I realise that this is a post and a half, so I'll split the different sections with a short line to help people move from one section to the other. Think of the line as sort of chapter headings!
domino, the Rambo cuts were very amusing. I think during that era there was some kind of unofficial policy on the 'pornographic fetishisation of violence' in which just playing around with weapons in an overly-causal or threatening manner would be as bad as actually attacking someone with them! One weapon that this documentary does not mention is butterfly knives, which the BBFC apparently hated as they could be concealed and then flicked out and played with in a 'cool' manner. Face/Off had quite a number of brief edits to scenes of Travolta showing his daughter how to use one properly. And one of the last films to be edited for this kind of 'pornographically violent' material was The Matrix in which a number of seconds of spent catridges tinkling to the ground or falling through the air in slow motion were removed. Though The Matrix is now uncut.
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The Draconian Days documentary was very interesting and more than anything helped capture the tone of the James Ferman BBFC regime at the time. I liked that the interviewees are a mix of familar faces from the previous film and new personalities (something which also extends to the introductions), and think that Carol Topolski's candid insider perspective on the BBFC is the highlight of the film. Though I would also highly recommend anyone interested in the history of the BBFC to also check out the 1995 BBC documentary
Empire of the Censors which is currently up on YouTube in two parts. Much of the Ferman material from this documentary appears sourced from the BBC one.
I also agree with domino that Topolski's description of the screening of New York Ripper is very powerful, and an understandable reaction to being confronted with that film, but then from a counter-perspective against censorship I would argue that a film about a misogynist slashing-up women in a sexualised manner perhaps should succeed in provoking those reactions of absolute disgust and horror. I see New York Ripper in a similar way to the Urotsukidoji films in that they have pretty extensive scenes of obvious revelling in the sexualised degradation of women, yet they are also situated within a wider context of a completely nihilistic, utterly depraved absolute cesspool of an uncaring, disinterested, amoral society (in Urotsukidoji post-demon invaded destroyed Tokyo as society devolves into an endless rondelay of ironised demonic violations; in New York Ripper the scuzziest version of New York that you could imagine) in which everyone is being exploited. That sexualised torture scene itself involves the killer calling up the police inspector 'hero' to let him listen in impotently as his prostitute girlfriend, who he has been having an affair with, gets ripped apart. The female character in that scene was at least in her third cycle of being used and abused by men for her body, incluidng our 'hero', before she gets to that horrific end, the murder itself done not because the killer was excited by her in particular but by her proxy value to get at the inspector himself. The entire point of that scene is that she is treated both in a sexualised manner and as nothing in and of herself, which is an extremely difficult thing for any audience to wrestle with, but I do think it is a little more nuanced than just Fulci giving the audience the material portraying violent violation that they want. Although it
is also an exploitation film, so it does do that too, and that is something that always has to be acknowledged as well!
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There were a few things that I would throw into the documentary: during the "Fuck for 15" section in which Topolski talks about the way that just one instance of the word would immediately cause that classification, there did seem to be an amusing unofficial trend of anime companies during the early 90s releasing their English language dubs full of bad language (even if it would not have been present in the original language track) in what was called "fifteening". This seemed to be done in order to ensure that tamer or borderline material would get the higher 15 or 18 adult ratings, presumably in order both to appeal to their audience wanting Urotsukidoji-level extreme animations, and also perhaps to bolster a self image that anime was 'not a kid's medium' despite being animated. Really until Miyazaki's films started getting proper UK distribution in the early 2000s, most anime companies seemed to be fighting that anti-Disney stance by going after mostly the action and horror titles and then if they were tamer examples trying to artificially inflate the BBFC logo through techniques such as the English language dubbed track. Now we are living in a much better time for anime in general, in which the horrors (albeit not the most extreme examples!) and action titles can exist alongside the Miyazakis and more gentle dramatic series such as Kids On The Slope or Waiting In The Summer, which would likely not have been seen to have much commercial potential for the narrowly defined demographic a couple of decades ago.
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It was great to see Nigel Wingrove interviewed here but, while it gets alluded to a few times, it never really gets officially mentioned that he ran Redemption Video. Someone really needed to interrogate him about his naughty nun obsession, as Redemption Video's catalogue was full of all the 70s nunsploitation titles! From The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine and Flavia The Heretic to Behind Convent Walls! Maybe it was a way to keep needling the BBFC by submitting naughty nuns to them in the wake of the rejection of Visions of Ecstasy? I think more likely it was just a particular subgenre that Wingrove liked!
