t think we need go into any more detail regarding hardcore porn. We’re really not that kind of website. We will however take a look at what happened at the BBFC post-Ferman. You may remember my attempt to inject a bit of perspective into proceedings by casting each BBFC chief as a British prime minister based on a combination of their perceived personal attributes, the success of their tenure and the era in which they operated. Thus suave, swinging and successful John Trevelyan was Harold Wilson. Well-meaning, but ultimately unsure and unsuccessful Stephen Murphy was a composite of Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan, and the dominant, dominating, self-promoter, and self-appointed moral philosopher and friend to the stars James Ferman was Margaret Thatcher AND Tony Blair (which sheds a little light in both directions, if you ask me). So then, does that make Robin Duval, Ferman’s successor, a dour, pragmatic, kicking-against-the-pricks Gordon Brown-type? To be honest, I have no idea. What I know about Robin Duval, I could scarcely write on the back of a postage stamp. He only stayed in the job until 2004, before being replaced by David Cooke, who remains in charge to this day, and who I also know nothing about. Perhaps by design, Duval and Cooke have never attracted the fame and notoriety that their predecessors “enjoyed”, and holding the very top job in British film censorship doesn’t seem to be quite the high-profile, occasionally poisonous position it once was. While those before them seemed to have a very specific brief each tried to work to in their tenure (Trevelyan; relax and modernise. Murphy; please everyone. Ferman; ban loads of stuff, attempt to explain why), Duval and Cooke seem to have been happy just to pass almost anything but the uttermost beyond of the uttermost pale. The answer to the big censorship question of the 90s seems to have arrived; what is gratuitous? Not much, only the really, really bad shit! Please remember that while the BBFC of old flipped their wigs over Marlon Brando bonking like mad without even taking his trousers off in Last Tango in Paris, the BBFC today will let you watch tedious indie actors authentically penetrating each other in guff like Nine Songs and The Brown Bunny, all in the name of art! The bar has truly been raised, and you’re going to have to really go out of your way if you want to upset the new-look BBFC. If wild ‘n’ raunchy modern cinema was deemed acceptable by the censors, then surely it would only be a matter of time before some older controversial films were re-submitted by opportunistic distributors keen to latch onto the spirit de change.

The two big-hitters that burst open the floodgates were The Exorcist and A Clockwork Orange. For so long James Ferman’s personal bete noire, The Exorcist became a massive mainstream cultural phenomenon once more after Warner Bros. had a flashy new print passed for a general cinema release in 1999. The newly-retired Ferman wasn’t around to fend it off, and one suspects that he must have been inwardly fuming when he caught wind of Duval’s decision to finally unleash the film uncut on video (and newly arrived DVD) the very same year. As we learned in part one of Banned for Glory, A Clockwork Orange re-emerged in 1999, also. And, yes pedants, Stanley Kubrick’s seminal, glam-era rumination on violence and punishment was never actually banned by the BBFC, but I tell ye, it was the BBFC sniffing around it at the behest of Home Secretary Reginald Maudling in the aftermath of it’s highly controversial initial (uncut) release in the early 70s, that could, as much as anything, have caused Big Stan to have withdrawn it himself. Anyway, these two long unseen titans of tabloid tittle-tattle and terror being released to little more than a loud chorus of gratified enthusiasm perhaps set the precedent for the BBFC’s post-Ferman policy; release (almost) everything! From 2000 onwards almost every Video Nasty found its way onto video (and now DVD) in the UK for the first time since the introduction of the Video Recordings Act in 1984. From the most notorious; The Evil Dead (passed in 2001), The Driller Killer (2002), Zombie Flesh Eaters (2005). To the more obscure; Night of the Bloody Apes (passed in 1999) in which a gorilla-to-human heart transplant goes horribly wrong, perhaps unsurprisingly. Prisoner of the Cannibal God (2001), a rum little number which, rather amazingly, stars Stacy Keach and Ursula Andress, and the notoriously awful Don’t Go in the Woods (2007), which I’ve not seen, but which is apparently the most laughably amateurish Video Nasty of ‘em all, and therefore possibly the most laughably amateurish film ever made. A fair number of the Video Nasties that do get re-released are still heavily cut, with Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit On Your Grave (both passed in 2001) rather predictably receiving the heaviest scissor treatment. Indeed, if there are two things that the BBFC have retained immense disapproval of, it’s the depiction of animal cruelty (real or otherwise) and sexual violence. A sizeable number of Video Nasties just so happen to contain either animal cruelty (particularly any film with the word “cannibal” in the title) or sexual violence (particularly films belonging to the “rape-revenge” subgenre, such as I Spit On Your Grave). Some even manage to contain both, and rather head-spinningly, Island of Death, an immensely sleazy Greek serial killer romp, boasts a scene which combines both these taboos at the same time, as the main protagonist proceeds to rape a goat at one point in the action! However, the BBFC seem happy enough these days to cut anything they consider too extreme, or “gratuitous”, and pass the rest of the film, with even Island of Death getting a release in 2002, after being shorn of its goat scene. I “kid” ye not!

The poster for SS Experiment Camp. Provocative? Not a bit of it

The retrial and reappraisal of Video Nasties is an ongoing project at the BBFC, with the most recent additions to the ever-growing re-released list being Wes Craven’s notoriously violent take on Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, The Last House on the Left (passed uncut in March last year), and the legendary, fabulously named Jesus Franco’s fabulously titled Sexo Canibal (passed under it’s boring UK title, Devil Hunter, just two months ago). As it currently stands, only 11 of the 39 Video Nasties successfully prosecuted in 1984 remain banned to this day. Several of these, it would seem, only really remain “banned” because they are so staggeringly shoddy and inept that no distributors in their right minds would be foolhardy enough to believe they could make a profit by attempting to sell them to the British public. This pack is lead by infamous hack Andy Milligan’s loony costume slasher Blood Rites (touched on in Banned for Glory part two), and unless scenes of astoundingly amateurish filmmaking should be banned (I believe they should in fact be encouraged), it could surely be passed with only a few minor cuts. Likewise three more titles which remain banned; Forest of Fear, Frozen Scream, and Mardi Gras Massacre, each one an American production, and dealing with zombies, mad scientists and serial killers, respectively. Spain chips in with The Werewolf and the Yeti, which unsurprisingly but bizarrely appears to be about both a werewolf and a yeti. I’ve not seen any of those films, but by all accounts they are truly awful and merely comparatively tame. If anyone’s got the time and money to start a DVD company, that’s five potential smash hit titles we could put out right there, after simply re-submitting them for classification to the BBFC, of course. Of the six Nasties left, three belong to surely the most reprehensible and loathsome subgenre of them all, the Nazi exploitation picture, or “Nazisploitation”. These films are so wrong on so many different levels, I feel rather unclean just writing about them. For anyone lucky enough to be uninitiated with this truly bottom-of-several-barrels shit, these films contain little other than continuous displays of torture (frequently sexual, sometimes otherwise; always revolting and offensive) largely directed at the female inmates of Nazi concentration and POW camps. The Video “Nazis” (if you will) that remain banned to this day are; The Beast in Heat, Gestapo’s Last Orgy, and Love Camp 7. I haven’t seen any of these films, nor do I want to, and nor will I ever endeavour to endure them under any circumstances. I was going to say I would cast serious dispersions on anyone who would want to see them, but as they generally boast production values disgraceful enough to match the “dramatic” content, I appreciate that they attract their share of adventurous schlock fans. I’m afraid throwing Nazis and concentration camps into the mix takes it just a step too far for me. Strangely enough, the most infamous example of the genre, SS Experiment Camp, was passed in 2005 after it was deigned ludicrous, but not completely sickening nor totally morally void. I have seen a bit of it (years ago), and remember little other than some wholly inappropriate soft-core sex (consensual), and the immortal line “What have you done to my balls, you bastard?!” spoken by an irate SS officer after he himself runs afoul of a particularly nasty experiment. Another famous example of the genre, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, was also banned by the BBFC, but never found its way onto the Video Nasties list. And lest you assume that them there Italians are behind all this sordid squalor (although you’d be largely correct), that last feature is an American production.

