The Video Nasty Project

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom

2010-12-29T16:31:00.011Z

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Writers: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Citti
Italy, 1975

Pasolini's infamous reworking of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom is set in the town of Salo in fascist Italy, where four wealthy, powerful men take their pick of local boys and girls and proceed to sexually abuse and humiliate them for the duration of the film. This includes some pretty disgusting scat scenes in the evocatively named "Circle of Shit" section of the film, the source of much of its infamy, and pretty much the only thing anyone talks about when it is mentioned.

This is a shame, because despite a lack of subtlety that verges on heavy-handedness at times, Salo is a powerful political work. The four wealthy men talk of the "true anarchy" of fascism, a political system that in its disregard for life and the rule of law has allowed them to pursue the limits of sexual cruelty. It is presented as a fundamentally immoral, chaotic ideology, a point that may be hammered home a little too much for some.

But while explaining the forces that allow fascism to attain power may need delicacy and subtlety, I'm not sure that examining the philosophy behind it does. It is quite plainly wrong, and showing its cruelties and twisted logic over and over is perhaps the best way of exploring this. Pasolini endeavors to rip fascism to threads rather than look at the psychology of its attraction, and the grueling repetition of themes building to the shocking final act is an approach of applaudable clarity and simplicity.

Salo's unpleasant, often stomach-churning scenes also serve to de-sexualise pornography. Similarities with the erotic fantasy popular at the time are cosmetic and ironic, from the cast of wealthy sexual adventurers to the opulent setting, while a dose of realism is injected - that the truth of sexual slavery and prostitution is abuse and rape, the victims exploited and vulnerable, the perpetrators inadequate and dangerous. It questions the softcore fantasy of the Emmanuel films and the intellectual erotica of The Story Of O alike, showing us that there's nothing sexy about an orgy organised by middle-aged men and populated by young prostitutes.

While not one of the Video Nasty list, Salo has an interesting history with the censors, victim, in the end, to the obscenity laws, under which it was cut mercilessly. The then head of the BBFC, James Ferman, objected to proposed cuts, which he though would "'destroy the film's purpose by making the horrors less revolting, and therefore more acceptable'". He described Salo as "one of the most disturbing films ever to be seen by the Board, yet its purpose is deeply serious... it is quite certainly shocking, disgusting and revolting - even in the legal sense - but it is meant to be. It wants us to be appalled at the atrocities of which human nature is capable when absolute power is wielded corruptly". The BBFC weren't always the bad guys.

I Spit On Your Grave remake

2010-11-13T22:51:00.006Z

Director: Steven R Monroe
Writers: Meir Zarchi and Stuart Morse
USA, 2010

This film was never going to be as good as the original, but there were enough questions around it to make it a must-see for me – whether it would be toned down or made nastier, would the rape scene be played down to concentrate on fun splatter in the revenge scenes, will it be updated to introduce contemporary mores on sexual violence. In a way I was looking at it as a barometer, a way to compare today's attitudes with those of the seventies. If that's the case things are looking pretty bleak.

After an extremely harrowing and graphic rape scene that includes the forced fellating of a gun, there is a point where the remake of I Spit On Your Grave could have achieved greatness. A local policeman answers Jennifer Hill's pleas for help, but on finding wine on her table and joints in her ashtray starts questioning her integrity. If he'd left here, leaving Jennifer no choice but to take matters into her own hands, this could have been a brilliant film. What better – and more simple – a way to update I Spit On Your Grave's central ideas? But instead it turns out the policeman is part of the gang, and he subjects her to an unwatchable act of forced sodomy.

Everything is much more explicit in the remake, it being quite clear precisely what act of forced sex is being performed when, unnecessary detail that is not only distasteful but clouds the straightforward simplicity of the original. This is followed by gory revenge scenes that stretch the boundaries of the imagination, ingenious and graphic, which despite being pretty much the nastiest I've seen on the big screen yet are light relief compared with the sexual violence of the first half.

This is what the remake of I Spit On Your Grave is about, setting a scene so appalling that you'll cheer the most horrific violence as the victim gets her revenge. It's pure entertainment, and lacks the serious heart of the original. Using rape to drive an irreverent piece of cinematic fluff is in very bad taste indeed.

Another Nasty on Ebay

2010-08-03T13:50:00.010+01:00

Another original, pre-certification Video Nasty has surfaced on Ebay, this time Don't Go In The Woods. At £62.00 (so far!) it's not as outrageously expensive as SS Hell Camp was. Here's the seller's blurb -

"Here is an original pre-cert of Don't go in the woods on the video network VRO label. This was one of the films to be prosecuted under the obscene publications act in 1984. Bizzare and ridiculous film, but gory and entertaining nonetheless.

Sleeve is in good nick no rips or stickers.

Tape is not in such good shape. Top label has been ripped along the bottom egde where a sticker was removed. Surface is sticky with glue residue from the removal of sitckers. Spine label is present but is peeling back in a few places.

Playback is OK watched it from start to finish fine."

I Spit On Your Grave

2010-06-17T16:20:00.013+01:00

Director: Meir Zarchi
Writer: Meir Zarchi
USA 1978

I Spit On Your Grave is one of the most divisive and controversial Video Nasties, accused of exploitative misogyny by some but praised as a feminist masterpiece by others. The premise is simple and effective - a young woman taking a break in the countryside to write her first novel is gang raped by a group of local men, and goes on to exact her revenge by murdering them one by one.

It is shot in the summer in a wooded, rural area of Connecticut, luscious but empty and eerie. The film style is spacious and restrained, with no music and only minimal, functional dialogue. This pared down approach is possibly due to budgetary constraints but works, giving the film an uncanny, dreamlike feel that compliments the slow build up to the first scenes of violence.

The violence takes the form of the prolonged gang rape of the central character, Jennifer Hills, in what is by far the most disturbing part of the film, the later revenge killings cartoonish in comparison. In the British version, cut by seven minutes, these scenes are abstracted somewhat, and though difficult are just about watchable. The same can't be said of the uncut version, which is very tough going indeed. The differences are interesting and reveal a little about how we cope with the way violence is portrayed - in the British version most of the violence is in close-up. Watching the original US version, it seems that a lot of the scenes that have been removed show the victim and attackers from enough distance to fit everything in the frame, a graphic approach that allows no escape.

The subject matter is of course controversial and a minefield to portray, its treatment in other films ranging from infallible in The Accused to repulsive in Death Wish 2. I Spit on Your Grave's treatment resides with the former, its unflinching directness humanised by Camille Keaton's portrayal of a woman whose independence offends her attackers, a group of losers who go on to rip all the dignity and strength from her in an act of mindless violence. The reassertion of her power in the revenge scenes isn't as nuanced but does spell out a strong moral stance for the film, one some commentators have gone so far as to call feminist.

It isn't clear whether this is really the case. Director Meir Zarchi said he was inspired to make the film after helping a real-life rape victim and experiencing the frustration of her dealings with the police first hand, which could be seen as a vigilante rather than feminist approach. Jennifer Hills' revenge is also just a logical path for a thriller to take, and a premise this simple hardly needs political roots. Against this is Keaton's intelligent performance and the film's willingness to tackle such a difficult subject head-on.

I'm not sure how much intention matters though when the result is this good. The clear, simple style paradoxically makes an enigmatic and complex film that has been debated over since its release. It's an example of a horror film doing an important job, presenting a controversial situation in all its terrible detail and leaving the viewer to untangle the moral ambiguities it raises. I Spit On Your Grave isn't as technically accomplished as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or as groundbreaking as Cannibal Holocaust, but its content makes it every bit as important.

The Killer Inside Me

2010-06-10T11:36:00.012+01:00

Michael Winterbottom's new thriller The Killer Inside Me has generated a fair bit of controversy due to its graphic depiction of violence against women, seeing it accused of misogyny by Charlotte Higgins and distasteful sensationalism by David Cox, while being applauded for its honest potrayal of domestic violence by Hadley Freeman. The film split Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode on their Radio 5 Live show, with Kermode defending its honesty while Mayo rather impressively threw Winterbottom by accusing him of misogyny in a live interview.

It is a problematic film, mainly because it seems to miss the point. While its main subject matter appears to be violence against women, apart from two brutal scenes and a bit of psychopath childhood background stuff the film concentrates on how the central character evades capture. This sort of thriller plotting makes the film work as a viewing experience but has absolutely nothing to do with the violence at its core, and indeed belittles it.

It is difficult to work out whether Winterbottom is trying to say something about violence against women and failing, or filming a straight thriller story with a nod towards it for controversy's sake. That there is some ambiguity should preclude any moralising, but the violence depicted is so appalling and the masochistic attitude of the victims so odd you feel Winterbottom has an obligation to at least provide some reasoning. This isn't forthcoming in either the film or his rather evasive interviews.

I Spit On Your Grave to be remade

2009-11-30T15:24:00.006Z

I wondered what would be next after The Last House on the Left was remade but never thought it would be controversial rape revenge movie I Spit On Your Grave.

I've made no secret of I Spit On Your Grave being one of my favourite Video Nasties, with its powerfully presented but ambiguous message sparking much-needed discussion of a difficult subject, so am a bit sensitive to a mess being made of it in pursuit of easy profit. It's hard to see the reasoning behind a remake until you consider the revenge murders of the second half and how the film could be changed considerably to concentrate on them - as seems to be hinted at by director Steven Monroe in an interview on Moviehole.net - while the harrowing and unflinching rape scene of the first half could probably be dropped from the film altogether. While arguably missing the point this would at least be a different film, and one I'd be interested in seeing.

