Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape

Young people nowadays don't know they're born . They want to watch a newly released Hollywood movie ? All they have to do is log on to their parents computer , search around for certain pirate sites and they'll be able to find the latest Hollywood blockbusters . Not so in my day where Rothesay didn't have a cinema from 1976-91 . If you wanted to watch a movie you'd need to take a ferry trip to Wemyss Bay and then a bus to Greenock . Thank goodness for a thing called a video recorder where not only could you record TV shows on to very expensive video tape but could go to a retailer - usually a corner shop that also sold alcohol - and hire a movie to watch . Strangely enough major studios weren't too keen on bringing out major releases . That said no one I knew was interested in major studio pictures , what me and my peers wanted was gore , gore and more gore and the video market was born for this era . If you're middle aged you're still able to name off the top of your head all these legendary "video nasties" you remember from your youth . This documentary featuring film makers , critics , academics and law enforcers take us back to the good old bad days where every film you watched was both stomach churning and laughable at the same time

The documentary wastes no time in showing the audience what the films that gained so much notoriety were and we see an alphabetical countdown of the 72 films that made the banned list . I was somewhat surprised as to how many of these films I saw back in the day . Perhaps even more surprisingly is how many such as ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS , THE EVIL DEAD and DRILLER KILLER actually turned up on satellite or network television years later . There's also a great nod to nostalgia and director Jake West shows the audience by tweaking he picture just how bad these videos looked on a visual level , many of which were third or fourth generation copies with the video heads clogged up with dust and the picture and sound constantly breaking up . Of course it didn't seem so bad at the time , but it's a good nostalgia trip for those who remember these days before DVDs came on the market with their cinematic picture quality and shows the youngsters today that what they were missing wasn't much

People are quick to look for scapegoats . Usually it's Jews who get the blame for everything but in Britain in the early 1980s it was video nasties . There never seemed to be a criminal case appearing in a daily tabloid involving a violent murder that wasn't solely blamed on a video nasty . Very soon the usual suspects of Mary Whitehouse and her acolytes backed up by right wing Tory MPs and the Daily Mail were running around the countryside with pitchforks and flaming torches looking for not only videotapes to burn but the obscene , subhuman degenerates who were selling them . If you're wondering why the police weren't bothered about arresting paedophile BBC personalities or members of parliament in the early 1980s that's because they were down the station getting overtime to slurp coffee while watching a video to see if it matched the criteria as an obscene film . Not only were those films on the banned list being confiscated from video stores but also any title that had a dodgy title like THE BIG RED ONE and APOCALYPSE NOW . Stop laughing at the back because in those days video retailers were being jailed or heavily fined for hiring out films on the banned list . As it turned out due to an oversight the video recordings act of 1983 wasn't actually enshrined in law so it turned out the retailers were jailed or fined illegally

This is a really interesting documentary and a warning what happens when politicians get caught up in hysteria being driven the small but noisy clique in pressure groups and the media . It also gives a window on to the world of the early 1980s . It's also probably the only documentary you will see where QUATERMASS AND THE PIT and video nasty gets mentioned in the same breath !

Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape (2010)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

The second documentary after the BAN THE SADIST VIDEOS! series that takes a look at the "video nasties" and the BBFC's attempt to ban horror movies that they felt would ruin the minds of young people and turn them into killers. We get interviews with people involved with the banning or fight against the banning as well as historians like Marc Morris and Kim Newman.

If you watched BAN THE SADIST VIDEOS! then you're not going to see anything here that you don't already know but this is still very much worth viewing simply because the subject matter is so interesting. It's amazing to watch the archival interviews as well as the newspaper headlines, which were pretty much brainwashing people into thinking that if you watched ZOMBIE or MANIAC then you'd turn into a murderer or if you saw I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE you'd turn into a rapist.

If you're unfamiliar with this era then you're certainly going to be in for a treat as a great number of films are discussed as well as clips from the various battles that happened on television as those against these movies would sometimes go up against those for them. We even get to see clips of all the movies as this documentary starts off, which was fun.

This was a documentary that was on my list of ones that I wanted to see for a while. I picked this up on DVD during a sale. The problem then became trying to find time to work it in. What I ended up figuring out was that I have a program where I could rip this into an MP4, to then treat it like a podcast and watch it at work. I still want to find the time to delve into all the special features as this has 2 additional discs of information.

Now something interesting here is that thanks to my good friend Duncan from the Podcast Under the Stairs, I knew most of the information. I've listened to most of his shows from the TPUTS Collective of Doing the Nasty where they were covering the films from all three lists. The introduction pulls soundbites and this theme song from this documentary. That still didn't diminish my enjoyment of this. I was born in the 1980s and in the United States, so when this was going on, I had no idea. It is quite interesting.

What I like most about this documentary is that it tells both sides of the story. We are getting great film critics like Alan Jones, Kim Newman, Julian Petley and Stephen Thrower telling their side. What is interesting then to go along with them is hearing from British filmmakers like Christopher Smith and Neil Marshall. Then on the other side of this, we hear from people who were in favor of the ban like Graham Bright, who introduced the Video Recordings Act 1984. The best documentaries try not to be completely biased so I give credit here.