That leaves just three more still forbidden Video Nasties for us to meet. Easily the most interesting remaining case is the curious Nightmare Maker. Universally acclaimed by everyone who has seen it, this apparently highly atypical American slasher has been described variously as a demented soap opera, a scalp-tinglingly intense psychodrama, and a tongue-in-cheek serving of suburban Grand Guignol. Veteran wild card Susan Tyrrell (Fat City, Forbidden Zone) reportedly devours the scenery as a maniacal, obsessive aunt who will stop at nothing (absolutely nothing!) to keep her orphaned nephew by her side, and ultimately she hopes, in her bed. After her young charge catches her repeatedly driving a carving knife into the neck of a TV repair man, a racist, sexist, homophobic and quite possibly mental police detective (played by Swedish hard-case and Tarantino favourite, Bo Svensson) turns up and begins to uncover all kinds of weirdness and lies. Nightmare Maker does sound like one heck of an interesting trip, but sadly I am yet to see it as it is still technically banned, no foreign DVD release has ever appeared, and I’ve never managed to locate a copy on pre-cert VHS. It was, however, re-submitted to the BBFC for a second time in 1987, and rejected again. It has not been re-submitted since, despite developing a not inconsiderable and potentially lucrative following of would-be fans, thanks in no small part to the high praise heaped on it by those who have seen it. These lucky few also seem to agree that while Nightmare Maker is not for the faint-hearted, it is also not an overly unsettling or gruesome film, and thus should really have been passed by the BBFC by now. Perhaps the censors have deemed the incestuous, psychopathic feelings of the Tyrrell character as a touch too much, but if they were to pass it, and a distributor were to pick it up, it’s safe to assume we’d be treated to one of the most complex and interesting of the Video Nasties.

Still banned after all these years; Nightmare Maker

Complex and interesting aren’t words you can attribute to our remaining two Nasties that have yet to be un-banned in this country. Generally offering little more than squalid titillation, women-in-prison films failed to even come close to making as large an impact on the list as those other 70s staples, the cannibal-themed “Mondo” movies and Nazisploitation, with imprisoned ladies boasting a paltry one entry. Still, you can trust our old friend Jesus Franco to lower the tone, and his Women Behind Bars sees him subjecting his own actress wife to some explicit onscreen torture. Another of Franco’s efforts in the same field, Women in Cellblock 9, never showed up on the list, but remains firmly banned by the BBFC to this day following controversial queries regarding the ages of some of the actresses involved. The old rape-revenge template chalks up another entry, however, as the last of the 11 Video Nasties that remain banned in this country is the odious racial variant on Last House on the Left, Fight For Your Life. Concerning the racial abuse and torture of a black family at the hands of white thugs, it is absolutely no surprise that Fight For Your Life is still banned in this country and it will probably remain so until hell itself freezes over. Mind you, that’s what I used to confidently predict about many of the other films on the list, particularly the likes of I Spit On Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust, but nowadays you can pick up a copy of either of those in your local HMV. Anyway, if you really want to see Fight For Your Life, it’s only a couple of mouse-clicks away. The twin developments of the internet and multi-region DVDs have completely undermined the power of a lot of the BBFC’s decisions in this country, and if a film is freely available on DVD in America, as Fight For Your Life and almost all of the Nazisploitation films are, a simple trip to Amazon or eBay will set you up with a copy, and it’s all perfectly legal.

And that, I believe, is pretty much where we came in. When I first developed an interest in films that were banned, beginning with The Exorcist, continuing apace with A Clockwork Orange and Reservoir Dogs, and developing into a full-blown obsession with the Video Nasties, I was shocked, awed and enraptured by the very notion that there were some films so mad, bad and dangerous that you were forbidden by law to see them. Nowadays, I can’t help but feel something has been lost by the fact that there are no real banned films anymore, that there are no infamous, outlawed celluloid nightmares worth tracking down. Aside from the 11 Video Nasties that remain banned (and Nightmare Maker is the only one apparently not racist, Nazi or downright bad enough to be worth seeking out), the list of films still banned in this country is a rather unappealing one consisting of little other than immensely dubious and sickeningly perverse hardcore pornography, that I really hope no one would want to see anyway. The relatively few proper, non-Video Nasty films that remain banned include several similar shockers that never made it on to video, such as Ilsa and Cellblock 9. A couple of interesting examples besides are the 80s American slasher, Silent Night, Deadly Night (with the BBFC refusing to unleash a bloody, if generic, horror film in which the killer wears a Santa costume for fear of psychologically buggering children everywhere), and Mikey, an unsettling yarn concerning a murderous infant that was banned in the wake of the James Bulger murder case (the film that attracted the largest media scrutiny in the wake of the case, tired killer doll sequel Child’s Play 3, was never banned, even if many video outlets stopped stocking it. These days it plays regularly on ITV2 without attracting any attention). The days when the BBFC welded enough power to keep a massive studio smash like The Exorcist off our screens seem like an age away now, when in reality it is only just coming up on a decade. A decade of massive change it has been, and although I can’t deny it is a great thing that a film as good as The Evil Dead, say, is now widely available minus the fuss and bother of pirates and bootleggers, I also think that the acceleration of freedom has been implanted a tad too fast and a touch too recklessly.

The Great Robert Crumb – A surprising candidate for the next head of the BBFC?

Not only has the exciting and fractionally dangerous (in my mind, at least) challenge of tracking down a genuinely banned film been lost, but the mainstream media has become oversaturated with genuinely startling nastiness, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone willing or able to keep it in check. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m writing this as a confirmed horror nut, and someone who has seen some badass beyond the pale bullshit in over 15 years of film viewing (and rather enjoyed it, on occasion), but when it comes to censorship I am very much a subscriber to the belief “Everything’s not for everybody”, as the legendary artist Robert Crumb put it when opining the fact his pre-teen daughter had been upset by the violence in Goodfellas. It just seems to me that there was something to be said about having to track down incredibly violent and outrageous films for yourself. For one thing, the limited availability of these films kept the numbers watching them down to the committed view. Secondly, if you went looking for a certain film it was generally something you were interested in, had read up on, and were prepared for. I just can’t get my head around someone wandering into any old multiplex or Blockbuster around the corner and catching a film as sickeningly violent, morbidly cynical and grimly salacious as Hostel or Saw. I remember being slightly unsettled by a chap in my office at work once recounting several of the glossy, gut-wrenching atrocities he had seen enacted in Saw 28, or whatever, in the Odeon the night before. He was the sort of person who normally only went to see films with Will Ferrell in them, and while there is some truth in the fact that if you’re not a horror fan you shouldn’t see a horror film, the poor fellow had still been clearly disturbed by a film that could rival almost any of the original Video Nasties in terms of nastiness. The only difference is he saw it pretty much accidentally, he didn’t hike 20-odd miles to some random car boot sale to buy a copy of it. Even people who aren’t necessarily upset by this sort of fare are a worry, and while I acknowledge that to be influenced and inspired by screen violence one must possess violent tendencies already, do we really want such overly sadistic films to be so freely available? The increasingly sleazy brutality of modern mainstream horror films has been a cause of much alarm to me in recent years. As much as anything, it is the fact that their popularity suggests how jaded people have become to any trace of traditional horror filmmaking, that a ghoul or monster will get laughed off the screen, and only rank torture can carry any water, or indeed, blood. One also can’t help but be shocked by the levels of xenophobia and misogyny displayed in these films, particularly the Hostel series and the Brazil-set, tourist traumatising torture porn-fest Paradise Lost (evidently not based on John Milton’s epic poem). If things continue this way, very soon all modern horror films will resemble a remake of Fight For Your Life filtered through a Slipknot video, with an ex-Guantanamo bay state-paid torturer working as an on-set consultant.

In conclusion, I suppose I’m appealing for two things here; one, better modern horror films please, although that is something of a side issue. Two, let’s have more in the way of sensible censorship these days. It’s great that we have a largely free media (in some respects, at any rate), but we need organisations like the BBFC to keep things in check. I’m not going to go all “in my day” on you, but we all know that violence is an ongoing problem in our society today, and we cannot allow money-hungry mainstream film companies to continue to pump sordid, sadistic films onto our screens and expect to go on unregulated. I think the age certificate system is great, but in certain cases we’re going to need a bit more. Either good old-fashioned heavy cuts or, I don’t know… A psychological survey and personality test to be filled in before admittance can be granted? If that sounds a bit fascist, then ask the BBFC for a better answer. They get paid to come up with this stuff! I just don’t think they should be afraid to weld a bit of power every now and then if they deem it necessary. I realise this isn’t a fashionable opinion, but let’s not forget; everything’s not for everybody.

Sorry if I got a bit lofty and moralistic at the end there, but I hope you enjoyed my semi-autobiographical, somewhat epic journey through the recent history of British film censorship. And I hope it managed to resonate with at least a few people who, like me, still can’t quite get over the fact that just under ten years ago there were shit loads of really great (and shit loads of really not so great) films banned in this country, and were actually rather pleased, intrigued and excited that there were.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to see if I can track down an old pre-cert VHS copy of Nightmare Maker, before that turns up in HMV an’ all. Cheerio!