But I'm jumping ahead. Who knows what kind of remake Monroe will eventually come up with. In the meantime I'll get a review of the original, in both its cut and uncut incarnations, up on the site.

Feminist Exploitation

2009-11-03T15:57:00.011Z

Kira Cochrane - who is called on so often by the Guardian to give a feminist perspective on horror films I'm hoping she'll be converted to the genre one day - writes about "feminist slasher" Jennifer's Body in today's edition. Unfortunately it sounds pretty unremarkable and not particularly feminist, despite the credentials of writer Diablo Cody, director Karyn Kusama, and indeed lead actress Megan Fox. I agree with Cochrane that a film really needs some sort of political subtext to become feminist, not just a few ballsy female parts, which often counter-productively reduce characters to femme fatale stereotypes anyway.

Cochrane lists a few interesting-sounding exploitation films she considers feminist, but I was disappointed to see no mention of The Witch Who Came From the Sea. Shall I send her a copy, or do you think that would look a bit weird?

Mountain of the Cannibal God

2009-10-09T16:35:00.005+01:00

Director: Sergio Martino
Writer: Cesare Frugoni
Italy 1978

For the most part Mountain of the Cannibal God is an above average journey through jungle exploitation, using the simple premise of an expedition into deepest Papua New Guinea to give us naked natives, ritual animal slaughter, spliced footage of a monitor lizard regurgitating a snake (footage of a snake eating a live monkey is cut from the UK release) and other interesting mondo together with less convincing but nevertheless entertaining crocodile attacks, spiky jungle traps and spear-chucking indians. The setting is authentically rain forest, and although it fails to convey the vastness, isolation and danger of Papua New Guinea is nevertheless atmospheric and lush. Guido and Maurizio De Angelis superb score of squelching electronics, tribal drums and doomy strings will keep your interest piqued when the action flags, which thankfully doesn't happen as often as in most films of its ilk.

In the last twenty minutes we are introduced to the cannibals up in their mountain cave, in surprisingly well-handled scenes that reminded me of an ultra-low budget Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A cast of tens swarms round the explorers (who include a very charismatic Ursual Andress, coming into her own in these final scenes) and at last we see a bit of gore, though the worst fate reserved for them - death by schaphism (warning: nasty) - is only alluded to, an unusually restrained approach for the genre.

It's not really much to praise a film for making sense, but compared to its contemporaries Mountain of the Cannibal God, despite a simple plot and premise, is a surprisingly coherent film that uses subtle plot devices to build a colourful, believable whole, especially towards the end when we are introduced to the cleverly drawn god of the title. In this it is a cut above the many Italian jungle exploitation movies of its era, in possession of a certain maturity and class despite being filmed with similar budgetary constraints. A credit to director Sergio Martino, this is a film I'd happily watch again, preferably on the big screen where it belongs - albeit in a dingy, flea pit cinema.

Criminal Literature

2009-09-21T17:15:00.016+01:00

The last couple of years have seen a worrying surge in criminal prosecutions involving literature, whether over the offensiveness of the writing itself, or the belief that the fictional ideas expressed amount to planning notes for future real-life action - an approach that gives lie to not only a misunderstanding of art, but an apparent ignorance that art even exists.

The latter was evident in the prosecution of "lyrical terrorist" Samina Malik, who wrote poetry expressing violent Islamic fundamentalism, and more recently of Manchester schoolboys Ross McKnight and Matthew Swift, who wrote fantasies about a Columbine-style attack on their school. Both these cases were presented as planning exercises by the prosecution, despite there being no physical evidence of the means to carry out an operation and a distinct literary bent to the written evidence.

Harder to defend but perhaps more relevant to this blog is Darren Walker's story "Girls (Scream) Aloud" a violent, misogynist piece of pornographic writing about the pop group Girls Aloud posted to a specialist slash fiction website, which saw him prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Despite its frankly repulsive content, it actually isn't that far from "Girls (Scream) Aloud" to the violent celebrity fantasies in JG Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition" and "Crash". There are obvious differences in execution and content (not to mention quality), but it is difficult to deny Walker's claim that he similarly intended his work to be satire. The ambiguity of intent rears its head time and time again in censorship prosecutions, and gives lie to the difficulty of reducing art to objective legal terms and definitions.

In an intelligent opinion piece in Saturday's Guardian David Edgar asserts that it isn't actually a failure of logic - whether confusing fiction and reality, or attempting to bend artistic ambiguity into a black and white legal framework - that drives these prosecutions, rather an attitude that doesn't attach any importance to art, to the point of it being acceptable to ban or prosecute over a piece of work if there is the mere possibility of it being harmful. It's not an angle I've considered before, but does make sense in a country that has regularly banned art in the past on a seemingly ad-hoc basis for cheap political gain.

We can take hope from the fact that none of the three cases outlined above resulted in a successful conviction; but that the prosecutions went ahead on such spurious evidence reveals not only a disregard of whether it was right or wrong to do so, but an uncaring attitude to the effect it will have on the lives of the defendants, now tarred for life as terrorists, weirdos and perverts. Not surprising that a hostile attitude to art should extend to the artists themselves, but forgive me if I find the mentality behind it much more frightening than anything the defendants themselves produced.

Cannibal Apocalypse

2009-09-17T14:24:00.008+01:00

Director: Antonio Margheriti
Writers: Antonio Margheriti and Dardano Sacchetti
USA/Italy 1980

A fun film with above-average production values that nevertheless isn't scared to use stock footage in proper exploitation fashion, Cannibal Apocalypse sees cannibalism brought to America by Vietnam vets in the form of a virus which then spreads, nicely merging the cannibal and zombie genres. Furthermore the sexualised nature of the cannibal attacks, usually carried out Dracula-style as the cannibal goes in for a kiss only to bite off a breast or a chunk of neck, brings in a bit of sexy vampirism as well - so what we have are essentially vampire zombie cannibals, breeds that aren't that far apart anyway when you think about it.

Cannibal Apocalypse's main drawback is the (relative) lack of gore and scares, but despite a bit of a lull in the middle it's a fast-paced, action filled movie with some good location work. The inevitable anti-climax as we move from the exciting "Delta Force"-style opening scenes in Vietnam to boring American suburbia is familiar in Italian exploitation horror, but a later supermarket siege and the film's climax in the city sewers are more imaginative than I've come to expect from the Video Nasties. It's home to some of the best unintended humour I've come across in the genre as well, a psychiatrist telling a woman concerned about her husband: "I always said you should have married me instead. But anyway, speaking professionally..." being one of the gems in a line-up that includes weeing on tear gas cannisters to put them out, a cannibal called Charles Bukowski and a romantic paedophile sub-plot for our main hero, played by B-movie legend John Saxon.

Most importantly the ingenious crossing of cannibals, zombies and vampires remains, as far as I know, unique in horror cinema - though god knows why, given how tired contemporary zombie films are becoming. The present paucity of imagination is underlined by the way this cheap exploitation film casually tosses it in as if coming up with new ideas isn't actually that difficult. The baffling failure of modern identikit zombie films to even copy this suggests that maybe it isn't.

Unenforcing the Video Recordings Act

2009-08-26T15:28:00.006+01:00

Interesting news that the Video Recordings Act 1984, ushered in to ban the films on the Video Nasty list, was rushed through with such haste that the government of the time forgot to tell the European Commission, thus making it unenforceable. As stated in a piece in today's Guardian there is a wonderful symmetry between this cock-up and the idiocy of the act itself; and I can't help but think it makes the Video Nasty story, one of the most interesting episodes of horror history, all the richer.

The BBFC bans "Grotesque"

2009-08-21T15:40:00.005+01:00

A quick mention should be made of the new Japanese horror film “Grotesque”, not one I was planning on seeing or had even heard of to be honest, though that has changed now “Grotesque” has attained instant infamy by being first film since the arthouse short “Visions of Ecstasy”, banned for blasphemy in 1989, to be rejected outright by the BBFC. This makes it the first horror film to be banned in Britain since the Video Nasty hysteria of 1984.

It was an article on Twitchfilm.net that broke the news to me, in which BBFC director David Cooke is quoted as saying: ‘‘Unlike other recent ‘torture’-themed horror works, such as the Saw and Hostel series, Grotesque features minimal narrative or character development and presents the audience with little more than an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism. The chief pleasure on offer seems to be in the spectacle of sadism (including sexual sadism) for its own sake… Rejecting a work outright is a serious matter and the board considered whether the issue could be dealt with through cuts. However, given the unacceptable content featured throughout cutting the work is not a viable option in this case and the work is therefore refused a classification.’’

I can’t really comment until I actually see the film (which I’ll certainly be doing now it’s been banned, along with a lot of other people I’d imagine). But let it be said that one man’s “unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism” is another’s unflinching and direct exploration of violence and its effects; as always, the difficulty of violence as a subject matter means there is no right or wrong way of addressing it. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure "Grotesque" will be of more artistic worth than the rubbish Saw films anyway.

Maniac

2009-08-20T16:51:00.008+01:00

Director: William Lustig
Writers: CA Rosenberg and Joe Spinell
USA 1980

Like the previously reviewed "The New York Ripper", "Maniac" is one of those banned eighties horror films that doesn't quite fit into the Video Nasty category, having been banned by the BBFC on release rather than caught up in the 1984 scare. It's a gruesome, effective serial killer study that slathers on the gore and sets up some engaging and tense set pieces. With a purity that rarely deviates from a formula of pursuit and murder and wastes no time on boring detective work, "Maniac" is thankfully bereft of the filler that makes so many giallo-style horror films of its era a chore to watch.

