DPP72: Flesh For Frankenstein

So lattly I have been talking a lot about horror films, I went through the First 3 Hammer Horror Dracula films and then I was going to move on to some more Hammer, one of the first things that came to my mind were the Hammer Frankenstein films, mostly because Peter Cushing who played Van Helsing in those Dracula films played Doctor Frankenstein in them but then I rememberd it had been quiet awile since I had touched on the DPP72/Video Nasties list. So this led me to the 1973 film Flesh For Frankenstein which is one of the films on the DPP72 which also happens to sometimes go by the title Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and was advertised as being the goriest take on Frankenstien there had ever been.

The film had some very big shoes to fill being a Frankenstein film after all fans of Frankenstein had been spoiled with the 1930's Universal picture featuring Boris Karloff as the monster and then the Bride of Frankenstein and the awesome Hammer Frankenstein films, so does it fill them, well I could drag this out but no it doesnt, but that is not to say that it is bad or without merit, infact compared to some of the films it sits on the DPP72 with well its a work of art. 

Ok so in this film Dr. Von Frankenstein (played by B-movie actor Udo Kier) is obsessed with trying to make  a master race of Serbians who he will control. His plan to do this is basically to , manufacture his own pair of  Monsters a male and a female who he then believes will give birth to the first of his new super race. He actually refers to them at one point as Zombies, its clearly a bit weird as the average person is going to go ''zombies cant have babies'' or ''but how does the body parts put togther have anything to do with babies thats down to DNA not the random arms and legs stitched on to a monster'' Still thats the plot and if you want to get on with this film then just say to yourself when this was set no body knew what DNA was and the guys a mad scientist trying to test a crazy theory.

Now I am not going to do a play by play of everything that happens in this film as I like to try and keep things relativly spoiler free so that if someone was so inclined they could then go and enjoy the film after reading this, so instead I just want to talk about a few aspects of it and then give it a general sort of rating. For a start the film pretty much sticks to the promise of it being gory, it is a very gory film but there is a also a lot of sexual refrences and shots of flesh but its not just a gory smutty film its also quiet impressive artistically. Frankiensteisns laboratory is of partoiciular note, it is quiet simply a magnificent set, I also have to appluad the films music, taken away from the film some of it is actually quiet beautiful and kind of classical in nature, certain scenes are framed in a magnificent way and it certainly does tell a story even if it is kind of weird compared to your average Frankenstein piece.

I think there is an attempt at putting some sort of deeper meaning in to this film, if it has a message I would argue the message is that our wants and desires can lead us to very dark places and that if we repress them or channel them wrongly or let them consume us then we are likly to put ourselves and/or others in danger. I would give the film a 6 out of 10 and recomend that providing you havent been put of by the things I have told you about it that you give it a shot, its not something I could see anyone watching again or again like the hammer and Universal Frankenstein films but it is an intresting little chunk of cinematic history.

DPP72: Tenebrae

Tenebrae is a film by the Italian Director Dario Argento. I am obviously talking about it because it is on the DPP72 list of banned films but unlike some of the films on the list in my opinion this is not a film thrown together just for shock and awe, I actually believe that Dario Argento is a great writer and director, I could easily write a post about him even if this film wasn't on the DPP72. In fact I wrote about him a few years ago when talking about one of my favourite horror films Demoni which was part written by him. If you didn't read that post and would like to read it you can follow the link below.

http://kerr9000.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/demonsdemoni-and-world-of-fake-italian.html

Tenebrae is what I would describe as a stalk and slash thriller an interesting one at that. It stars Anthony Franciosa as a an American novelist who goes to Rome to promote his new detective novel. Once there he finds himself embroiled in a series of grizzly murders, as one of his readers starts to imitate the killings from his book. The author is then bombarded with threats as well as pictures from the murders, murders which include amongst other things stabbings, garrotings and razor slashings. I find this deeply interesting maybe its because of the fact that I am an author myself or because of my interest in the whole Video Nasties thing but it basically feels like it is dealing with the idea of whether or not the creator of a piece of fiction has any responsibility for what someone may or may not do because of what he views or what he hears or reads. I think horror works at its best when it plays on peoples very deepest fears. Now I know that not everyone is a writer but all of us are in one way or another creators we all create ideas and we push these out in to the world be they in the form of a piece of work or in the way in which we present ourselves in the things we say, our thoughts and feelings constantly seep out of us and everyone will at some time worry that these will get us in to trouble or cause someone else to say or do something that we don't agree with that something terrible will grow from the seeds we have planted. To me this film is a manifestation of that very fear and that's what I feel all great horrors are, they are films which bring a fear to life in an interesting way, and that is something I feel Argentino is a Master of.