(Hello peeps. Welcome to part two of my look at the history of film censorship in Britain, and how it affected me, in particular, in a series of blogs which could easily carry the sub-heading “The BBFC & Me”. Apologies for the delay in getting part two onto your ass; the blame can be partly laid on both Big Bloody Brother and a nice holiday in Ireland, but now that’s all over and done with we can pick up right where we left off and get on with it etc. In part one we saw the British Board of Film Censorship (as it was known then) straddling the British film industry like an ultra-moral, scissor-fingered colossus from the early 1900s right up to the swinging 60s, before running aground on the rocky terrain of early 70s shock cinema. In today’s episode The Exorcist gives both me and BBFC chief Stephen Murphy countless nightmares (even though only one of us had actually seen it), and then Thatcher’s Britain decides that some of these newfangled video cassette tapes are just too, well… nasty. Next week (I promise!), Quentin Tarantino becomes the most infamous director on the planet after the dad from Free Willy cuts someone’s ear off, and I visit HMV and buy You’ve Got Mail, Blues Brothers 2000 and Cannibal Holocaust as part of their fabulous 3 for £20 DVD offer. So, without further ado…)

The Exorcist (1973) – I suppose I should begin by ’fessing up and admitting that I don’t actually like The Exorcist very much. I don’t rate it very highly. I don’t think it’s a very good film. I’ve always found it much too schlock-y and childishly theatrical. I also think that it is as much to blame for the eventual over-commercialisation and cheapening of mainstream American cinema as other more frequently cited culprits (Star Wars, for example); the point at the end of the decade when the daring and mature masterpieces of the 1970s found themselves usurped by big budget spectaculars that thrived off the notion that films should be a glitzy assault on the senses and little else. For all that, though, it is a very unsettling film, not to mention a remarkably famous one, and of all the films to fall afoul of the BBFC, it is easily the most notorious example.

As we learned last week, the early 1970s was an incredibly difficult time to be in charge of film censorship in Britain, and BBFC chief Stephen Murphy had already enraged no higher an authority than the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, by passing A Clockwork Orange uncut for UK cinemas in 1971. That decision also served to make him persona non grata to the newly empowered “moral majority” in England, a movement made up mainly of old age pensioners and old school Christians, who had decided they’d had enough of the 60s liberalist attitudes which they held responsible for the hysterically heralded “breakdown” of society in the early 70s. The movement boasted a high-profile and media conscious leader in the form of legendary cardigan-clad agitator Mary Whitehouse, whose 1971 Festival of Light religious protest against perceived moral decay in the arts was set up as an almost direct response to Murphy’s passing of Ken Russell’s The Devils (as looked at in Ode to Moviedrome) early on in the unpopular new BBFC head’s tenure. 1971 was a very bad year for Stephen Murphy (he also passed Sam Peckinpah’s troublesome, and eventually banned, Anglicised western Straw Dogs, among others), and 1972 found him struggling with several more controversial releases (including two of the year’s top grossing hits, The Godfather and Deliverance), and rubber-stamping the outright ban of two of the most provocative films ever submitted to the BBFC (barefaced porn fest Deep Throat and torture porn blueprint The Last House on the Left, both of which would remain fully banned for decades). The following year would mark the beginning of the end for Murphy, and The Exorcist aside, Bernardo Bertolucci’s sloppy but interesting celluloid sex fantasy Last Tango in Paris was 1973’s most controversial film, passed with only minor cuts by Murphy, and attracting the angry attention of Whitehouse’s Festival of Light cohorts. One of Mary’s chums, a retired army colonel, inflamed the tabloid furore even further by bizarrely claiming that he had inside information on the film, and could prove that several steamy scenes between Marlon Brando and co-star Maria Schneider were genuine recordings of the pair having actual sexual intercourse. However, quite how a 60-something, upper middle class British pensioner who had never even seen the film came to be aware of this was never revealed. And also, how could anyone have that much “real” sex with their trousers constantly ON as Mumblin’ Marlon does in the film? Still, the public naturally lapped up all this red hot publicity, and went to see this confusing and raunchy art film in droves. Italian audiences were not so fortunate; not only was Bertolucci’s film banned and many prints destroyed in his home country, but the director himself was handed a suspended prison sentence on obscenity charges and banned from voting in general elections for five years (if the Italian government had possessed more foresight they may have banned him from directing films from 1980 onward; Little Buddha… Stealing Beauty… The Dreamers… Need I go on?).

But 1973 belonged to The Exorcist, and to this day it remains Warner Bros. highest grossing release of all time. As with A Clockwork Orange in our last instalment, a plot synopsis of The Exorcist is surely unnecessary as I’m certain that everyone has seen it (although, I’m not convinced that it has that much of a plot, anyway). I have seen it too, of course, but again as with A Clockwork Orange, it was something of a mystery to me for some time whether I’d eventually get to see it or not (naturally, we are discussing once banned films here). Unlike A Clockwork Orange, however, I wasn’t especially anxious to see it for the simple reason that it (or the idea of it, anyway) scared the living shit out of me.

As we established earlier (in Troubles so Bad), I grew up in Northern Ireland, which is a very religious country indeed, and notoriously, problematically so. I had a very religious upbringing (although not quite as strict as many of my peers, I must admit) in the Calvinist/Presbyterian denomination, attending Church (and Sunday school) every Sunday, and the faintly Hitler Youth-like Church Lads Brigade most evenings of the week. It is often the case that, when groups of children are indoctrinated into heavy and binding religion at an early age, the more imaginative and curious youngsters will develop a morbid fascination with the dark side of devout spiritualism; fire, brimstone, punishment, damnation, evil etc. And so it was with many of my peers and I; a good number of us developing an admittedly underdeveloped and ill-informed obsession with occultism, particularly as represented in films and popular culture. This was in the 1980s, an age rife with rumours of records being played backwards to reveal satanic messages, and Iron Maiden hitting the charts with half-baked ditties devoted to the devil, or in this case, “beast”, and his “number” (the universally misinterpreted 666, of course), so there was plenty of salacious fodder to fuel our (hell)fire. Naturally, our religious leaders and guardians led an attack on all this unholy fare, particularly heavy metal music and horror films (both massively popular at the time), but this only served to heighten our ghoulish interest (I swear to you I once witnessed a young minister, with a completely straight face, disclose to his congregation that the name of subsequently long-forgotten 80s shock rockers WASP stood for We Are Satan’s People, as opposed to the more dubious White Anglo Saxon Protestant, which it actually does stand for; he then went on to lambaste Olivia Newton-John’s erotically-charged, aerobics-inspired masterpiece ‘Physical’ in the same sermon!).

Let me hear your body talk…

I can’t remember when I first heard of The Exorcist, it’s just always been “there”, and its diabolical legacy loomed large on my adolescent imagination. The title alone could make me and my schoolmates shudder with fear, and wild rumours about the actual contents of the film, and its conception, spread like even wilder fire. It was about a girl possessed by the devil. It was written and directed by Satanists. It featured a scene were the girl masturbates with a crucifix. While they were making it several of the cast and crew died in a mysterious fire. It features lots of random images of demons that appeared mysteriously on the film without the filmmaker’s knowledge. The director’s baby was born with no head. The film featured a scene were a real priest actually dies onscreen. The actress who played the girl committed suicide. A scene was shot in Charles Manson’s old house. The director died in a car crash after completing the film… that kind of thing. A handful of these rumours turned out to be true (more or less), but most were hysterically false. There were even rumours about what could happen to YOU personally if you happened to watch The Exorcist. According to a friend of mine who had claimed to have seen it, all the clocks in his house eerily stopped working before the film had ended (amazingly, daysarenumbers.net’s very own Aneet claims something similar happened to her. She can’t be serious!). Another rumour offered the rather longwinded idea that if one watched The Exorcist, and that night had a dream in which one was falling from a great height, but didn’t wake up before impact, one would die in one’s sleep! Perhaps this ludicrously far-fetched fantasy will have greater resonance with you if I also tell you that it is a commonly held belief amongst the youth of Ireland that reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards will invoke the devil himself. No one I know was ever brave enough to try this, and to be honest with you, it’s not something I’m itching to try even now.

