Censored

Mahon has made some fun and some boring films but this is one of his most interesting. This is a faked collection of scenes supposedly cut out of other films because they were deemed obscene. Dry but thoughtful lectures on censorship alternate with scenes of tame nudity and/or S&M. Was this hack director Mahon's call for artistic freedom from a society that would deem his own work obscene and beneath contempt? Who knows?

Censored (1965)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This low-budget film from Barry Mahon starts off with an "expert" sitting at a desk where he talks about how movies are censored across the country. He promises to show us some of this censored footage and let us make the decision on whether it was right for local authorities to "cut" art.

CENSORED is a pretty fascinating film from Mahon that manages to be quite entertaining throughout its 61-minute running time. This film tries to play itself off as a documentary showing us dirty footage that the censored wouldn't allow us to see but in reality all of the footage here was freshly shot by the director so you're really just seeing a fake set-up with all new footage.

With that said, there's some interesting things to be had here. We get the typical nudist camp footage and there's another section with an artist, which allows for some topless women. Things get really strange during a violent scene where a woman has her leg sawed off. The most interesting segment has a female Nazi torturing a woman that she has chained up.

The Nazi footage is interesting because you could argue this was the first example of Naziploitation. The scene with the leg being sawed off contains no blood so this was well short of what Herschell Gordon Lewis was doing at the time. For the most part this is a harmless film that has some interesting aspects to it. Fans of the director will certainly want to check it out.