This documentary doesn't get into it too much, although it alludes to it, but there was apparently a culture in the BBFC that if you did not provoke them you could often sail through the classification process relatively unscathed. But if you continually provoked them, as it seems that Wingrove did with the kind of titles that Redemption Video were putting up for classificiation, then they would get heavier cuts and even outright rejection. I still have the Shivers horror magazine from 1996 which did a four issue feature running through all of Redemption's video titles up to that point and detailing all of the cuts made to them, which would range from minor (three seconds from Cannibal Man) to major (three or four minutes from Requiem For A Vampire and The Living Dead Girl). I didn't really follow Redemption into the porn titles that they released that get discussed in the documentary (in the early 2000s I was moving much more into beginning to import films from the US and getting into Criterion. My first Criterion being Flesh For Frankenstein! So horror fandom can lead you into whole new worlds of foreign language and arthouse cinema!), and wasn't particularly interested in their 70s sex film line under the Jezebel label, but do remember that one of the major events in 1996-7 was Redemption having Jess Franco's women in prison movie Bare Behind Bars totally rejected by the BBFC, and then appealing that decision. I don't think it worked but they were at least trying.
On that note, another lesser known company that might be worth bringing up is the sad fate of
the Exploited label, run by David Gregory, which had the unfortunate timing of turning up in the late 90s and being successful in the VHS arena just when everything was shifting over to DVD. Their label had very ambitious plans and indeed released only slightly edited versions of Deranged, and completely unedited and correct aspect ratio versions of Bill Lustig's Vigilante and Bob Clark's Dead of Night and Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (the latter even including DVD-style interviews with Alan Ormsby after the feature), editions that I still treasure to this day. They also tried moving into documentaries with The Killing of America and Hated: GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. However they had major troubles with Ferman and the BBFC when they wanted to put out The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and were told that it was impossible and had their plans completely rejected. Even contextualising documentaries to help the release were rejected. And then a year or so later, Ferman was gone and another company got The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through the BBFC completely unedited for DVD release, which completely nullified their plans. So it seems that David Gregory's Exploited label got unfairly messed up by the Ferman issues and the changing policies of the BBFC.
Anyway, back to Redemption. Lest you think that Redemption Video just put out 70s nunsploitation and gory horrors, they also released Witchfinder General (albeit with a couple of scenes in an alternate 'topless' European version), Fritz Lang's M, Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage and The Monastry of Sendormir, White Zombie and Haxan. Not to mention Clive Barker's avant garde shorts to celebrate their 50th release (yes, they numbered their VHS tapes, Criterion-style!) So there were a few genuine novelties and older classics together with the 70s exploitation. That was actually something that their video covers, often composed photographic shots of models doing something vaguely related to the movies in question, helped to disguise. All the covers were done in Redemption's house-style, so it would only be a quick check of the stills and text on the back that would distinguish a 20s Sjostrom from a 70s Jean Rollin!
I wasn't cool enough, or hip to that world enough, for the fanzine culture that gets described later in the film but in the mid to late 90s living in the middle of nowhere (where I still am!) I began buying mail order videos through companies who would send printed catalogues of available titles out through the post in a similar way described. I credit an interest in wanting to see weird and strange horror films that would never show up in my local store or on television as my gateway into the wider world of cinema as a whole. I was familiar with a lot of the arthouse titles from television screenings, but to see evocative titles such as Orphee jostling against titles such as Killer Nun, as the Redemption catalogue jostled against labels releasing blacksploitation or anime or Hong Kong action, or the BFIs and Artificial Eye's releases, there seemed like a whole range of diverse cinema out there to dip into an explore.
So I have to credit Wingrove's Redemption Video label (along with the book Immoral Tales by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs) for fostering my interest in cinema whilst simultaneously catering to my horror needs! Even if I wasn't particularly intested in too many of the nunsploitation titles outside of a couple of the major titles!
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Back to the documentary - I'm ambivalent to Ferman's tenure. He obviously was far too controlling and autocratic in his censorship, his dealings within the Board, and with the little personal foibles that seemed to creep into his decision making process (there is a great, though possibly apocryphal, story I think in the BBC Empire of the Censors documentary from 1995 about Ferman, whipped up into a pro-active position regarding sexual violence in film, cutting the rape scene from the original Emmanuelle film and then describing himself to the female examiner recounting the story that he was "more Feminist than the Feminists". Rosemary Stark, the lady recounting this story said, "Sorry James, you don't get to be!", but it is unclear whether she told Ferman this at the time or could just finally express herself in the documentary). Yet those kind of frustrating qualities are probably also what helped him to bull-headedly stand up strong against all of the whipped up media panics over Hungerford, James Bulger,
the David Alton proposed amendment, the Crash situation, and so on. It takes someone paternalistically and/or moralistically convinced that they know best to be able to shout down other people who similarly think they know best!