But where could a terrified adolescent get hold of a copy of The Exorcist to watch it, if said adolescent was indeed brave enough? The Exorcist was never given a full ban in UK cinemas; the film was too much of a monster money-spinner to ever be consigned to such a fate. It arrived on these shores hot on the heels of a frankly sensational opening in America, and tales of audience members suffering from everything from vomiting to epileptic seizures and even cardiac arrest whilst watching the film were rife. Stephen Murphy deliberated briefly over a few cuts (eventually removing some of the “subliminal” demon images. That rumour was indeed true, then, but of course the production staff knew fine well that they were in there), before leaving it in the hands of local councils to decide whether they would allow cinemas to show the film or not (much as he had done with The Devils). This led to a bizarre and somewhat comic phenomenon known as “Exorcist buses”, in which opportunistic cinema owners would lay on transport for potential patrons in boroughs in which councillors had deemed The Exorcist too evil for exhibition, and take them to more enlightened boroughs to be scared rotten by it. Surprisingly, The Exorcist was screened pretty much all over Northern Ireland on it’s initial release, but, as was the story with A Clockwork Orange, my old mum missed out (I know, this is getting a bit Norman Bates). She did try to see it, however, but whilst queuing up outside Ballymena’s now sadly defunct State Cinema (an amazing, old school picture palace, destroyed by a fire a few years ago that was probably started by some crooks hired by Soulless Multiplex Inc.) she, and everyone else there, was berated by none other than internationally renowned boor, bully and rabble-rouser, the Rev. Ian Paisley himself (our local MP for about 100 years, before, by some terrifying passage of fate, he became the leader of the entire fucking country). Unfortunately, having been subjected to a no doubt reasoned and intelligent bollocking from Dr. No, my mum decided that she would give The Exorcist a miss, and went to see Last Tango in Paris instead (probably not what pious Paisley had intended). I did know a lot of other people who had seen The Exorcist, however, basically anyone over the age of thirty, and the unanimous verdict was that it was certainly terrifying, and possibly actually evil. My uncle curiously complained of still living in fear of his bed suddenly, manically throwing him around in the middle of the night. I was not aware at the time that this was a reference to something that happened in the film, and contemplated contacting a social worker. Due to its incredible level of fame, much information on the film was available and, like A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist was based on a novel (by William Peter Blatty, of course, more on whom later). My grandfather, surprisingly something of a fan of horror fiction, had a copy in his bookcase, albeit one that was permanently housed next to a copy of the King James Bible, although I never asked if this was intentional or not. I also never dared read it, and simply walking past it in the bookcase was enough to give me the willies for years.

Ulster says no… To The Exorcist!

But, could a film really be that frightening? I would soon find out. Stephen Murphy’s perceived failure to handle the highly controversial releases that marked his tenure as the head of the BBFC would lead to his resignation in 1975, following a mere four years in charge. As the Heath/Callaghan figure in our British Prime Minister allegory, he could only be replaced by a man of Thatcher-like steeliness and determination, and that man was to be James Ferman. By the time Ferman took over, The Exorcist had been scaring the pants off audiences for two years, and it was much too late to rein in this massively successful beast. However, a few years later when Warner Bros. became one of the first studios to release its films on home video, and (partly inspired by the popularity of horror films among early VCR owners) unleashed The Exorcist into the home, Ferman was ready. Equal parts moralist and philosopher, the new BBFC boss would make the outlawing of The Exorcist’s home video release his cause celebre, his reasoning being that a film essentially concerning the emotional trauma and physical torture of a young child could be a potentially dangerous thing to have lying around the house (logic I am not completely unsympathetic to). Ferman would keep The Exorcist under lock and key in the UK for as long as he remained in charge at the BBFC, despite many beneath him feeling that the ban was both outmoded and unnecessary. Indeed, legendary film critic Alexander Walker would imaginatively liken Ferman and his staff debating over whether or not The Exorcist should be released on video in the UK to a medieval court attempting to determine if the devil actually existed (Walker, like his modern counterpart Mark Cousins, came from Northern Ireland, a veritable breeding ground for top film writing talent, don’tcha know).

Copies of the early 80s pre-certificate (otherwise known as “pre-certs”, tapes released before the BBFC covered home video, and thus uncertified) release of The Exorcist did the rounds for increasingly extortionate amounts of money from the mid-80s until the late-90s. My cousin somehow ended up with one such copy in 1995 (eerily minus its cover), and before I knew what was happening, I was sitting down to watch The Exorcist; the film I had been afraid of for so long. My aunt (my cousin’s mother, natch) had forbidden him from watching this blasphemous video in her house, so he brought it round to ours instead. And, on a bright summer’s day with the curtains pulled, I put on a brave face, not wanting to show how scared I was, and with white knuckles gripping a scatter cushion, a now-familiar feeling began to envelope me as the supposedly horrifying film progressed. The Exorcist was a bit disappointing. It really wasn’t that scary, but then what film could be? This is something I would experience 9 times out of 10 with films that had been banned and had subsequently became shrouded in strange myth and terrible legend; when you actually got to see them they most often turned out to be a bit, well, daft. The first thing that got me about The Exorcist was just how shoddily put together it was. It is riddled with continuity errors, underdeveloped and unintentionally comic characters (most notably the seemingly pointless film buff police detective, played by HUAC squealer Lee J. Cobb), and top-heavy with over-elaborate set pieces, that come cloyingly thick and hysterically fast, played only for shock value and little else (although they do undeniably hit the mark occasionally before you finally feel fully bludgeoned). It is no surprise how poorly made The Exorcist is considering it came from a director more famous for his off-screen histrionics and on-set bullying campaigns than his skills behind the camera. A vastly overvalued talent, William Friedkin (who, thankfully, did not die in a car crash in accordance with one previously mentioned Exorcist rumour, although, it is probably true that when Friedkin reads his reviews he sometimes wishes he were dead… Oh! I am awful!) has only managed one wholly satisfying film in his entire career (The French Connection, and even then the John Frankenheimer-helmed sequel is superior). Other than that his body of work (which kicks off, rather brilliantly, with the Sonny and Cher vehicle Good Times) consists of a handful of garish, although admittedly not totally uninteresting, failures (Sorcerer, Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A.) and a run of dismal, diabolical flops of staggering ineptitude (The Guardian, Blue Chips, Jade). One can’t help but feel that The Exorcist might have emerged in better shape minus Friedkin’s slipshod, sledgehammer approach, perhaps as something more along the lines of Roman Polanski’s superficially similar, but infinitely more subtle and effective Rosemary’s Baby.

William Friedkin; a bit rubbish, frankly 

No shortage of directors had been approached ahead of Friedkin, in fact, including marquee names John Boorman and Mike Nichols, both of whom had rejected the film on the grounds that they found it morally dubious. And that, indeed, is another indelible problem with The Exorcist, the fact that, at its heart, it is a very reactionary and sanctimonious film. The controversy it whipped up among the religious communities of America and the UK has always seemed somewhat paradoxical considering how church attendance in both countries rocketed in its wake. The film can be seen as unsolicited propaganda for organised religion, particularly the Catholic Church (and indeed, in some of the countries it remains banned, it is so for that very reason). The Exorcist suggests boldly and vindictively that the devil, as imagined only by religious fanatics, is not only very real but also capable of possessing innocent little girls, and there isn’t a darn thing no doctor or scientist can do about it. No, you’re going to need your Catholic priest for that. And while you’re at it, you mother of possessed girl, you had better accept full responsibility for said possession, and think about quitting your successful, yet immoral and unladylike film career, too. No wonder feisty Jane Fonda (the original choice for the lead) decried The Exorcist as a “capitalist piece of shit”.

So there you have it, I don’t like The Exorcist. I was once very afraid of it, but then I saw it, realised it wasn’t very good, and that was that. I’m not the only person who doesn’t like The Exorcist (legendary author James Baldwin and cravat-clad film critic Kim Newman are right behind me) and I’m not the only person who thinks the universally derided The Exorcist II: The Heretic is better (come on down, legendary film director Martin Scorsese and influential film critic Pauline Kael). The sequel has become a byword for a flop and an embarrassment, yet although it is far (very far) from perfect, it has much (much more than The Exorcist) to recommend it. Directed by John Boorman (who had, you may remember, turned down The Exorcist) in between two of his most epic and ridiculous films (Zardoz and Excalibur), The Heretic is, appropriately enough, a true ridiculous epic. It balances the inspired (a visually sublime plague of locusts) with the goofy (that hypnosis machine thingy) and throws out countless more interesting ideas than its predecessor, even if they do fail to hang together for the most part, and fall apart altogether in time for the notoriously studio butchered finale. It also boasts Ennio Morricone’s second-to-last great (truly G.R.E.A.T.) score, with Il Maestro weighing in with a heady, hear it to believe it, set of prog-cum-tribal rock compositions, and a suitably haunting, unforgettable main theme (in case you were wondering, Morricone’s last great score was for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven in 1978). I also enjoy The Exorcist III, directed by none other than William Peter Blatty (who wrote The Exorcist novel) himself, and making up for in subtlety and refinement what both the previous instalments sorely lacked. Indeed, this atmospheric occult murder mystery is only hamstrung by an ill-fitting, climactic exorcism, shoehorned in by studio execs who, perhaps not unreasonably given the title, demanded there should be one. Blatty would also direct the flipping mental, loosely Exorcist connected (it centres on the astronaut who fleetingly appears in the first film) The Ninth Configuration (also known as Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane). A one of a kind freewheeling trip through warped late-70s sci-fi, Biblical allegory, and haunted house horror, the film is a puzzle bursting with weird life, and it’s better than The Exorcist, too!

The Ninth Configuration, as with the two Exorcist sequels, was available on video for years before The Exorcist itself joined them. As we’ve already seen, there was no way in hell this could have happened under James Ferman’s watch, and it was to be the first of many scalps he would claim.