Frank is the maniac, a lonely man living in a New York apartment, obsessed with his dead mother and murdering young women who remind him of her. He scalps his victims and uses their hair as wigs for a collection of dummies who stand in for his mother, but his character isn't just a Norman Bates rip-off - more interestingly, the killings themselves and the media panic around them take obvious inspiration from the "Son of Sam" murders that terrorised New York a couple of years before the film was released, grounding the film in real-life history. The seedy New York location work contributes to this, and as in "The New York Ripper" the city is one of the stars of the film, a tense pursuit through a run-down, empty subway station being a particularly effective scene.

The crude stabs at psychology that underwrite Frank's character are heavy-handed and played for effect rather than meaning, but a great final scene reminiscent of Polanski's 1960s obsession with madness (via some full-on Day of the Dead-style gore) is a reminder that more respected directors don't have that great a track record when it comes to understanding portrayals of mental illness either. "Maniac" is anyway a piece of exploitation horror that despite an intelligent edge makes no claims to be otherwise, and one that in its pared-down, action-packed approach succeeds rather well.

Antichrist

2009-07-25T01:01:00.015+01:00

Director: Lars Von Trier
Writer: Lars Von Trier
Denmark/Germany 2009

I'm going slightly off-topic reviewing Antichrist, but as the British press seem to have practically shit themselves in a spasm of outrage I reckon it's relevant enough, even if their anger seems rather quaint and thankfully impotent.

It's controversial of course, but as you might expect the grim bits are a bit of a distraction from the rest of the film, slightly unnecessary and – apart from one very shocking sequence – actually not that bad. I think people reading this blog are more likely to greet the sight of William Defoe spunking blood with hilarity than horror.

But what a gorgeous, atmospheric and downright creepy film they distract from. Dreamlike camerawork, sometimes subtly bending in LSD distortions at the edge of the screen, portrays the awesome nature of a woodland setting beautiful and terrible at the same time, hinting at a theme of chaos versus humanity and the greys imbetween that is unfortunately lost as the film descends into horror cliché, and more interestingly, some rather tacked-on and plastically controversial misogyny.

Von Trier is a director of immense talent with an unfortunate silly streak, and Antichrist is a film of these soaring highs and dullard lows. The subtle build-up when we are first introduced to the forest is filled with dread and wonder, while a talking fox elicited an audible groan in the cinema.

And the genital mutilation? One of the least interesting bits of the film, though it's pretty savvy advertising.

Anti-Antichrist

2009-07-08T12:10:00.006+01:00

The Sun has run a piece criticising the new, liberal BBFC and its passing of Lars Von Trier's controversial new film "Antichrist" for a cinema release. It's a rather confused argument, claiming to speak for an outraged moral majority while proclaiming anti-censorship credentials in the same breath. A weird circular logic claims that as it is a "torture porn" film (a term coined by newspapers like the Sun to market horror films that has nothing to do with pornography) then the BBFCs assertion that it isn't porn can't be true. In the end, the gist of the argument seems to be that there needs to be a new certificate for films worse than your average 18. A 21 perhaps? A 40?

What's interesting here is the schism between the old, outraged tabloid press and a newspaper fully aware that a substantial part of its readership wants to see films like this, all in the same article. It's like watching them being dragged kicking and screaming into maturity right before your eyes.

The Last House on the Left remake

2009-06-22T12:54:00.009+01:00

Director: Dennis Iliadis
Writers: Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth
USA 2009

The remake of The Last House on the Left - one of the more infamous Video Nasties - has a lot of horror fans up in arms, but while it's a bit of a pointless exercise I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with remaking trashy old classics. In fact given the original's flaws, most due to the technical inexperience of director Wes Craven, there was every chance that a new version could complement the original nicely.

It doesn't quite manage that, mainly because it's a pretty badly-made film itself. The really glaring flaws of the original are gone - there are no slapstick police scenes, thank god; and the jumpy, scratchy editing has of course gone too, for better or worse - but compared to most modern horror films the remake, with its annoyingly aggressive and cheap sounding score, unengaging action scenes and functional dialogue has all the hallmarks of a modern B-movie. Pointless flabby sections imbetween the meaty bits are overlong and tedious, a familiar sight to the exploitation fan but one that's no doubt down to incompetence rather than a homage. Shame really, because like the original there is some merit here.

The infamous central scene that sees the drawn-out torture of two young women is present, and amazingly is even more brutal and unpleasant than the original. It's uncomfortable seeing these scenes rehashed in a release that is geared solely to making a profit, but to think the original had aims otherwise, despite its sketchy arthouse credentials, is to romanticise it. The questions that surround the use of such realistic and nasty violence in this way are much the same as when the original was released.

A more tangible success is the smooth linking together of the film's two main acts, the violent attack and the revenge that follows, an area of failure in the original which was just too muddy and badly-made to pull off the transition. The remake makes a smooth, coherent switch that feels much more believable. These two acts are famously reworked from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, violence being avenged by more violence in a grim and unrelenting spiral, a comparison that I feel too much is made of in what is in effect a pretty straightforward revenge story. Wes Craven may have wanted to inject some intellectual weight into his movie by referencing Bergman but he didn't manage it, and the remake doesn't either.

The 1972 film shocked with its groundbreaking and original approach to horror: the only reason such a poor film is remembered with such reverence, and the only reason it has been considered for a remake. This renders the new version pretty pointless, a cash-in with little artistic merit. It is however executed with more competence, and placed side-by-side with the original it's the better film. It's a shame that it isn't as tight as it could be and still feels so cheap, as there was a real opportunity here to turn a bad film into a brilliant one.

That such a nasty cult horror movie has been remade for mainstream audiences, while losing none of its appalling brutality, poses the interesting possibility that there might be more new versions of Video Nasties to come. Modern audiences have more of an appetite for horror films than ever before, and rehashing cult classics certainly makes commercial sense. I can't think which of the Nasties are ripe to be remade, but then I wouldn't have thought The Last House on the Left was suitable either. Maybe someone else will have a go at that same film. I hope so, it feels like an idea someone should get right one day.

My review of the original Last House on the Left is here.

The Burning

2009-05-14T15:53:00.012+01:00

Director: Tony Maylam
Writers: Harvey Weinstein and Tony Maylam
USA 1981

"The Burning" is so straightforward it could be a government advisory panel example of the teenagers-in-peril slasher, with a summer camp of high school students being pursued by a maniac with a pair of garden sheers taking up the entire film with little deviation. This simplicity gives the film's other aspects plenty of room to breathe, with a great cast of believable youngsters and an atmospheric lakeside location setting the scene for some old school, bright-red gore (though surprisingly little actual burning).

It takes a while to get going but there are plenty of killings once it does, the garden sheers piercing throats and slicing off fingers, with one astonishing rampage of utter carnage aboard a canoe setting up a devastating scene when it drifts downstream towards the unsuspecting camp. It's filmed beautifully and leaves little room for complaint, but despite being one of the gorier nasties feels a little run-of-the-mill and predictable. Great by teen slasher standards, but falling short of the more intelligent films on the list.

Two things lift "The Burning" considerably: Rick Wakeman's electronic score is fantastic and does a lot for the atmospheric tone of the film, and while it's certainly Goblin-influenced it's a pleasant change to hear a good horror movie score that isn't by the Italian disco-prog-rockers. Secondly and perhaps most importantly "The Burning" stars a young Jason Alexander, aka George Costanza from "Seinfeld", who furthermore has a pretty big part. It's just a shame he isn't one of the ones chopped up with garden sheers. That would have been brilliant.

Original Nasties on Ebay

2009-03-23T14:31:00.009Z

Google alerts has brought my attention to original VHS copies of some of the more infamous Video Nasties - Island of Death, Anthropophagus and the Beast in Heat - for sale on Ebay. Island of Death and Anthropophagus are going for an impressive £57.00 , but the Beast in Heat was sold for a whopping £575.85. The seller says:

"This is a rare opportunity to own what is considered to be the holy grail of the so called video nasties. The Beast in Heat (1977) AKA La Bestia en Calor/SS hell camp/Nazi holocaust/Horrifying experiments of SS last days.

I have searched for this on Ebay many times and have only found the US DVD under the title of SS hell camp. I am not saying that it has never been on Ebay, but if it has been it has been a very rare occurrence...

...This film has been in my possession for 20 Years plus and the picture quality is crisp (for video). The labels are firmly stuck down and look original. There is a Crown video label on the video itself, so this was once in the rental market. There are two sticker on either edge of the video cassette itself that read "warning tampering with this tape could result in loss of membership". these labels are unbroken and have not been tampered with. The sleeve itself is on good quality paper and does look original."

There is part of me that finds the idea of an original, pre-ban British VHS of a film as out-there as the Beast in Heat a tempting idea, but I'm not sure I'd spend close to £600 on it.

Also worth a look are the Ebay forum comments on the item, where this blog is mentioned. Did someone just call me a sick individual?