But his time does show in no uncertain terms the need for continual rotation in these kinds of high level positions, to stop personal taste or ingrained methods of thinking from becoming too ingrained within an organisation (sadly though we live in a world in which the high level positions in most organisations mostly stay the same whilst the lower level staff are continually rotated, which seems topsy-turvy management practice to me!)
The documentary also doesn't mention that huge grenade that Ferman lobbed into the censorship debate as he retired, as he gave an interview to the tabloid press in which he said that in his opinion he was too lenient on the material he passed relating to the drug imagery in Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting. Something which annoyed both pro and anti-censorship sides of the debate as the horse had long bolted from that particular stable by that time, as both had been shown on UK television too!
It is also a bit of a shame that the documentary doesn't get into the Crash tabloid furore, or the issue with the BBFC sitting on a video release of Natural Born Killers for years. Although the fuzzy footage of the table of tapes in the bootleg video section of the documentary actually comes from a TV piece in which an investigative reporter wired up a 14 year old boy with a camera and microphone and got him to go up to these street vendors in bootlegs and ask for Natural Born Killers, then unreleased in the UK! There is a great response from one vendor that "I'll put that in a bag for you, as you're not 18 are you?" to the boy! I hope nothing bad happened to that guy after he was caught on camera saying that!
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I also want to go into a little more detail on the briefly mentioned BBFC re-edits to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. This is well documented on the current DVD and in the BBC Empire of the Censors documentary, but it really was a jaw-dropping example of a censorship board getting involved in manipulating the entire meaning of a scene consciously rather than inadvertently by snipping a few frames here and there.
Here is the section from Empire of the Censors describing the manipulations to that scene, manipulations which ironically turn the scene from uncomfortably confonting the viewer with their own participation in the action to simply viewing the material in a more distanced manner. In a problematic way it is trying to make the murders play more untroublingly!
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I was very pleasantly surprised by the number of films in the Section 3 list that I'd just never heard of at all. I did a quick count and I think I was introduced to 30 films by this set. Most of which look terrible, but it is good to know that they exist! I'd certainly quite like to see The Aftermath, The Black Room, The Child, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The Last Hunter (I'm glad there is another film starring David Warbeck and Tisa Farrow out there!), Suicide Cult (though it looks a mess) and Street Killers. Maybe The Toy Box and The Killing Hour too. Though it looks from that trailer that The Killing Hour is just an Eyes of Laura Mars copy, I like the implication from the trailer that the killer keeps handcuffing people to deadly contraptions!
And
maybe Grievous Bodily Harm as, while it looks pretty awful shot-on-video stuff, it got a glowing write up in the recent book Offbeat: British Cinema's Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems, which made a good case for it. If nothing else it shows shows off those wonderfully blunt Mancunian women, the terrible chat up lines, and that kicking someone in the bollocks over and over is a perfectly legitimate fighting tactic!
I think I could live without needing to see those slasher films like Final Exam though (though I agree with domino on Home Sweet Home, if only for the scene in which somebody fixing their car has the killer exuberantly do a powerslam move on the open hood whilst laughing insanely!). While I love this compliation disc and like domino I hope that we get more (maybe just an exploration of the enticing obscurities in the video tape collection in the background? Or an anime focused one?) we are really getting into the films here which are either so mainstream or so uninteresting I couldn't really recommend them even as curiosities. Even just the trailer for Prom Night almost sent me to sleep! And I totally agree with Stephen Thrower on Oasis of the Zombies - it is oddly compelling while being utterly soporific. The Rollin directed Eurocine companion piece Zombie Lake is also very slow and inept (
watch the two minute long version instead!) and it is a shame that Rollin's worst film is his only representative here.
But there are also some truly great films peppered through the list. We really need Criterion or somebody to get The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (and The Devil's Playground) out, and Thrower's disecction of Rabid is one of the best examinations of that film I've encountered.
And I still sneakily suspect that Inseminoid is the true sequel-prequel to Ridley Scott's Prometheus!
Anyway I'm off to sacrifice some garden furniture to the great God Gazebo in the hopes that he will hear my prayer and release Hugo The Hippo on Blu-ray!