The Driller Killer (1979) – Despite the fact he was inaugurated in the 1970s, James Ferman, much like his Prime Ministerial counterpart, would not truly hit his peak in terms of influence and infamy until the 1980s. If we are prepared to stretch our allegory to breaking point, we can almost suggest then that if Mrs Thatcher had the miner’s strike, then Mr Ferman had the Video Nasties.

As we learned in part one of Banned for Glory (all those years ago now), “Video Nasty” was the tabloid-coined term for any one of the slew of low-budget horror films that appeared on VHS cassette tapes in Britain during the early days of home video. These predominantly cheap ‘n’ sleazy shockers, housed in chunky black boxes adorned with lurid titles and explicit artwork, leered out from video shop display cases at terrified moralists the length and breadth of the country, attracting the ire of (you guessed it) Mary Whitehouse, as well as Margaret Thatcher herself, who targeted them as part of her return to “Victorian values” campaign, and damned them in Parliament. The Video Nasties remained freely available (not to mention hugely popular) in the UK until 1984, when the BBFC was finally granted the power to classify (hence the name change, with the C going from Censors to Classification) videos under the Video Recordings Act 1984. With this new found power in place, the BBFC bowed to pressure from Whitehouse, Thatcher et al and tried 75 controversial films, more than half of which were later acquitted (including, hilariously, the Dolly Parton musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, which had been rounded up and included on the list by accident), leaving 39 fully banned films, all of which were illegal to buy, own or sell in the UK until the late 90s, and in many cases later still. A small handful of Video Nasties remain banned even to this day.

But, what films actually made the list? Contrary to popular belief, The Exorcist was not one of them, although it had been banned on video. According to different sources, its absence from the list is either down to the fact that it had simply been banned already, or that Warner Bros. money was affording it some “special consideration” at the BBFC. Surprisingly, Tobe Hooper’s entrancingly terrifying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre never appeared on there either, despite a full ban from the BBFC some years earlier. Its early 70s contemporary, Wes Craven’s uncompromisingly cruel The Last House on the Left, DID make the list, however, betraying a somewhat scattershot selection process on the BBFC’s part. As far as I can see, there is something of a “big four” of Video Nasties, four titles that stand head and shoulders above the others in the list in terms of fame and notoriety; Cannibal Holocaust, Driller Killer, The Evil Dead, and I Spit on Your Grave. Bubbling just under (in the Video Nasties UEFA Cup spots, if you will) we find the Tarrant on TV-like, (largely fake) snuff compilation Faces of Death, the gut-munching masterpiece that is Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters, and the tastelessly titled, maniac-on-the-loose romp Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (which became the focus of several tutting tabloid reports after its release was promoted by a competition which asked video shop patrons to guess the weight of a real human brain in a jar!).

The first Video Nasty I ever saw was Driller Killer. It was 1997, and I had just started college (I’d like you to picture me as a “Freshman”, climbing the steps of my college for the very first time, with a youthful visage betraying both nerves and exuberance. ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba is playing in the background, no doubt). I was doing Media Studies (you would never have guessed I’d done that, would you?), and, as luck would have it, not only was one of my teacher’s a proper, bona fide film nut (who turned me onto all sorts of ace stuff, including lending me Jean-Luc Godard’s demented agitprop masterpiece, Week End, when I was but a lad of 16), but he also knew a man in England who could get him just about any film you could think of, banned or not. My teacher was going over to visit him and asked me if there was anything I wanted. I asked for a Video Nasty, particularly The Evil Dead (I had seen, and enjoyed, it’s freely available sequels), but when he returned I got given Driller Killer (my teacher got Pasolini’s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, which he would also lend me sometime later. Although not a Video Nasty, it is a very nasty video, being an allegorical tale concerning fascist barons conducting routine abuse and torture on a group of adolescent boys and girls, and was banned in this country until very recently. Sadly, this deeply unpleasant and murky film has become Pasolini’s most famous work, due to the controversy attached to it. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour and watch one of Accattone, Mamma Roma, or The Gospel According to St. Matthew, instead).

My First Video Nasty, then. As with The Exorcist, I was bricking it a bit when I sat down to watch Driller Killer, not knowing what psychologically damaging gruesomeness I was about to expose myself to via the medium of my Sanyo VCR. The cover on the box didn’t offer me much in the way of comfort, being perhaps the most explicit video cover of all time. The cover, in fact, is partly responsible for landing Driller Killer in such hot water in the first place, with the film’s UK distributors, Vipco (Video Instant Picture Company) getting a little bit overexcited and running full page ads in movie magazines of the box sleeve in all its gory glory. Thus, in 1982, two years before the Video Recordings Act, Driller Killer got pinched by the Advertising Standards Agency, and all but guaranteed itself a spot on the BBFC’s subsequent Video Nasties list.

Taking the tape out of its box (and hiding the box under some of my beloved Liverpool FC videos to spare my distress), I squirmed down to enjoy some DIY-related terror, and before long I was experiencing an emotion I had not anticipated; boredom. That’s right folks, despite the salacious title and explicit cover, Driller Killer is actually a bit boring. Like The Exorcist before it, I had been expecting an unremitting hell-ride, a merciless descent into pure horror, but what I got was yet another helping of hokey North American moviemaking from the 1970s. Not that I didn’t enjoy Driller Killer (and I still have a real soft spot for it) and not that I didn’t find its power tool-based murder scenes marginally disturbing. It’s just that, for the majority of the film, not much really happens. For this very reason, many have ventured that Driller Killer is as much an art film as a slasher film, but I’ve always found this an overgenerous appraisal.

The story concerns struggling artist Reno Miller (played by director Abel Ferrara, more on whom later, under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine), who lives with his two girlfriends (that’s right, TWO) in a crumby NYC loft apartment, and is apparently surprised that this set up doesn’t seem to be working. As you can imagine, living with TWO girlfriends doesn’t leave Reno much time to work on his art (he is currently painting a nice picture of a buffalo) and that means he doesn’t have enough dough to pay the astronomical telephone and electricity bills that TWO girlfriends will inevitably run up. This leads to a scene early on in the film where Reno and his TWO girlfriends argue over who uses the phone the most; not really the sort of thing I was expecting to see in a Video Nasty. To make matters worse for poor Reno, a truly awful punk rock group, The Roosters, move into the flat below and start to rehearse at all hours at ear-splitting volume, but our hero can’t persuade them to turn the bloody noise down by simply asking nicely, and the landlord is too busy skinning rabbits to help. So, when one of Reno’s TWO girlfriends gives him a power drill to put some shelves up, Reno does what any of us would do in the same situation… He goes out and starts drilling random homeless people to death.

And that’s one of the major problems I have always had with Driller Killer. Why, oh why, does he not go downstairs and drill the bloody band to death? This seemed merely illogical to me the first time I watched it, but these days, as someone whose neighbour has a penchant for noisy, moronic dance music, it positively makes my blood boil. “GO AND DRILL THE FUCKING BAND, RENO!!!” I found myself snarling uncontrollably at the TV whilst I watched Driller Killer again recently. He could probably do with bumping off at least one of his TWO girlfriends, upon reflection, as well. Some have suggested, however, that Reno takes his frustration out on the homeless because he is afraid of ending up like them, as the whole art thing isn’t really paying off. Why doesn’t he get a proper job, then? Jeremy Kyle would soon sort him out! To be honest, though, it is probably because of how goofy and earnest Driller Killer is that I still like it. I also really enjoy Ferrara’s overwrought performance in the title role. The murder scenes are effectively gruesome, to boot, and the film’s ending is genuinely cryptic and creepy. And, let’s face it, you never forget your first Video Nasty. It’s also a real treat for fans of New York in the late 1970s, with lots of gritty, grainy footage of the decaying Lower-East Side in all its ragged glory.

Abel Ferrara; ALSO a bit rubbish 

Abel Ferrara is one of only a small handful of “name” directors on the Video Nasties list, and with the exception of The Evil Dead’s Sam Raimi, he is the most successful director to have made his debut with a Nasty. I don’t want this to turn into some kind of Overrated Film Directors Purge-Special, but as with The Exorcist’s William Friedkin, I can’t help but feel that Abel Ferrara is unfairly and overly lauded. Driller Killer aside, Ferrara’s most famous films are King of New York and Bad Lieutenant, both of which are both puerile and sensationalist (in my opinion, at least. I know they both have armies of fans. I particularly dislike King of New York; Christopher Walken’s wacked-out central performance is supposed to be a joke, surely). He also directed the possibly feminist, rape-revenge tale, Ms. 45, and the certainly misogynist, pimp-revenge tale, Fear City. His gothic companion pieces The Funeral and The Addiction are passable if you have the patience, while his spooky, morbid take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers is probably the best thing he’s ever done. Having said that, however, I haven’t seen his Madonna vehicle, Dangerous Game, which I always dismissed as little more than a Body of Evidence retread (sexy, provocative and absolutely avoidable), but some people reckon it’s really rather good. I’m not sure if committed Madge fan Aneet is one of these people, though. Are you, Aneet? (I’ve just gone into a bit of a tizzy. Whilst “researching” this bit, I read that German genius Werner Herzog has done a remake of Bad Lieutenant, starring Nicholas Cage. What? The? Fuck?).

