Banned for Glory (part two)

(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.