Delicious

2009-02-17T23:23:00.002Z

I've set up a Delicious account for the Video Nasty Project where I'll be posting any bookmarks relevant to the project. Please feel free to cross-post anything interesting from your own accounts - Video Nasties, horror films, exploitation cinema, censorship - it's all welcome. I've imported some of my own bookmarks to get things started.

http://delicious.com/VideoNastyProject/

Killer Nun

2009-02-16T17:34:00.011Z

Director: Giulio Berruti
Writers: Giulio Berruti and Alberto Tarallo
Italy 1978

Despite a title that suggests a cheap exploitation romp, "Killer Nun" is a surprisingly tasteful production based on the real life story of a Belgian nun, who develops a brain tumour and murders patients in her charge to pay for black market morphine. The morphine angle is played down and the murders played up, with the brain tumour a cause of temporary psychosis that bequests the film a handful of wonderfully surreal Argento-esque murder scenes, spatters of red blood on the dreamy white-and-cream of the rest of the movie.

But while it is subtle, beautifully filmed in parts, and home to some decent acting from La Dolce Vita's Anita Ekberg as Sister Gertrude, I don't want to praise Killer Nun too highly. The workmanlike way it plods through the story makes its eighty minute running time seem a lot longer, and for the most part it plays as an erotic thriller in the mold of Emmanuel and other softcore of the period but without that much actual sex, and the promise of a lesbian romp with Sister Metheus, played by the stunning Paola Morra, that never materialises.

The Argento-influenced death scenes are what makes Killer Nun worth a look. The first gory murder is accompanied by Alessandro Alessandroni's superb twisted disco theme music and sends a shiver up your spine, while a later drawn-out acupuncture torture scene reminded me, with its shallow depth-of-field close-ups and excruciating tension, of Fulci at his best. The dazed atmosphere and muted palette of the rest of the film compliment these scenes perfectly. It is just missing the dynamism that makes the best horror an edge-of-your seat experience even when there isn't anything horrific happening, the gaps filled with flabby storytelling and boring dialogue - a common problem with Video Nasties, but one I'm learning to ignore.

The Real Cannibal Ferox

2009-02-10T14:32:00.002Z

I never really considered that the Cannibal exploitation genre had its basis in anything other than racist myth, my understanding being that cannibalism was restricted to complex cultural rituals for dealing with the dead in some isolated tribal societies. However CNN is reporting a pretty gruesome tribal cannibal murder in the Amazon after which the victim's family "saw his body quartered and his skull hanging on a tree".

I'm intrigued as to how often these reports surface and how many of them turn out to be true. Were the Cannibal exploitation films inspired by reports like this - or more interestingly, are the reports inspired by the films?

Cannibal Ferox

2009-01-21T16:06:00.015Z

Director: Umberto Lenzi
Writer: Umberto Lenzi
USA 1981

Watching the UK release of Cannibal Ferox - cut by a massive five minutes - I came across a problem I thought would have reared its head a lot sooner: a film that has been more or less ruined by the censor's cuts. It still makes sense and there's the odd bit of gore, but the film is so obviously constructed around its nastier, missing scenes that the entire point is lost completely.

I have an uncut version as well (for some reason dubbed in German, which is why I hadn't watched it) so skipped through to take a look at the scenes that are supposedly so horrific they cannot be seen by British eyes. There is some unpleasant animal cruelty which of course would have had to go, and an eye-wateringly nasty sequence where a female character is suspended by the breasts from metal hooks, but other cuts are pretty tame by today’s standards. An eye-gouging scene isn't as bad (or anywhere near as effective) as the one in Zombie Flesh Eaters, and the castration and torture scenes have since been surpassed by relatively mainstream films like the Hostel series. This is a film that would probably benefit from being resubmitted to the BBFC.

Cannibal Ferox isn’t particularly good. It blatantly rips off Cannibal Holocaust, released a year earlier, from plot, characters and anti-Western sentiment right down to the butchery of a turtle, all done with none of the flair, art or melancholy of its infinitely better predecessor. As such it is a proper exploitation movie and possibly of interest culturally, but couple the low quality with the BBFC’s cuts and you get a supremely pointless piece of cinema.

Cannibal Holocaust

2009-01-10T21:52:00.006Z

Director: Ruggero Deodato
Writer: Gianfranco Clerici
USA, 1980

I'm glad I waited until I got hold of an uncut version of this film, and saw it in its full glory without knowing much about it beforehand. It's a powerful, intelligent piece of work, and as one of the more purely exploitative Video Nasties I've seen so far raises some interesting questions about this kind of titillating, mondo film making.

Cannibal Holocaust is split into two acts. The first follows a latter-day explorer to the Amazon as he tries to discover the fate of an earlier expedition. This section is filmed traditionally with fairly high production values, and despite some very nasty scenes promises a pretty run-of-the-mill early eighties horror. The second half is made up of the “found footage” of the previous, doomed expedition, and is where the film gets interesting.

This innovative device was famously a big influence on the Blair Witch Project, and it shows. While Blair Witch refines the technique, the basics are very much the same. It is strange that it took so long for Cannibal Holocaust's influence to filter through, but this can probably be explained by the film's reputation. For a long time it was seen as an exploitation too far, despicable and beyond the pale, and there's no doubt it is a tough film to watch.

The sexually violent scenes are graphic, drawn out and brutal, but I've discussed the ins and outs of this here before so will concentrate on Cannibal Holocaust's infamous animal cruelty scenes. Crucially, these are depictions of actual animal cruelty made for the film, not faked or spliced from documentary footage.

The scene I'd heard most about was the dismembering of a live turtle. Whilst pretty gross (it's certainly put me off eating turtle), the turtle's death is relatively swift, and it doesn't really amount to much more than butchery. A pig is shot and a monkey has the top of its head chopped off – these are worse, as the animals are obviously in distress, but death is still swift. Worse for me was the slow killing of a muskrat in one of the film's opening scenes. The animal screams and fights pathetically for its life, a horrible sight that makes you feel witness to an actual murder. Watching this cruelty perpetrated for entertainment made me think about the countless times its been enacted for my culinary enjoyment. Thankfully now animal cruelty on film is pretty much internationally banned - but given our diets, maybe that itself is a little hypocritical.

These scenes place Cannibal Holocaust firmly in the exploitation genre, and make it one of its most notorious and vilified examples, but the film's found-footage second half gives them a bit of a twist. It shows a group of young explorers' brutal and racist interactions with an Amazonian tribe. There are echoes of the Vietnam War in their attitude, with one scene referencing the My Lai massacre. They are obsessed with filming their actions, and in doing so remove themselves from the cruelty they inflict.

Flashes to a cutting room in New York where TV executives talk about the found footage and its televisual possibilities are heavy handed and remove any subtlety, but do make it clear what Cannibal Holocaust is about: our obsession with violence as titillation, and film as a conduit for this. These ideas are a forerunner of those presented in more recent films like "Man Bites Dog" and "Funny Games". In this light, the animal cruelty scenes take on complex meaning as we begin to question our motives for watching them, in what is perhaps a more brutal exploration of film violence than the aforementioned, more respected and “intelligent” horror movies.

Cannibal Holocaust is another great Video Nasty, an important, ground-breaking and brave film sidelined and vilified for its honest and daring exploration of violence and its meaning. Aside from this it is a cinematic joy, the found footage section being particularly tense, pacey and – unusually for a Video Nasty – bleak and nihilistic. Riz Ortalani's amazing soundtrack, an incongrous mix of “Love Story” style mournful strings and pinging synthesised snares, lift the film from cold horror to a strangely sad look at humanity in all its dysfunction.

Last House on the Left

2008-11-22T02:35:00.007Z

Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Wes Craven
USA, 1972

In interviews Wes Craven expresses regret about some aspects of his first feature, feeling it was too coldly horrific. I agree there are problems, but the middle section of the film, which views the brutal torment of two female victims of a criminal gang with impressive detachment, isn't one of them.

Rather his pussyfooting around the subject, expressed in cuts from the violence to the victims' families and annoying comedy policeman sequences, detract from the cold, drawn-out torture and murder of the two young women which makes this film such a classic. It is only in the final stages of their long suffering that the stupid music and pointless scene cutting finally stops, and it is testament to the power of the scene that it is the one the film is remembered by – in beautiful Autumn woodland, pathetic physical dominance of man over woman is rendered with the unflinching attitude to violence it deserves.

Much talk of Last House on the Left concentrates on its retelling of Ingmar Bergman's “The Virgin Spring”; but this is a distraction, a directorial flourish that has little to do with the film itself. More interesting is Craven's insistence on placing a female character in the gang that carries out the misogynistic murders – Why? Is this a way of distancing himself from what goes on in his film? It doesn't make sense. She is only there to salve the director's conscience and deflect the inevitable criticism films like this receive.

Craven's strengths as an action horror director are revealed in the later revenge scenes, where chainsaws and cut-throat daggers are wielded in quick-fire cuts of exciting physicality. This is the director who made “A Nightmare on Elm Street”: action filled, fun and gory. It's a preview of eighties Hollywood slashers in all their daft glory.

Last House on the Left is a mess, but interesting all the same. The actual horror is horrific and deservedly notorious, yet infused with a strange reluctance on the director's part. The action of the final scenes is effective and Craven seems much more comfortable with that style of film. But given the power of that Autumn woodland scene, who knows what a director of his skill could have come up with if it was the other way round.

Zombie Flesh Eaters

2008-11-05T23:40:00.013Z

Director: Lucio Fulci
Writers: Elisa Brigante and Dardano Sacchetti
USA/Italy 1979

Not one I was looking forward to watching again to be honest, but on second viewing it wasn't that bad at all (maybe my quality threshold has lowered since starting this blog). Nicely summed up by Mark Kermode while listing zombie movies to watch for Halloween in his latest BBC Radio 5 podcast as “Rubbish, but not bad rubbish”, Zombie Flesh Eaters is pretty much what you'd expect from a zombie movie, with some iconic scenes thrown in.

