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Video Nasties: Difference between revisions
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So in 1984, the Video Recordings Act was passed, which made it illegal to distribute any film that had not been classified. The [[Censorship Bureau|British Board of Film Classification]] liased with the Department of Public Prosecutions to build a list of videos that had already led to shopkeepers being convicted for criminal obscenity and hence could not be legally distributed in Britain, to which were added a number of videos that were submitted to the BBFC for classification and rejected. Hence was formed the infamous list of the '''"Video Nasties"'''. This ultimately comprised 72 films, of which 39 had been successfully prosecuted. Video stores renting them were subject to police raids.
As time has gone by and society become more liberal about horror movies, many films from the list have been resubmitted to the BBFC. In some cases they were passed with no difficulties, but a few of the more extreme cases were passed only with cuts, only for them to resubmitted again a few years later and released completely uncut in the present day (the most notorious and high-profile case of this being ''The Last House on the Left''). Only a handful of films from the list still remain banned, but usually because they remain so obscure that nobody has bothered to resubmit them. If you are able to find and view these films (most used to be incredibly rare and obscure; what were once considered holy-grails amongst collectors are now widely available in this age of DVD) you will probably be shocked at how tame ''some'' of them are compared to today's standards what with films the likes of ''[[Saw]]'' and ''[[Hostel]]''. In many cases, some films would have been tame even by ''those'' days' standards; often films were convicted of obscenity [[Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch|based on the cover art or the title alone]]. The featuring of the words "[[I'm a Humanitarian|Cannibal]]", "[[Zombie Apocalypse|Zombie]]" or anything associated with [[Those Wacky Nazis|Nazis]] in the title of a film almost guaranteed inclusion on the list. Other films though, such as ''Cannibal Holocaust'', retain the power to shock and horrify.
It really doesn't take a genius to know what the result of Mary's hissy-fits and the bans were; people wanted to see these films. [[Bile Fascination|Naughty little boys, spurred by the media's allegations that these were reprehensible, disgusting, Gorntastic shlockfests that were corrupting the youth]] [[Forbidden Fruit|and which had been banned for the good of the nation]], flocked to video stores in hopes of getting their grubby hands on a copy before the police buried them in landfills. [[No Such Thing as Bad Publicity|Their infamy instead took on a nearly legendary status]]; many would have faded into obscurity as generic money-sucking horror drivel and nowadays nobody would know they had ever existed (however, several of them were already wildly successful in their countries of origin and beyond, such as the legendary ''[[Evil Dead]]'' and the [[Dario Argento]] films included on the list).
You can see how [[Roger Ebert|Siskel and Ebert]] reacted to this trend in [http://siskelandebert.org/video/2MW8BASYDOAM/The-Untouchables--The-Witches-of-Eastwick--Video-Nasties-1987 this video], starting at about 12:20.
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* ''[[Film/Nightmare Maker|Nightmare Maker]]''
* ''[[Film/Nightmare In A Damaged Brain|Nightmare In A Damaged Brain]]''
* ''[[Possession (1981 film)|Possession]]''
* ''[[Prisoner of the Cannibal God]]''
* ''[[The Boogeyman 2|Revenge of the Boogeyman]]''
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* ''[[Night of the Living Dead]]''
* ''[[Scum]]'' (original TV version refused broadcast by [[The BBC]] after being made for them, subsequent film version subjected to an eventually unsuccessful legal claim that [[Channel 4]] had breached its own taste-and-decency rules by broadcasting it)
* ''[[Shogun Assassin]]''
* ''[[Silent Night, Deadly Night|Silent Night Deadly Night]]''
* ''[[Straw Dogs]]'' (predates the "nasty" controversy, but went through a similar torturous and tortuous sequence of bannings and cut releases)
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[[Category:British Media Tropes]]
[[Category:index]]
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