This is also a well-made documentary. There is a funny part in the beginning when they talk to people who used to seek these films out. They talk about how you could tell when a gory part or nudity was coming because the quality would dip. Having grown up with VHS tapes, I do remember that. What is fun is that the quality of what we're watching mimics that. This does well in editing in footage to help show things they were talking about. I'm glad I finally sought this out. This definitely gives an interesting introduction to this period of British history and to this list of wild films, which were added for a variety of reasons.

My Rating: 8 out of 10.

Video Nasties, eh?

Anyone here remember the luridly awesome looking covers at your local fleapit video shop, the type of shop where you just knew the owner was kinda dodgy? They were gonna corrupt us, deprave us, and turn us all into thrill killing time bombs. Or so the powers that be apparently thought at the time, and decided that enough was enough as they certainly knew what was best for us all.

This documentary explores this mindset, its consequences, how it affected people and its possible effects in regards to today.

Jake West lets each camp equally give their opinion, and is more than happy to give advocates of the Video Recording Act enough rope to hang themselves by coming out with patently ludicrous views. West also highlights the unscrupulous and fraudulent methods used by advocates of the ban and Video Recordings Act, in regards to statistical data to back their claims of films being able to morally corrupt, and how said data was gotten.

The doc also features insightful comments from the likes of Neil Marshall, Christopher Smith, Kim Newman, Alan Jones and Stephen Thrower and is well worth checking out for any self respecting horror fan, particularly UK fans and particularly fans who were around at the time of the era.

It's nothing especially new- the topic has been covered in the also excellent Ban The Sadist Videos documentaries- but it's a cracking and often amusing documentary all the same.

Not much else to say really, except that it's great and is well recommended for any horror fan. 9/10, an absolute treat.

I remember back in the early 80's when I was at school, in our lunch hour me and my friends would often visit the local video rental shop which adjoined a Texaco garage. This was so exciting and to think that all we actually ever did was *look* at the video covers! We were too young to actually rent anything out. It's probably very hard for younger people to understand the excitement caused by the video boom of the early 80's, especially the influx of horror titles that saturated the market back then. The covers of these videos were garish and unsettling. They promised so much excess. They were a forbidden fruit. Some ironically were given eternal fame by being banned. I genuinely think that back in those days the authorities were so naive that they didn't foresee this. I distinctly remember seeing the list of the banned titles for the first time in a magazine of the time called 'Halls of Horror'. The list contained all of the films that would achieve infamy as video nasties plus several others that were patently absurd such as the war movie The Big Red One. This latter film made the list because the authorities assumed it must be a pornographic film going by its title! Its details like this that shows how absurd the whole thing was in many ways and how amateurishly it was handled.

In the last few years or so, I have caught up with most of the infamous video nasties and on an alarmingly common basis wondered how in hell they were ever considered obscene in the first place. Of course, I don't refer to all of them when I say this; movies such as Cannibal Holocaust and The House on the Edge of the Park remain deeply troubling movies, while Faces of Death is guaranteed lasting infamy for its real death footage. But when viewing films such as Funhouse or Visiting Hours, amongst many others I just couldn't get to grips with how they could have fallen foul of the law to such a massive extent. As it turned out the 72 nasties were eventually whittled down to 39 'true' video nasties that were considered the extreme of the extreme Although when you consider that this final list included the innocuous The Werewolf and the Yeti you are still left wondering about the thought process that produced this final list.

This documentary looks at the thinking behind the panic and the way the authorities acted. It was driven by politicians, puritans and Mary Whitehouse. The tabloid press were possibly the most influential of all though, informing the public that the sadistic videos were not only pernicious but that some were even genuine snuff movies. All of this was eaten up of course and titles with tabloid friendly, memorable names such as The Driller Killer became poster boys for all that was wrong with the new home video entertainment. Although most of us never actually thought about it at the time but the reason the market was flooded with low budget horror titles in the first place was that when the home video format first emerged, the big American studios refused to release their movies onto it seeing it as a competitor to their cinematic offerings. Consequently, lots of small traders emerged and bought up packages of cheap films, often very obscure and with a large percentage being horror flicks. And with this historical context, the early 80's home video horror boom was born.

In fairness, it isn't very surprising that the Video Recording Act happened. It does seem insane that these films weren't age certificated in some way. It's also not hard to understand why a lot of folks were uncomfortable when they were presented with lurid promotional posters for the likes of S.S. Experiment Camp. We have been desensitised these days to film violence and you really have to take into account the historical context to understand the genuine shock that these films engendered. So the documentary looks at why the furore happened and it allows both sides of the argument fair air time to present their case. It would only be fair to say that the film is clearly on the side of the defenders but I did think that it allowed the other side of the argument a fair hearing and didn't make them look silly with cheap editing or anything. We get to see short clips of all the 72 films but in the final analysis, this is not about the films themselves. It's about what caused the Video Recordings Act of 1983 to come into place. If you have knowledge of the subject there probably won't be too much new here although I am certain you will learn a few new nuggets of information. If, on the other hand, you have no, or limited knowledge, of the whole video nasty phenomenon then this is as good a place to start as any.