It's set largely on the Caribbean island fiefdom of a mad doctor, whose experiments with the living dead have left him with a makeshift hospital of full of chained-up zombies. Unusually for a zombie film actual voodoo legend explains the chaos, while a functional plot is used to string together gory set pieces in proper exploitation fashion. The most well-known of these, the infamous eyeball scene, is joined by undead Conquistadors rising from their graves, a gory gut-eating scene that pre-dates Romero's Day of the Dead, and nothing less than an underwater fight between a zombie and a shark, done with a lot more flair and technical expertise than you'd imagine.

In fact, where it matters – the gore scenes – Zombie Flesh Eaters' production values are pretty high, and will have the squeamish covering their eyes. This being Fulci there's also plenty of nudity, with the gorgeous Auretta Gay getting her kit off more than once. There's certainly enough going on to keep you interested.

It doesn't get boring, the zombies keep on coming, and in my opinion Zombie Flesh Eaters vies with its sequel City of the Living Dead, a film which somehow escaped the BBFC's attentions, as Fulci's best. Both films are scored by Fabio Frizzi, whose strident yet melancholy electronic music is amongst the best in Italian exploitation cinema.

Death Trap, aka Eaten Alive

2008-10-30T15:34:00.013Z

Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Alvin L Fast, Kim Henkel and Mardi Rustam
USA 1977

From the best film on the list so far to the worst - and both by the same director.

It's difficult to say just what makes Death Trap so bad, but its early promise is certainly a factor. With a decent budget to spend Hooper shoots on a fake, creepy Deep South swampland set, all dry ice swirling mists and red light district lighting. It kicks off with an anal sex-obsessed redneck driving a woman out of a whorehouse and into the clutches of a psychotic Norman Bates-style hotel owner, played by Neville Brand, and his pet alligator. What follows has all Hooper's trademarks - a well thought-out sound design of nighttime crickets and croaking frogs, mixed with a few jungle sounds and synth squelches for good measure; looming wide-angle close-ups and scenes shot from odd angles; bad trip atmosphere; a signature over-the-top crazed redneck performance from Neville Brand. But it just doesn't gel.

For a start there isn't any tension. The film uses fight and chase scenes right from the beginning and never slows or ups the pace, the result a constant and profoundly irritating Keystone Cops effect as people run up and down stairs and round and round the hotel. This is broken up in places by character exposition as people arrive at the hotel, but none of the characters are interesting or sympathetic. I felt indifferent to them, and couldn't engage with the film.

Worst of all though is that Hooper has descended into self-parody. The hysterical if-you-don't-laugh-you'll-cry humour of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been replaced by the dreaded knowing wink of irony. Everything is just a bit too silly or played up for the camera, and the dialogue is shouted and stagey. Towards the end a horribly misjudged sequence copies an iconic scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to little point or effect. It smacks of desperation, and you realise Hooper must have really struggled to follow his 1974 classic.

Hooper fans quite like Death Trap and I'm going against the grain in finding it so bad. So much so in fact that I've sat through this tedious and disjointed mess twice thinking I might have missed something, both times resorting to drink to get me through, glancing at the clock and praying for it to end. Without the low budget charm of other terrible films on the Video Nasty list, Death Trap leaves you with nothing to think about, nothing to laugh at, and no reason for it to be so bad. The sad thing is that it was probably more of a disappointment to its director after his amazing debut than to his fans, and it shows.

Twitter

2008-10-14T16:21:00.009+01:00

I started this blog as a more focused and hopefully more interesting version of what I originally wanted to do, which was to review every single film I saw. Fortunately "microblogging" site Twitter.com has arrived, giving me the opportunity to do that in a pithy, one-sentence form that appeals to my love of keeping it short and to the point.

So if you'd like to see what I think of the other films I watch, along with my opinions on lots of other stuff I know nothing about, come and follow me!

Twitter.com/VideoNasty

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

2008-10-11T00:09:00.015+01:00

Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
USA 1974

The first time I saw this film, alone in the middle of the night, I received a phone call halfway through from a friend who thought she was being followed after getting out of a taxi. Staying on the phone with her while she found a police station with Leatherface’s chainsaw screaming in the background isn’t something I’ll forget in a hurry.

At the time the film had an almost holy mystique after being banned in the UK for so long. I was filled with anticipation and dread before watching it - and the unfortunate events of the night aside, it scared me rigid. Last month I picked up an uncut DVD version for three quid in my local Tesco. How times change.

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is the most respected, most influential and probably the most frightening film on the list. It excels in every area. The camera work is astonishing in its originality, the direction tight, the pacing unique. It eschews the traditional murky, dark tones of the time in favour of dripping colour, sunsets and sunrises providing a lurid background to the horror. And that horror hits you like a smack in the face, an abrupt switch part-way through the film that doesn’t let up until the very end.

Hooper uses unusual camera techniques – low level tracking shots, burnt-out lens flare, wide-angle lenses for closeups – to create a deeply unsettling, claustrophobic atmosphere. There are iconic scenes throughout – the blood-soaked, sobbing figure of actress Marilyn Burns as she is tracked at low-angle through sun-parched undergrowth; an extreme close-up of her terrified, fluttering eye; Leatherface's psychotic dance in front of a blinding sun. It's all shot on colour-drenched 16mm film, high-contrast and hyperreal, with an amazing sound design of chugging diesel generators, gibbering madmen and incessant, terrified screaming.

The subject matter and rural setting are commonplace nowadays but were unusual at the time. No-one had thought to exploit the city audience's fear of that other America of the isolated, inbred redneck. Hooper does it expertly, and though the formula has been imitated many times it's never been topped. There's even a queasy humour in there, hysterical in the literal sense, hardly ever commented on because the horror swamps it so utterly.

And it is absolutely terrifying. The speed at which the horror appears and then attacks with double-punches of cinematic shock and sickening cruelty leaves you breathless. The body count mounts so rapidly it seems the film must run out of steam but it doesn't, switching expertly to the drawn-out torment of a single character and a bleak, soul-destroying finale.

It's almost an insult to call this masterpiece a horror film, relegating it to the ghetto of the genre movie where it has never received the mainstream critical acclaim it deserves. But it is a horror film through and through, building on those that came before it and sticking to the same claustrophobic, tension-building formula that makes previous classics like “The Birds” and “Night of the Living Dead” so effective. It's proof that the horror genre is a vital and innovative part of cinema, driving the industry and giving it much-needed kicks up the arse, while remaining resolutely underground, independent and subversive.

Shockspoitation

2008-10-01T12:34:00.009+01:00

The guys over at Horroretc recorded a nice, long podcast a couple of weeks ago covering a selection of films they deem to be the most shocking of the exploitation genre: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Last House on the Left, Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave and Thriller (the Swedish rape-revenge film, not Michael Jackson's admittedly brilliant music video).

The Horroretc guys are great reviewers, and I was pleased at their recognition of the use of sound as a horror device in a lot of these films - notably the constant hum of the generator in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Cannibal Holocaust's incongruous, gently melancholic soundtrack, which adds a dimension of sadness to the all-out gore.

They see these films as grueling, difficult and very effective horror movies, but otherwise opine that they have little merit - before going on to contradict themselves in long discussions about possible meaning and director intent. This is most notable their review of I Spit on Your Grave, which they dismiss as despicable before descending into a heated discussion about its possible feminist angle. I love the way I Spit on Your Grave provokes this discussion every single time, without fail.

The New York Ripper

2008-09-20T21:56:00.031+01:00

Director: Lucio Fulci
Writers: Gianfranco Clerici and Lucio Fulci
Italy 1982

Not strictly a Video Nasty this one, as it was banned prior to the 1984 Video Recordings Act and doesn't appear on the list. Nevertheless it’s a banned horror movie from the same era: a gory crime thriller in the Italian giallo tradition, with a dubious line in misogyny which somehow manages to stay just the right side of hateful.

The film tracks a Manhattan serial killer, following the movements of his victims and the police before revealing his identity in classic whodunit fashion. The serial killer's shtick is to quack and talk like a duck - actually pretty effective - the reasons for which are hurriedly and confusedly explained at the end of the film.

His victims are women and the murders sexualised, a stripper getting bottled in the vagina being one memorable scene. An extensive sub-plot follows a married woman’s risky sexual escapades and is quite well treated in the context of erotic cinema of the time, her inevitable comeuppance slightly off-key and ambiguous. The film’s best scene is a drawn-out erotic encounter she has in a seedy bar where she battles her lust and propriety at one and the same time, pulled between the two, neither winning.

The location work in “The New York Ripper” made the film for me. Fulci uses the old, grimy New York of the early 1980s to great effect, shooting on the Staten Island Ferry and in rotting tenement blocks; Puerto Rican bars and the mean streets of Lower Manhattan; and best of all, in the live sex shows and grindhouse cinemas of 42nd Street - a fine piece of self-reference that must have made the film a joy to see in those self-same theatres. Like a lot of these old horror films, it left me nostalgic for a time I never knew.

Should psychotics be allowed to watch horror films?

2008-09-09T21:01:00.006+01:00

According to the Guardian a dangerous man in psychiatric care built up a collection of horror films while in hospital, and was accompanied to the cinema to watch horror films, before going on to rape a fourteen year-old girl - something that has played a significant part in his trial and upset relatives of the victim.

