Video Nasties

[hawkeyepierce]

This week I watched my brand spanking new 'Video Nasties - the definitive guide' dvd set, which includes a documentary and trailers for all nasties including commentary.

What are these Video Nasties I speak of?! Well, in the 80s the British Board of Film Classification were an ever bigger bunch of pussies then they are today. it was the age of the videoboom when you could get any crazy movie on cassette, Italian horror, mondo movies, Slashers, Nazi porn and all the things that make cinema great!

Enter the social activists (the best known of which is 'Doctor Who' hater nr.1...Mary Whitehouse) & conservative politicians and before you know it over 70 tapes were banned! And by banned I don't mean frowned upon - I mean banned, destroyed, prosecuted etc. etc. etc.

There a couple of sick classics on the list like 'Cannibal Holocaust' & 'Love Camp 7', lots of films that are gory yet super fun required viewing like 'Zombi 2' or 'Tenebrea' and some titles are pretty tame really. Jess Franco's 'The Devil Hunter' seems quite boring and one of the many odd titles to appear on this list. There's even 'The Werewolf & the Yeti', Paul Naschy's Tibetan wolfman adventure film (one of the few Naschy werewolf titles I haven't seen yet).

As quite a couple of folks on the forum are from the UK, I'm sure there's some cool stories to share concerning this odd slice of British film history... ;D

[Marcus]

Well. One of the things which the 'video nasty' banning did was give a lot of those films a big PR boost, and made them 'must see' rather than vanish into obscurity. These banned films were still gettable if you asked the right people.

I remember back than, we used to have a video van that would come round the estate. And he had a number of these banned films, from before they got banned. Which he'd rent out.

Then of course there was a 'friend of a friend' who had a pirate copy of this banned film or that banned film that you could get to borrow.

[Werewolf]

Oh it was just stupid. You can't watch these films but we can watch them to decide whether or not you can watch them? Wtf! I mean they banned the first Evil Dead, it's not even scary. But Marcus is right, Mary Whitehouse jumping on her high horse was the best publicity at lot of these movies ever had. We had them all

[hawkeyepierce]

Remember any specific titles Marcus?

[Marcus]

Well, there's the big ones like Cannible Holocaust, Cannible Ferox, I Spit on Your Grave, and Evil Dead. Others I remember watching include The Burning, Driller Killer, Night of the Demon, Faces of Death.

Clockwork Orange was banned, but don't think that was a video nasty. Was Xtro banned I don't remember?

It's been such a long time I don't remember 90% of the films I watched back when I was a kid.

[Werewolf]

Here you go Hawkeye, I found this list for you: www.hysteria-lives.co.uk/hysterialives/Hysteria/slasher_nasties_4.html