What about the rest of the Video Nasties, then? I hear you cry. Well, I ain’t seen all of them, but I’ve seen a good few, so here’s a whistle-stop tour… Of the rest of the “big four”, The Evil Dead is a marvellous, darkly imaginative piece of filmmaking I’m sure you’ve all seen (Scotland’s second biggest box office hit of 1982!), whilst Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your Grave are much more troublesome prospects. The former is perhaps the most exploitative and violent condemnation of exploitation and violence ever filmed, and the latter is either a despicable misogynist affront or a true feminist action movie, depending on who you’re asking (I was alarmed when I first arrived in London back in ’99, to see someone selling ISOYG T-shirts off a market stall!). For the record, I’m not a massive fan of either. Faces of Death, Zombie Flesh Eaters, and Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, you’ve already met, and next in line in terms of infamy were the handful of utterly tasteless Nazi-themed sexploitation films on the list, most famously SS Experiment Camp. Cannibals were in vogue at the time, too, and sharing the Cannibal prefix with Holocaust were Apocalypse, Ferox, Man and Terror. Cannibal Ferox was directed by Giallo veteran Umberto Lenzi, who started the cannibal, erm, ball rolling with Deep River Savages in the mid-70s, and that too features on the list. The films in this curious subgenre routinely feature cruelty to animals, which is, of course, utterly deplorable, so you may want to think twice before seeking any of them out. Another quintessentially Italian phenomenon, the nunsploitation film, was represented by the legendary Killer Nun, starring La Dolce Vita icon Anita Ekberg.

Of the big name directors on the list; the notoriously gore-happy Fulci unsurprisingly boasts a whopping three films (The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery, in addition to Zombie Flesh Eaters), fellow countryman Dario Argento is close behind him with two (bona fide classics Inferno and Tenebrae; easily two of the best films on the list), and the Godfather of Italian horror, Mario Bava, weighs in with the mighty Bloodbath. Cannibal Holocaust helmer Ruggero Deodato gave the intra-species scoffing a break to chip in with the sordid and shocking, disco-tinged torture fest House on the Edge of the Park, while Giallo alumni Luigi Cozzi and Aldo Lado also appear (Contamination and Night Train Murders, respectively. For more info on those, check out my earlier Giallo blog, Yellow Peril). Moving away from Italy, other notable European directors on the list include Spain’s irrepressibly sleazy (not to mention fantastically moniker-ed) Jesus Franco (three films; Bloody Moon, Devil Hunter and Women Behind Bars. He’s still most infamous for Vampyros Lesbos, though) and Poland’s barmy sensualist Andrzej Zulawski (the incredible, Polanski-flavoured Possession, certainly one of the classiest films of the list). Former Fassbinder stock company player Ulli Lommel contributes the interesting, if unspectacular, The Bogey Man, and its sequel, ahem, Revenge of the Bogey Man, both made in the US (Lommel’s earlier non-BBFC bothering, German-made, The Tenderness of Wolves, is top homoerotic vampire noir, stars a number of other Fassbinder regulars, and is well worth seeking out). The closest we come to a big British name is Ken Hughes, who earlier in his career had directed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (of all things!), but later somehow found himself on the Video Nasties list with the grim, yet underwhelming, slasher Terror Eyes, which was an American production. In fact, there are very few British films on the list, although the Spanish production The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue was filmed in Britain (guess whereabouts… NOT Manchester, actually), and this chilling, atmospheric zombie effort is right up there with Possession in terms of quality. The only two 100% British efforts on the list are unsavoury Straw Dogs rip-off Expose (never seen it) and unlikely ET rip-off Xtro (have seen it). Xtro features what could be the most unpleasant sequence in all of the Video Nasties, no mean feat, in which a pregnant woman gives birth to a fully grown man! Once seen, never forgotten! A close runner-up to this would surely be the foetus quaffing scene in the late Joe D’Amato’s manic and perverse Anthropophagus The Beast. Yet another Italian, former porn director D’Amato followed this up with a loose sequel, Absurd, also on the list, before returning to porn full time, stopping briefly en route to combine horror and porn in the fabulously titled Porno Holocaust.

Moving stateside, two films that could probably push for one of those imaginary Video Nasties UEFA Cup spots are Snuff (which caused a minor scandal in the US by pretending to be an actual snuff film) and The Toolbox Murders (no relation to Driller Killer). When it comes to big name directors, we’ve already had three in the shape of Ferrara (Driller Killer), Raimi (The Evil Dead), and Craven (The Last House on the Left), and although his masterpiece, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, somehow stayed off the list, Tobe Hooper still wound up with two contributions to his name; his overlooked, grisly backwoods black comedy, Death Trap, and the relatively tame, carnival-based slasher The Funhouse. Names don’t come much bigger than Andy Warhol, of course, and he’s in there too, with Flesh for Frankenstein (AKA Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein). Andy didn’t direct it himself, unsurprisingly, but Paul Morrissey did, and he’s pretty famous, as well. It’s a great film too and absolutely bonkers, of course. Someone who perhaps deserves to be as famous as Warhol is Herschell Gordon Lewis, who pioneered the use of bloody effects in horror films, and earned himself the title “Godfather of Gore”. His warped and gory, even by today’s standards, tongue-in-cheek tall tale of an insane and cannibalistic Egyptian caterer (!), Blood Feast, is the oldest Video Nasty on the list, having been made in 1963. And someone who perhaps deserves to be as famous as Herschell Gordon Lewis is Andy Milligan, whose films simply have to be seen to be believed, being as jaw-droppingly amateurish as they are gob-smackingly gory, which is VERY! He chips in with Blood Rites, which arrived six years after Blood Feast at the end of the 60s.

It may not have a big name director (although man behind the camera, Gary Sherman, did direct the disappointing, Tube-based horror, Death Line, in 1972) but 1981’s Dead & Buried was written by Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon, and it is another highlight on the list, concerning the spooky (not to mention gory) goings on in a mortuary in a sleepy California town. The same year’s Evilspeak is also bereft of a famous director, but it does boast Clint-brother-of-Ron Howard in the lead role, as a put-upon nerd at a military academy (that old standby!), who wreaks vengeance by summoning evil demons (and bloodthirsty pigs) through his computer. Imagine Carrie-meets-WarGames. The remainder of the American films on the list were fairly straight forward slasher fare for the most part, with the most notorious example being The Burning. One of the first releases from the Weinstein brother’s Miramax production company, the film is famous for some over-the-top gore effects from the legendary Tom Savini (the killer’s weapon of choice is a pair of garden shears and Savini puts them to eager use). The Burning also features an over-the-top score from Rick Wakeman, which is perhaps more frightening. Much better in the slasher department is the eerie The Slayer, which cleverly uses a dreams-into-reality device that predates the similar A Nightmare on Elm Street. Neither a slasher film, nor even a horror film, martial arts fest Shogun Assassin sticks out from the list like a severed thumb. It is very, very bloody though, was compiled from a long-running samurai series by Robert Houston (best known as Bobby from The Hills Have Eyes), has an excellent soundtrack, and is brilliant.

Audio Nasty? 

Well, that’s all the Video Nasties I’ve seen (including some I haven’t seen), and that isn’t even the whole bloody list. I worked my way through the list as and when I could from 1997 onwards, initially procuring copies of films off well-connected fellows like my Media Studies teacher, until suddenly these films slowly began to get legitimate releases around the turn of the century. But, how could this happen after they were outlawed for so many years? And wouldn’t James Ferman and the BBFC have something to say about it?

To find out the gory details, tune in next week.                

(Cue Alfred Hitchcock Presents music: Good evening. I’m trying something different this time round. In my continuing effort to cement a reputation for myself as the Nigel Slater of film blogs, I present for you today another semi-autobiographical investigation of a chosen cinematic subject, this time British film censorship. As I have no shortage of things to say on this topic, I’m going to be comin’ at ya in three parts. Below is part one, concerning the BBFC in the late 60s and early 70s and my quest for A Clockwork Orange. Stay tuned next week to find out why mad and abundant rumours concerning The Exorcist caused Northern Irish children no end of sleepless nights, and why some films about power tools made the BBFC a bigger deal than it already was. Part three will then appear the week after, natch. Love ya)   

Do you remember when films used to be banned? It’s becoming increasingly hard to imagine a time when literally hundreds of titles were forbidden from being seen on both our big and small screens by the UK’s once ultra-stringent and omnipotent censorship laws, but if we cast our minds back a mere ten years, we find an executive class American studio film as famous as The Exorcist (Best Picture Nominee, 1973 Academy Awards) only just being deemed suitable for British cinema audiences following some 14 years in illicit limbo.