One does wonder what the hospital’s policy was. That he was also allowed to build up a collection of pornography is perhaps more perplexing. However, in the absence of any evidence that links horror films to actual violence, a hospital policy that refused access to horror films would have its basis in something other than medical science, and could possibly be an infringement of a patient’s rights.

It’s a difficult issue. Should psychiatric hospitals err on the side of caution despite the evidence, or do psychiatric patients have a right to access the same media as the rest of us? Of course, as the man in question had killed before and had a history of violence, his access to horror films may have no relevance at all.

Sexy Nazis

2008-07-09T14:45:00.017+01:00

In response to the Max Mosely vs News of the World trial and in particular Mosely's claim that he can "can think of few things more unerotic than Nazi role play", critic Danny Leigh has written a short piece about sexy Nazis in film on the Guardian website. Unfortunately he's missed out the Video Nasties, but readers' comments fill in the gaps with mentions of "SS Experiment Camp" and "Love Camp 7" (as well as the classic Two Ronnies series-within-a-series "The Worm that Turned", much to my delight).

I didn't find "SS Hell Camp" in the slightest bit sexy, but should mention that lead actress Macha Magall did look pretty hot in an SS uniform.

The Funhouse

2008-07-08T12:09:00.021+01:00

Director: Tobe Hooper
Writer: Lawrence Block
USA 1981

"The Funhouse" is a fairly traditional horror offering from Tobe Hooper, but one that nonetheless allows him to explore his love of gaudy, redneck Americana - in this case a creepy carnival that comes to town, much to the the delight of a group of pot smoking teenagers who decide to spend the night there. The carnival set-up is handled as expertly as you'd expect from Hooper, it being just his sort of thing, with unsettling sideshows, grotesque characters and (my favourite) what appear to be genuine deformed cows in an animal freakshow.

However "The Funhouse" takes quite a while to get going, and when it does it isn't a patch on "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre". Apart from an agonising chase scene set in the mechanical innards of a ghost train ride, there just isn't that much in the way of thrills. It's actually quite a slow film. Not necessarily a bad thing of course, but in this case it jars with the gaudy horror theme.

It's widely thought that Hooper lost his way after "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", or even that it was a chance movie and he actually isn't that great a director. What can't be denied though is that his peculiar take on America has been a big influence on contemporary horror. It is great to watch a film like "The Funhouse" and see where the ideas in Rob Zombie's and Eli Roth's films come from. Unfortunately though, away from that colourful redneck vibe "The Funhouse" is a pretty boring and unremarkable mainstream horror movie.

SS Hell Camp, aka The Beast in Heat

2008-07-02T15:37:00.021+01:00

Director: Luigi Batzella
Writers: Luigi Batzella and Lorenzo Artale
Italy 1977

I didn't think there'd be anything on the Video Nasty list so tasteless it actually deserves to be banned, but it's hard to defend this Italian Nazi exploitation movie. The plot, for what it's worth, has a saucy female SS guard inject a caged man with a serum that turns him into a rampant sex beast. The beast is then used to torment the wives and girlfriends of local partisans, so they confess to their activities. The film ends with a partisan raid on the SS camp, and the tables being turned on the female SS guard.

I'm not going to be coy about what makes this film so distasteful. Several scenes are very unpleasant to watch. In the opening sequence, the caged beast rapes a woman to death, the rape continuing into necrophilia after her death. Later in a Nazi raid on a nearby village a woman is shot in the pubis by an SS guard. The following scene has a woman being tortured with electrodes on her vagina as she is strapped to a table. This isn't subtly done - her vagina is in full view and fake blood runs down her thighs. Later the caged beast eats parts of a woman's pubis while she is still alive. The film ends with the female SS guard getting her "comeuppance" by being raped to death by the beast in the cage.

To a certain extent these scenes are mitigated by appalling special effects. There is a lot of underpant wearing and flaccid tackle waggling about in the rape scenes, the fake blood is bright red and copiously splashed about, and in purely visual terms the scene where the beast eats the woman's pubis is farcical. But it is the casual misogyny of this sexualised violence that is disturbing, not its realism. No matter how obviously faked a female corpse dripping in blood being raped is, it is still an upsetting sight. And a screaming woman undergoing vaginal torture is about as much as I can take, no matter how bad the acting or props.

What makes this worse is a lack of context. These scenes, and indeed the film itself, have no point, aim or agenda. It is pure exploitation. There is nothing wrong with exploitation for its own sake - I wouldn't be writing this blog if I thought there was - but in this case the exploitation is of sexual violence towards women explicitly for the titillation of a male audience.

This sets "SS Hell Camp" apart from other contentious films on the Video Nasty list. While opinions on, for example, I Spit On Your Grave's artistic merit vary, it is at least controversial. Its subtleties, presentation and revenge-driven plot provoke debate about a difficult subject. "The Beast in Heat" however is just badly-made, violent pornography, any merit lying solely in the unintentional humour that so often runs through films of its ilk.

"SS Hell Camp" is of course still banned in the UK. Despite an innate feeling that a film this ridiculous shouldn't be censored in such a heavy-handed manner, I find it virtually impossible to defend. But more than that I wonder about a film audience that made exploitation cinema like this a viable business model in the first place. This is an audience that no doubt nowadays finds its kicks in the darker corners of the internet. Just how big is it?

The Evil That Men Do

2008-06-26T14:39:00.006+01:00

Another mention of Teeth in yesterdays Guardian, this time in a feature by Kira Cochrane on rape-revenge cinema. Cochrane is left feeling uneasy by Teeth and goes on to discuss films such as Thelma and Lousie, Dirty Weekend, Ms 45 and inevitably, I Spit On your Grave.

Given her problems with Teeth I wasn't expecting her to enjoy I Spit On Your Grave, but she is surprisingly positive. She thinks cuts made by the BBFC may have improved the film by abstracting its long and difficult rape scene into shots of the assailants' and victim's faces, which is an interesting point. I've just ordered the uncut Region 1 version of the film, having watched the cut version on release here in the UK a couple of times, and am looking forward to seeing how different it is.

A few months ago Lionel Shriver, also writing in the Guardian, reviewed I Spit On Your Grave in a feature about the possible reviving of the Video Nasty list that I missed at the time. She took a less charitable view of the film, inexplicably describing it as the "Lamest Picture Ever Banned" (she obviously hasn't seen Night of the Bloody Apes), adding that "the film's quasi-feminist message of female empowerment is merely an excuse for prurience."

If nothing else, it's good to see that I Spit On Your Grave is still dividing critics after all these years.

The Warm, Rubbery Love of Video Nasties

2008-06-24T09:54:00.012+01:00

Mark Kermode expounds on the delights of Video Nasties in the latest edition of the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo Radio 5 Live podcast, while reviewing the interesting-sounding satirical horror movie Teeth. The film reminds the Good Doctor of the Video Nasty era, and he opines how nice it was of the BBFC to put all that wonderful, trashy horror on an easy-to-follow list - giving particular mention to The Witch Who Came From The Sea, which he reckons would have sunk into undeserved obscurity if it wasn't for the BBFC. It's nice to have your opinions confirmed by someone as brainy as Kermode.

Filth

2008-06-13T23:53:00.025+01:00

"Filth", the Julie Walters biopic of Mary Whitehouse shown on BBC2 a couple of weeks ago, generated a fair bit of comment in the press and was warmly received. The dramatisation followed the early years of her campaigning, and didn’t stretch as far as the Video Nasty era.

A rehabilitation of sorts, “Filth” concerned itself with Mary Whitehouse the person, presenting a human side to the famously single-minded media campaigner, and her admittedly courageous confrontations with the then totally unaccountable BBC. She was portrayed as a plucky, slightly batty English eccentric with some rather old-fashioned beliefs.

To get a better insight into Whitehouse I went down to the BFI on London’s South Bank to make use of their new public access archives, where I found an earlier BBC film, an Everyman documentary from 1977 called “Blasphemy at the Old Bailey.” This impressively simple and informative film followed the trial of the British gay newspaper Gay News for its publication of the poem “The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name”, famously the only work of literature still banned in the UK*, a prosecution brought by Mary Whitehouse.

“Blasphemy at the Old Bailey” reports on Whitehouse’s reasons for bringing her prosecution against Gay News in a series of short interviews. Here we see the Christian morals skated over in “Filth” explored, and they are frighteningly narrow and small-minded. She talks of the people involved in Gay News as “people who have turned their back on Christ” who strike at the very heart of the public, as “religious feelings are a person’s essence.” The trial was “somewhere where the great spiritual truths of Christendom are being fought out.” “I did what I did in the name of the Lord.”

The poem is about a Roman centurion who has sex with the dead body of Christ, an act through which he finds salvation. Although like most art its message is ambiguous, it is not a difficult piece of work. It juxtaposes its shocking content with love and spiritual ecstasy. Whilst technically necrophilic sex with the body of Christ is quite obviously blasphemous, in the poem that blasphemy is comprehensibly undermined by religious redemption.

That Mary Whitehouse didn’t understand this shows her disinterest in the subject she devoted her life to. Art was alien to her: all she saw were selected affronts to her values leaping from the page, their context lost. She completely misunderstood the things she read and watched. Yet Whitehouse dictated the censorship debate in Britain for decades, and was instrumental in the creation of the Video Nasty list - amongst much worse things of course, the sentencing of the editor of Gay News for Blasphemy being one.

In some ways Julie Walters’ affectionate dramatisation is fair enough. Now she’s gone, we can chuckle at Whitehouse’s crusade and be thankful things aren’t like that any more. But we shouldn't forget that through a mixture of arrogance, stupidity and hatred Mary Whitehouse did serious damage to the arts in Britain.

