FORMAT: BLU-RAY (REWATCH)
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
(As posted on November 5th, 2017)
(NOTE: This documentary was included on the Night of the Demon Blu-Ray)
David Gregory’s informative and absorbing follow-up to his Video Nasties documentary, Ban the Sadist Videos! focuses on the BBFC, the British Board of Film Censorship. Thanks to their chronic nitpicking of gory and violent images in horror movies, Britain becomes the most censored nation in the free word. The head censor in charge, James Ferman, takes to his job all too well, gleefully cutting stuff out of movies as he sees fit. In actuality, the things he found objectionable (like throwing stars, nunchucks, blood on female flesh, etc.) seems pretty arbitrary.
Gregory also shows how the British government used Video Nasties (mostly thanks to the country’s sensationalized tabloids) as the public scapegoat for violent real-life incidents. The infamous Bulger case, where two boys killed a toddler, is blamed on Child’s Play 3, even though the kids never even saw the movie! There is then a movement to further crackdown on horror films, which leads to an unlikely champion in Ferman, who winds up defending them.
There are a couple of interesting side notes here, like the rise of the black market for movies without certificates. I also enjoyed seeing the logistics of putting censorship into action (the board has to go back and watch thousands of videos that have already been released, leading to a huge backlog). Gregory also does a side-by-side comparison of Evilspeak and its eventual censored version. I wish there were more of these comparisons, because seeing the actual cut footage gives you a good idea of what the censors found objectionable.
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