Sometimes I think that the spark that leapt onto my burgeoning interest in films and caused it to explode into a full-blown obsession was the fact that there were apparently some films which just couldn’t be seen. What horrors could these films possibly contain, I queried to myself, because, of course, when you’re very young, there’s nowt much safer than a film, is there? Films were what you were taken to see in the cinema when you were good. They were what you were put down in front of when you were bored at your granny’s house. They weren’t supposed to be threatening or unsettling; they were supposed to be for the whole family. Weren’t they? I really had to find out.

I grew up in the 80s, an age in which the horror film became a bona fide mainstream cultural phenomenon once more, in a way not seen since it had helped to haunt the national psyche of a paranoid Cold War America in the late 1950s. The icons of this revival were the lead bogeymen in a series of successful slasher franchises, chiefly the ubiquitous Freddy Krueger, whose burnt visage leered out from all manner of memorabilia, ranging from t-shirts to mugs (my pal Richard had a Freddy mask as a child. He complains to this day that the interior reeked overwhelmingly of a fishlike stench). Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street were discussed in hushed tones at the back of the school bus, and sounded genuinely terrifying when recounted by classmates who had almost always been slipped a copy to watch by an unprincipled elder sibling (many of these classmates were barefaced liars, I later discovered, who hadn’t seen these films at all. Most notably the one who told me that chief among Freddy’s fiendish powers was his ability to communicate with domestic animals, commanding them to carry out his evil bidding, although that is an idea Wes Craven may want to consider for his proposed Krueger revival). And although these films did have the power to frighten when channelled through the over-active imagination of a gibbering, dim-witted child, when you actually got to see one it was often a different story. The horrors conjured up by your imagination just couldn’t be matched by the mores of what was still essentially mainstream 80s cinema, not to mention the fact that Freddy Krueger always reminded me of an unusually sadistic Kenny Everett, which isn’t a massively frightening thing. Or is it? Most disappointingly of all, of course, was the knowledge that these films were all perfectly legal.

So, where were the forbidden films, the films containing such unspeakable horrors that the powers that be had to keep them under lock and key? That is, of course, a somewhat paradoxical question, but for the fact that apparently there were channels ready to be opened and sources waiting to be tapped in order to procure some of this cinematic contraband. The most notorious banned films of the age were the 75 titles that made up the infamous Video Nasty list, compiled by the Director of Public Prosecutions as a moral defensive against what they perceived as an outrageous offensive on Thatcher’s Britain, launched by an unruly band of unscrupulous, and supposedly immoral, small-time video distributors (it’s such a typical Thatcher-era phrase, “Video Nasty”. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Charles Saatchi himself had coined it. See also, “Friendly Fire”). A potted history of the Video Nasty shows us that the majority of these films were borne of Hollywood’s refusal to acknowledge the potential of nascent home video technology just as it began to boom in popularity in the late 70s (much as the major studios had neglected television for years, fearing that their profits would be severely undercut). Stuck for something to watch, and starved of mainstream product, hungry and eager VCR owners found themselves being catered to by the aforementioned, and equally eager, independent distributors, who were either buying up the rights to quick ‘n’ sleazy Eurosploitation (mainly from our old friends Italy), picking up seedy and unlicensed 60s and 70s curios from Britain and America, or conjuring up their own creations of varying taste and quality on minuscule budgets. This kind of output eventually oversaturated the market, and 99% of early video releases are strikingly base, as without the promotional budget of a major studio behind it, a film can be a very hard thing to sell. Add a dash of sex or violence (very often both), however, depicted with daring depravity on the box sleeve and an audience begins to emerge.

The Video Nasties cast a dark, and to many, compelling shadow over the early years of home video. Following the outrage they created, the UK’s chief censorship body, the British Board of Film Censorship (later Classification), turned its attention to home video for the first time in 1984 and systematically tried and banned every film on the DPP’s list. The newly savvy Hollywood studios stepped in to fill the void, and very shortly mainstream fodder was finally finding its way into the home, taking the place of the newly outlawed Nasty. However, although the police could legally seize copies of these prohibited video cassettes, it was impossible to round up every last tape, and many of them would spend the remainder of the decade and beyond circulating between the callous and the curious, growing a little more worn out after each screening. It was one such battered copy that was presented to me by my elder cousin one night in the late 80s. The film was Mario Bava’s Bloodbath (as discussed in Yellow Peril, see below), and I was both excited and repulsed by the appropriately lurid cover. “What’s that?” I asked my cousin, dry-mouthed from horrified intrigue. “It’s banned”, he grunted. “Where did you get it?” queried I. “Off some lad in the chip shop”, he illuminatingly conceded, before barring me from watching it with him in case I told the police and got him “done”. But at least I could say I had been in the presence of an actual banned film, and had seen first-hand evidence that they did still exist and could be relatively easily acquired, it only being a mere matter of striking up an acquaintance with some mysterious and well-connected fellow in a chip shop. Appetite whetted, I spent much of the 1990s defying the all-powerful BBFC by tracking down as many Video Nasties, and other censored shockers besides, as I could find.

(John Trevelyan, centre, with Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol)

I also developed a learned interest in British censorship history in general, and it’s an engrossing and colourful tale. With thick clouds of class conflict, sexual repression, xenophobia, religious fervour, moral sanctimony, and commercial callousness forever threatening to rain down trouble and turmoil on these isles, it’s no surprise that the BBFC became the largest and most scissor-happy censorship board in Western Europe. It struck early, claiming its first victim in 1903 after banning a short science feature called The Cheese Mites at the behest of the British cheese industry. Later, in and around the time of the Second World War, it would find itself at the elbow of an altogether more powerful agency, when the Government entrusted it with the task of keeping political propaganda under control. Informed by several sources, including Tom Dewe Mathews excellent book Censored and BBC2’s outstanding 1995 documentary Empire of the Censors, I found myself able to list off all the BBFC chiefs in order of ascension, and discuss the key events of their reign, much in the way one might with the Prime Ministers of Britain. With that in mind, then, we’ll journey right up to the modern era and meet the BBFC’s equivalent to Harold Wilson, John Trevelyan, who decided what the Great British Public could and couldn’t see between 1958 and 1971. Like Wilson, Trevelyan presented the exterior of a dapper and genial gent, but underneath could be a shrewd and ruthless networker. Presiding over a successful boom-time in newly liberalised British cinema, Trevelyan cheerily got on with his work, pausing only to trim the odd twenty seconds off a sweaty sex scene in a kitchen sink drama here, or to ward off some unwanted and unwittingly ahead-of-schedule gorefest from America or the continent there (Blood Feast and Bloodbath, respectively, both of which would appear on the Video Nasty list years later). Trevelyan, again like Wilson, had a healthy relationship with industry (or, in Trevelyan’s case, the industry) and garnered much praise for being brave enough to pass a succession of celebrated taboo-busting classics, including Victim (homosexuality), Room at the Top (class inequality) and Yield to the Night (capital punishment). He bowed out happily enough at the end of his reign having caused relatively few grumbles, and history would show that he also possessed impeccable timing among his attributes as the 1970s would bring an awful lot for an awful lot of people to grumble about in terms of film censorship…

A Clockwork Orange (1971) – Alright, alright, alright… I know it was never actually banned, per se. It was instead withdrawn by its legendary director, Stanley Kubrick, for one of several potential reasons that will continue to be debated over for years and years to come (fear of copycat violence, death threats to his family by rabid moral zealots, unwillingness to have it shorn by even a single second by the BBFC, all three). What is clear, however, is that you couldn’t watch the bloody thing in Britain (at least, not legally) for some 27 years, and that’s almost half a lifetime.

Even if John Trevelyan had managed to duck out of the BBFC top job with scarcely a blot on his copybook, he was clearly wise to the fact that the position was about to get a lot tougher. Towards the end of his captaincy the waters had begun to get choppy with a small handful of high-profile and difficult releases threatening to upset the boat, including Arthur Penn’s sublime but occasionally brutal Bonnie and Clyde, and the somewhat muddled, climatically horrific hippie-tinged western Soldier Blue (once notorious, but pretty obscure these days. It’s not very good). But these films were mere trifles compared to what landed on the in-tray of his immediate successor, Stephen Murphy. 1971 alone heralded the release of at least a dozen major releases containing unprecedented levels of screen violence, several of which would remain major bugbears for the BBFC for years to come, including; Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Devils and, of course, A Clockwork Orange.