--------------------------------------

*The last piece of literature to be banned in the UK was the 1989 novel “Lord Horror” by David Britton, a gay sadomasochistic vision of an alternative Nazi-ruled UK which libeled the then Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, James Anderton. The ban was later overturned.

Contamination

2008-05-21T09:51:00.016+01:00

Director: Luigi Cozzi
Writer: Luigi Cozzi
Italy 1980

One of a handful of science fiction films on the list, Contamination starts promisingly with a helicopter flight over New York, featuring shots of the same Roosevelt Island housing projects that provide the setting for the US version of Dark Water. Excitingly the credits promise an appearance by Ian McCulloch, though to my disappointment this turned out to be some actor and not the floppy-haired founder of 1980s indie band Echo and the Bunnymen.

One of many films of the time inspired by Alien – including John Carpenter's superb The Thing and the gloriously silly British sci-fi horror Inseminoid – Contamination dispenses with internal logic and ups the gore, the result being what at first seems to be a very watchable, surprisingly pacey piece of B-movie fun. As in Alien, acid blood and bursting stomachs play a part, though ingeniously a mere touch of the alien blood in Contamination causes you to literally explode - a filmic device used as frequently as you’d hope.

Unfortunately, after about half an hour of pulsating alien eggs and exploding scientists Contamination loses its way and turns into a boring thriller. There are a couple more decent scenes and it is almost rescued by the daft finale, but ultimately Contamination is a disappointing experience, especially after such a promising start.

Some mention should be made of Goblin, the Italian prog rock band who provide the soundtrack to so many Italian Video Nasties, as this is the first film I’ve reviewed that features them. Though not up to the amazing standards set by the soundtracks to Tenebrae and Suspiria, the music and abstract sound effects in Contamination are well above average and make the long stretches of tedium that little bit more bearable.

Whitehouse

2008-05-20T14:00:00.006+01:00

Julie Walters is to play Mary Whitehouse, the most famous and outspoken critic of horror movies in the early 1980s and one of the driving forces behind the Video Nasty list, in a BBC2 play on Wednesday 28th of May at 9pm. Although I’m obviously not a great fan of Whitehouse and her moralist Christian agenda, I don’t know much about her and look forward to seeing it.

In a Daily Mail article Walters, formerly a critic of Whitehouse, says she softened her opinion of her a little while researching the part, citing early campaigning against that all-pervasive modern bogeyman, child pornography. I’ll reserve judgement for now.

Fight For Your Life

2008-05-07T11:31:00.018+01:00

Director: Robert A Endelson
Writer: Straw Weisman
USA 1977

This is a very controversial film, and the only film from the Video Nasty list I’ve seen so far that’s still banned in the UK. "Fight For Your Life"’s notoriety doesn’t derive from its violence – though there’s plenty of that – but from its racially inflammatory content. Following the ordeal of a middle-class black family held hostage in their home by a racist gang, "Fight for Your Life" promised to actually shock, and I approached it with some trepidation. I seriously wasn’t expecting the powerful, courageous political work I was about to see.

The first thing to strike me about the film was its surprisingly high production values. Directed, edited and shot professionally with real artistic flare on high-quality film, this is about as far from "Night of the Bloody Apes" as you can get. The actors can actually act, and the dialogue is nothing short of superb – central to its success in dealing with its controversial subject matter.

"Fight For Your Life" is not a racist film. That it was released under the name "Getting Even" in cinemas in black areas of American cities more than hints at its resolution. Throughout the film clever and thoughtful scenes turn the tables on the kidnappers as they torment the family; with the father, a liberal Christian clergyman, showing civilised restraint at odds with the racial stereotypes held by the gang.

The language is strong, but we live in an age desensitised to the use of the word “nigger” in the arts - though thankfully we rarely hear it from a white mouth nowadays. Worse are scenes where the family are forced to act out racial stereotypes, for example being forced to tap-dance and sing at gunpoint. The way this is turned around on the captors is a clever, subtle and moving piece of cinema, and places this film miles above most of the others on the Video Nasty list.

Much of the violence is relatively mild - punches are quite obviously pulled – but there are a couple of very strong scenes, and one in particular is very shocking and would never make it past the British censors. But like "The Witch Who Came From the Sea", this is an unusual film that bluntly tackles the social issues of its day; though unlike "The Witch Who Came From the Sea", it is well structured, directed and acted, and tackles its subject matter with measured, well thought-out intelligence rather than the unsubtle cosh of cod surrealism.

I watched this film weeks ago and have struggled to write a review that does it justice. While I can see why it is still banned in this country for its inflammatory content, I despair that something this socially intelligent – and perhaps more importantly, so direct – isn’t available to a wider audience.

There are some Video Nasties that go beyond the joy of trash and are truly great: "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", "Evil Dead", "Last House On The Left". This criminally ignored film joins them as one of the best films from the list, though in this case for its social comment rather than its horror.

Mondo movies and video games

2008-04-10T14:22:00.006+01:00

Ben Howard and Dan Auty over at Mondo Movie make a brief mention of British media scares around violent films in their latest podcast, in this case the furore that surrounded the release of Man Bites Dog, Reservoir Dogs and the Bad Lieutenant in 1992. Ben and Dan are steeped in exploitation cinema and have a much longer relationship with it than I have, having been part of the ‘zine scene in the 1980s and 1990s, and seem quite unconcerned about these panics. Their take is that these things happen from time to time and never amount to much.

They point out that violent video games are now taking much of the attention away from violent films, most recently illustrated by censorial dithering and media outcry over Manhunt 2, which has finally been granted a release. Most of the fuss around video games seems to be centred on their availability to children. New laws are being mooted which will toughen up present regulations on selling violent video games to children under 18.

This is a welcome change in the parameters of the debate. Whereas in the past films were banned because of the possibility they could fall into children’s hands, now talk is of tougher policing of 18 certificates, stiffer fines for retailers and the possibility of prosecuting parents who buy 18 certificate games for their children. This much more sensible approach treats adults as adults while protecting children, and is to be welcomed.

Night of the Bloody Apes

2008-04-08T12:05:00.011+01:00

Director: René Cardona
Writers: René Cardona and René Cardona Jr
Mexico 1972

"Night of the Bloody Apes" is a Mexican exploitation piece from 1972, with all the appalling production values that suggests. There are occasional bursts of unintended humour – not least that to be had by emphasising the “bloody” in the title – but overall this dull, simplistic film has little going for it. The version I watched, a Satanica VHS release from the late 1990s, is apparently cut by one minute, but even so it’s difficult to see how this incredibly cheap film could provide any real gore or scares.

The plot is basic Frankenstein stuff. A mad surgeon replaces his terminally ill son’s heart with that of a gorilla, which transforms him into a half-man, half ape creature - or at least a man in cracked, slathered on makeup who makes silly growling noises. In the build up to the transformation, the unfortunate gorilla is portrayed by a man in a particularly bad monkey suit alternated with stock footage of an orang-utan. And yes, there’s only one bloody ape, despite the title’s claim otherwise. Inevitably the ape-man goes on the rampage, dispatching with canoodling couples in the park, before a predictable King Kong finale.

None of the gore in the version I saw was worse than the average Hammer Horror, and I find it difficult to see why this film had to be banned. I can only conclude the BBFC took one look at the title and, realising no one would care, put it on the list anyway. Appalling behavior outside any sensible definition of a censor’s remit, but it’s hard to argue they did us a disservice.

The Witch Who Came from the Sea

2008-03-15T01:45:00.021Z

Director: Matt Cimber
Writer: Robert Thom
USA 1976

From rape to castration on the ever-cheerful videonastyproject blog! As well as the aforementioned emasculation, group sex, paedophilia and laughably small quantities of Class C drugs abound in this low-budget 1976 indie, but it is by no means the trash the censors apparently thought.

The title is from Botticelli’s "The Birth of Venus", a witch born in the sea of the water-borne sperm of a castrated god. A reproduction of the painting adorns the wall of one of the sleazy men the heroine, Molly, castrates throughout the film as she moves through the poisoned idyll of California beach life.

"The Witch Who Came from the Sea" is a blunt, direct, overtly feminist film. The exploitation genre’s usual disregard for acting and character development in this case works in the film’s favour, with Molly as a cipher for an entire sex’s revenge on the latent need for dominance in male sexuality. The supposedly liberal sexual mores of the time are exposed as a male-centric confidence trick, as any sexual aggression on the promiscuous Molly’s part is answered with snarled exclamations of “bitch”, “cocksucker” and most regularly and memorably, “cunt” – but Molly is no victim, and everyone gets their comeuppance.

It’s interesting that Molly’s sexual conquests never cross the line into rape – instead, their sexism is in the context of love play, their grinning faces oblivious to the offence they are causing. It isn’t one-dimensional either, tenderness often preceding and following outbursts of misogyny. In a refreshing role-reversal, it’s the men who are the lost, fucked-up, delicate little flowers in this horror movie. Molly turns on the men in what is presented as a Jackal and Hyde transformation, which we learn from flashbacks is a consequence of sexual abuse she suffered as a child. This underdeveloped idea is used to drive the film's plot, but has the side effect of presenting male violence as an ongoing constant in Molly's life, and by implication the female experience.