To continue in earnest with our British Prime Minister analogy, if John Trevelyan is Harold Wilson, then we can view Stephen Murphy as a sort of Ted Heath/Jim Callaghan hybrid character. The 1960s had been a tremendous decade for the film industry all over the world. Sure, the major American studios took a bit of a beating with no shortage of expensive flops throughout the decade (for every successful Mary Poppins there was a flop Hello Dolly to sap precious profits), but who cares when the likes of Italy, France, Britain, and the US indies were churning out era-defining, epoch-making masterpieces under newly relaxed censorship laws. At the turn of the decade the major studios caught up and as the hopeful and permissive 60s bled into the bleak and uncertain 70s, Stephen Murphy, much like his Prime Ministerial counterparts, was found wanting in his ability to quell the outraged cries of the so-called moral majority whilst simultenously establish himself in the ever-changing brave new world. Copycat violence was nothing new by the early 70s, and the BBFC had previously banned Marlon Brando’s moody biker vehicle The Wild One for similar reasons in the 1950s. However, by the time of A Clockwork Orange, with the British press primed for stories of disaffected teens mimicking the anarchic antics of Alex and his Droogs, the debate on screen violence had reached such fever pitch that none other than Reginald Maudling, Home Secretary in the Heath cabinet, demanded a private screening of Kubrick’s film, expressing concern that the seemingly weak-minded Murphy and the BBFC had just passed it uncut. Film censorship was now a front page issue, and its causes and potential effects were troubling even those at the very top.

(I couldn’t find a picture of Stephen Murphy, so here is a nice one of Reginald Maudling instead)

A Clockwork Orange needs no introduction, and I’m sure every one of you has seen this immaculate and incendiary meisterwerk, so I’ll spare you a synopsis. I have seen A Clockwork Orange too, of course, and many times now. But for a very long time I had cause to speculate whether I’d ever actually get to see it or not. I can’t quite remember exactly at what point during my search for information on banned films I stumbled upon A Clockwork Orange, but the moment I did I was immediately intrigued. It was the title that did it. “A Clockwork Orange”, what did that mean? Every forbidden film I had ever heard of came with a salacious and often somewhat predictable title, such as the aforementioned Blood Feast or Bloodbath, but what on earth did “A Clockwork Orange” mean? I had no idea, but I liked the sound of it (I experienced similar bamboozlement over the title of the similarly banned Straw Dogs. What the hell was a “straw dog”?). Further investigation revealed that this was also a very different beast from its banned brethren in that it had enjoyed a major and successful mainstream release in the early 70s. Thus I interrogated my mother on the subject. Had she seen it? No, but she remembered it coming out and being subsequently pulled following the whole copycat hoopla. I was crestfallen she hadn’t seen it (mind you, she would have only been 15 at the time) and felt somehow unfairly deprived of a direct hotline to firsthand information regarding this mysterious film. She attempted to make this up to me by pointing me in the direction of the novel on which it was based (it was based on a novel?!) and the public library was my next port of call. I couldn’t believe the ease with which I found a copy of this apparently inflammatory material (and one with an enticing screenshot of Malcolm McDowell on the cover, to boot) and promptly read it from cover to cover, absolutely gob-smacked. How could they make a film out of that?! And if they could, I would dearly love to see it (and yes, Anthony Burgess fans it was the proper 21 chapter version of the novel, which ends with the older Alex being mocked by his new Droogs after they uncover his burgeoning paternal instincts. Kubrick obviously didn’t film this and the majority of subsequent prints of the book removed the chapter accordingly).

But, of course, I couldn’t see it, and in that dark, pre-internet age it was struggle enough to even get my hands on a screenshot or an old, enlightening magazine article or two. To my eternal shame, an old 70s film journal I also loaned from my library had several colour photographs of scenes from the film (each bizarre image adding a new layer to the mystery) and an A4 print of the famous “A” poster (designed by Kubrick himself, see above), all of which I unscrupulously cut out and stuck to my bedroom wall, before sneakily returning the journal without confessing to its being vandalised (my guilt was later relieved when I heard that no less than Martin Scorsese committed similar crimes in his youth. Great minds, eh?). I was also given a cutting of a newspaper article by my dear old mother, continuing to feed my unhealthy interest, detailing an illegal screening of the film in a London cinema in 1993. That cinema was none other than the Scala in King’s Cross, and before you say “but, that’s a nightclub!” I will say that, yes, it is now. But it was a cinema before an enraged Stanley Kubrick chose to smite it, bankrupting the owners with a heavy lawsuit for daring to show his film. Old Stanley was taking this self-imposed ban very seriously, indeed. I found this article both stimulating and depressing. On the one hand, the fact that A Clockwork Orange HAD been screened somewhere in Britain in the recent past was an exciting proposition. However, not only did I curse my luck for not being in London in 1993 (although, I would only have been 12), but the fact that Kubrick had reacted so aggressively to his ban being broken (even by an esteemed art house cinema) was proof positive that A Clockwork Orange would not be getting a general release any time soon.

On through the years I trudged with my prospects for viewing A Clockwork Orange growing no brighter. My yearning to do so had inadvertently turned me onto some very fine films, however, and I became a committed Kubrick fan, enraptured by his freely available efforts, films so incredibly brilliant that they further fired my imagination as to just how fantastic his rendering of A Clockwork Orange might be (Lolita and Barry Lyndon are my other two favourites). I even watched anything I could find with Malcolm McDowell in it, but the general quality of that particular oeuvre is less high, obviously (I mean, If… is very good, but have you seen Buy & Cell?). I always got a kick from watching anything with anyone from or involved in A Clockwork Orange in or behind it, so you can imagine my surprise when I learnt that Dalziel from Dalziel & Pascoe played one of the Droogs!

Then, in 1995, BBC2 screened its fantastic Empire of the Censors documentary series, part two of which showed entire sequences completely uncut from A Clockwork Orange, I believe for the very first time on British television (I recall an earlier Kubrick documentary on Channel 4, narrated by Jonathan Pryce, showed only grainy black and white stills). This was an incredible development in my quest, and I sat wide-eyed watching Alex in action for the very first time, recording every second on VHS for posterity. I even called a couple of my friends off the street to come and have a look at Alex bludgeoning a victim to death with a giant phallus (that wasn’t in the novel!) which earned me a reputation as being “sick” among my ignorant peers (they did however enjoy the Emmanuelle segment in the same documentary).

Two years on and I was better connected (although not necessarily to better people) and in 1997 I finally reached the end of my quest, returning home one evening with a Portuguese VHS tape of my adolescent Holy Grail, housed in a pale blue box with the “A” poster on the front. I was triumphant, and how I got hold of it was almost ridiculously simple. For some reason, some lads I knew were on friendly terms with a large skinhead metaller-type, who had a collection of knives, a pet snake, and a harebrained obsession with Nazism; you know the type. By complete chance I overheard him mention A Clockwork Orange to one of my friends (I was trying my best to ignore him), upon which cue I suddenly changed tact and bounded into the conversation. “Have you seen it?” I asked. “Yeah, I’ve got it. It’s supposed to be the most violent film ever made, but it’s boring”. And then the magic words… “You can have it, if you want”. I naturally didn’t hesitate to say yes, and hurried home not believing my luck, stopping only to rope in a friend to join in the screening party and share the magic (I remember almost resenting him, he was about to fucking watch A Clockwork Orange, and he just didn’t seem to appreciate the significance, or indeed, his luck).

My mind was completely blown by A Clockwork Orange (still my favourite opening shot of all time, ehanced all the more by Walter/Wendy Carlos’ evocative and sinister score), and to actually be able to sit and watch the thing unfold by itself after trying to imagine what it would really be like for so long was an almost transcendental experience. Unlike the philistine who had put me in possession of my long sought after prize, I had already worked it out that A Clockwork Orange was not even close to being “the most violent film of all time”. I still found watching it a rather strange and frightening experience, however, and Kubrick does weave such a dark and intoxicating spell (albeit with jolts of bawdy humour) with this one that it’s easy to see why it gave the BBFC such a headache.

The final say was always with the director, any road, and he kept A Clockwork Orange heavily under wraps right up until his death in 1999. He had barely departed when Warner Bros., the film’s original distributor, rather overzealously announced their plans to re-release it in the cinema forthwith. I’ve always questioned the tastefulness of their timing, but I had moved to London by the time of its comeback weekend, and was comfortably seated in the back row of the Holloway Road Odeon when the curtain drew back on A Clockwork Orange for the first time in a British cinema (barring the Scala scandal) in 27 years. On the big screen, and with a delicious new print, it obviously looked even better than it had done on a battered video cassette, and with the added bonus of not having Portuguese subtitles, too. When I first caught the Clockwork Orange bug I burnt up with a mad fever to see this illusive and malicious masterpiece, but sitting in the comfort of a mainstream cinema in the company of Alex and the Droogs, I realised that, at last… I was cured, all right!