Like pretty much every other film that will feature on this blog, the good bits are interspersed with sections of plodding dialogue, and its rich ideas are underpinned with clichéd, tedious plotting. But no matter. The Witch Who Came from the Sea is an unusual and powerful piece of work. Although there are a couple of disturbing scenes, it is remarkably gore-free and intelligent. That the BBFC banned a film so obviously attempting – and succeeding – to question the liberal sexual mores of its time is a damning example of the conservative, reactionary institution it once was.

On the other hand, without the allure of the banned label this film could well have sunk into obscurity like many other low-budget grindhouse films of the nineteen-seventies. The Video Nasty label gives The Witch Who Came From the Sea a notoriety it doesn’t deserve, but may well end up giving it the audience it does.

Banned again?

2008-03-07T19:37:00.013Z

Last month saw the introduction of a private members bill by Conservative MP Julian Brazier to allow MPs to override BBFC classification decisions, with the old Video Nasty list in mind. It all seems pretty irrelevent until you see he has considerable support on both sides of the Commons, and even recognition of sorts from Gordon Brown who "expressed his concern" about the availability of the films according to the Guardian.

In an article for the Cornerstone Group, Julian Brazier MP drags up the discredited media scare stories surrounding the Jamie Bulger murder case, and more unusually an episode of the BBC TV drama "Casualty", but also touches on the controversial subject of depictions of rape in cinema. In light of a recent spate of sexualised murders in the UK, this is something worth looking at.

Whether onscreen sexual violence influences men to rape or not - and most evidence says it doesn't - banning films that depict it is effectively banning artisitic exploration of the subject. Films like Irreversible, I Spit On Your Grave and The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael approach the subject in ambiguous, challenging ways absent in other areas of the arts. Unfortunately murder, rape and violence are part of our lives, and as such need to be addressed as a subject.

That Julian Brazier doesn't understand the subtleties of horror cinema, no doubt through disinterest, is fair enough. But I can never understand the mindset that forms an aggressive opinion on something without taking the time to research and understand it.

Don't Look in the Basement

2008-03-07T14:44:00.021Z

Director: SF Brownrigg
Writer: Tim Pope
USA 1973

It's difficult to know where to start this blog -- I've seen a few of the films from the Video Recordings Act 1984 list already, but feel it would be cheating to write reviews years later without watching them again. On the other hand, as anyone who has watched much low budget exploitation cinema knows, sitting through some of them twice would be akin to torture.

So I've decided to compromise, and review the last Video Nasty I saw before drawing a line under my previous viewing and starting again, repeats and all. Funnily enough this happened to be a film I wouldn't have minded sitting through again.

"Don't Look in the Basement" is a 1973 film by maverick Texan director SF Brownrigg. Set in a lunatic asylum complete with a domineering matriarch head nurse, the film aimlessly follows a handful of patients before delivering a twist that makes the whole thing worth while.

For a number of reasons "Don't Look in the Basement" is perhaps the ideal film to start this blog with, being a great example of what gives exploitation cinema its appeal. So low budget it appears to have been filmed exclusively in someone's house, this constraint nevertheless creates a sense of claustrophobia that fits the subject matter perfectly. The amateur actors have a great laugh playing the lunatics, and there are some funny over the top performances.

But the most interesting thing about "Don't Look in the Basement" is that deep inside there is a serious arthouse film trying desperately to burst out. Out of necessity, young directors of the time often dressed serious work in gore and blood to get financial backing and a viable release. In the case of "Don't Look in the Basement" this is laughable -- tame, hurriedly made gore scenes have been tagged on at the beginning and end, and when its status was finally reviewed by the BBFC in 2005 the film was only awarded a 15 certificate. The film's original title, "The Forgotten", has a resonance lost on backers who changed it to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Not to say the film isn't challenging to watch. Much of it is rambling and pointless, with most of the dialogue seemingly inserted just to fill time (which it quite possibly was). A misogynist streak typical of the era ruins a lot of the humour, and the acting is of course atrocious. However, the ideas behind the film, claustrophobic atmosphere and obvious passion with which it was made make "Don't Look in the Basement" a film worth seeing.

The Project

2008-03-06T14:41:00.008Z

In 1984, the British Conservative government banned scores of horror films under the Video Recordings Act in response to a media orchestrated moral panic. They became known as Video Nasties. Good sense was gradually restored, and since the mid 1990s most of these films have become available again. There are 73 Video Nasties in all, and I aim to watch them all.

Absurd (original title: Rosso Sangue -- released with 2m 32s cut in 1983)
The Anthropophagous Beast (original title: Antropophagus -- released with approximately 3m of pre-cuts in 2002)
Axe! (original title: Lisa, Lisa -- re-released uncut in 2005)
The Beast in Heat (original title: La bestia in Calore) (Banned outright)
The Beyond (original title: E tu vivrai nel terrore - L'Aldilà -- re-released uncut in 2001)
Blood Feast (re-released uncut in 2005)
Blood Rites (original title: The Ghastly Ones) (Banned outright)
Bloody Moon (original title: Die Säge des Todes -- released with 1m 20s cut in 1993)
The Bogey Man (original title: The Boogeyman -- re-released uncut in 2000)
The Burning (re-released uncut in 2001)
Cannibal Apocalypse (original title: Apocalypse Domani -- released with 2s cut in 2005)
Cannibal Ferox (released with approximately 5m of pre-cuts plus 6s of additional cuts in 2000)
Cannibal Holocaust (released in 2001 with 5m 44s cut to remove all scenes of animal cruelty)
Cannibal Man (original title: La Semana del Asesino -- released with 3s cut in 1993)
Cannibal Terror (original title: Terror Caníbal -- released uncut in 2003)
Contamination (released uncut in 2004 with a 15 rating)
Dead & Buried (re-released uncut in 1999)
Death Trap (original title: Eaten Alive -- re-released uncut in 2000)
Deep River Savages (original title: Il paese del sesso selvaggio -- released with 3m 45s cut in 2003)
Delirium (released with 16s cut in 1987)
Devil Hunter (original title: Il cacciatore di uomini) (Banned outright)
Don't Go In The House (released with 3m 7s cut in 1987)
Don't Go in the Woods (released uncut in 2007)
Don't Go Near the Park (released uncut in 2006)
Don't Look in the Basement (original title: The Forgotten -- released uncut in 2005 with a 15 rating)
The Dorm That Dripped Blood -- re-released with 10s cut in 2001)
The Driller Killer (released with cuts in 1999 - re-released uncut in 2002)
The Evil Dead (re-released uncut in 2001)
Evilspeak (re-released uncut in 1999)
Exposé (re-released with approximately 30s cut in 2006)
Faces of Death (released with 2m 19s cut in 2003)
Fight For Your Life (Banned outright)
Flesh for Frankenstein (re-released uncut in 2006)
Forest of Fear (original title: Bloodeaters) (Banned outright)
Frozen Scream (Banned outright)
The Funhouse (released uncut in 1987)
Gestapo's Last Orgy (original title: L'ultima orgia del III Reich) (Banned outright)
The House by the Cemetery (original title: Quella villa accanto al cimitero -- re-released with 33s cut in 2001)
House on the Edge of the Park (original title: La casa sperduta nel parco -- released with 11m 43s cut in 2002)
Human Experiments (released with 26s cut in 1994)
I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses (released with 1m 6s cut in 1986)
I Spit On Your Grave (original title: Day of the Woman -- released with 7m 2s cut in 2001)
Inferno (re-released with 20s cut in 1993)
Island of Death (original title: Ta Pedhia tou dhiavolou -- released with 4m 9s cut in 2002)
Killer Nun (original title: Suor Omicidi -- re-released uncut in 2006)
The Last House on the Left (released with 31s cut in 2003)
Late Night Trains (original title: L'ultimo treno della notte -- released uncut in 2008)
Living Dead At Manchester Morgue (original title: Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti -- re-released uncut in 2002)
Love Camp 7 (Banned outright)
Madhouse (original title: There Was a Little Girl -- released uncut in 2004)
Mardi Gras Massacre (Banned outright)
Night of the Bloody Apes (original title: La Horripilante bestia humana -- released with approximately 1m of pre-cuts in 1999)
Night of the Demon (released with 1m 41s cut in 1994)
Nightmare Maker (Banned outright)
Nightmare in a Damaged Brain (re-released with pre-cuts in 2005)
Possession (released uncut in 1999)
Prisoner of the Cannibal God (original title: La montagna del dio cannibale -- released with 2m 6s cut in 2001)
Revenge of the Bogey Man (original title: Boogeyman II -- released with additional footage in 2003)
Shogun Assassin (re-released uncut in 1999)
The Slayer (re-released uncut in 2001)
Snuff (released uncut in 2003)
SS Experiment Camp (original title: Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur -- released uncut in 2005)
Tenebrae (original title: Tenebre -- re-released uncut in 2003)
Terror Eyes (original title: Night School -- released with 1m 16s cut in 1987)
The Toolbox Murders (released with 1m 46s cut in 2000)
Twitch of the Death Nerve (original title: Reazione a catena -- released with 43s cut in 1994)
Unhinged (released uncut in 2004)
Visiting Hours (released with approximately 2m cut in 1986)
The Werewolf and the Yeti (original title: La Maldición de la bestia) (Banned outright)
The Witch Who Came From the Sea (released uncut in 2006)
Women Behind Bars (original French title: Des diamants pour l'enfer) (Banned outright)
Xtro (released uncut in 1987)
Zombie Creeping Flesh (original title: Virus -- released uncut in 2002)
Zombie Flesh Eaters (original title: Zombi 2 -- re-released uncut in 2005)

Info courtesy of Wikipedia.