 

Some people have claimed that Tenebrae is a sexist film and I do agree that the killings in the film are almost all inherently sexual. The authors book within the film is all about “human perversion and its effects on society,”. The murders in the film are largely erotocised, two women are killed in a state of undress, another being force fed as she’s throttled and while I do not wish to spoil everything lets just say that it is penetrating in more than one way.

 I would give this film a very strong 9 out of 10, I can not get across my appreciation for this director or for this film any more than I have without fear of spoiling it. I think that this film is and was a piece of art it was wrong that this was banned it was not a case of violence for violences sake or gore for the sake of gore it is a deep story which happens to contain violence , as far as I am concerned this is a piece of art in much the same way the works of Shakespeare is, if you need to see a good horror film then watch this it might be on the DPP72 but it is not one of the films which tried to use gore to cover up a none existent plot, to try and push a hastily put together piece of rubbish into profits it doesn't really deserve, it is an actual brilliant film expertly crafted which deserves every bit of attention it has and could get.

DPP:72. 3 More Cannibal Films

So I figured I would need one more post in order to finish up discussing the Cannibal movies which are a part of the video nasties controversy of the 1980’s.

Cannibal Terror

Cannibal Terror was one of the films to end up on the list of video nasties which was not prosecuted. In fact compared to some of the films on the list this films stay there was rather brief as it was removed from the list in 1985. It was suggested that this film ended up on the list purely because of the word 'cannibal' in its title. A lot of people question how in depth the research in to these films was as Cannibal terror was treated as if it contained the same violence and questionable content as Cannibal Holocaust, and Cannibal Ferox, but it is in fact not even close to the level of violence depicted in those films. 

The plot in brief is that two criminals kidnap a girl and hide out in the house of a friend who lives by trading with the natives in a nearby jungle. The friend's wife is raped by one of them; in return for this she ties him to a tree and leaves him to be eaten by a local cannibal tribe.

The film shares some footage with another film called 'Mondo Cannibale (also known as White Cannibal Queen). While there are many sources which try to suggest that the footage from 'Mondo Cannibale' was borrowed for Cannibal Terror to save money and pad the film out there are more connections than this between the two films. Both films share a number of locations, cast, and even dubbing actors. In this way I view this as similar to the situation with the Spanish version of Dracula, which was filmed on the same sets as the British version, its sort of a way of trying to make the most out of your resources, one would imagine in the case of Cannibal Terror if any of this was done without permission there would have been legal action by now.

The film is full of nudity and has some blood but in comparison to Cannibal Holocaust, and Cannibal Ferox it is more comical than disturbing. In my opinion it is just one of those ‘’me to’’ films which was trying to cash in on what was at the time a popular genre, if it wasn’t banned it would have faded away so quickly that it would barely have made its way on to anybody’s radar. In this way the whole Video Nasties thing proberbly did this film a favour. I have always said that the easiest way to make sure someone watches something is to try to tell them that they cant, after all most people dislike being told what to do in there own personal life.

I would score this film an utterly forgetable 5 out of 5 , only watch this if your a completionist that feels they need to see all of these films.

Deep River Savages

Deep River Savages also known as Man from Deep River is an Italian exploitation movie from Umberto Lenzi the maker of Cannibal Ferox (Which I mentioned last time). It is considered by some to be the start of the whole cannibal movie phenomenon in fact and inspired many of films which followed it.

The plot can briefly be explained as the story of a photographer who is ambushed by a tribe while on a photo assignment in the rain forest. The tribe initially treats him viciously and uses him as a slave. The chief's daughter takes a liking to him, and her mother, who can speak English, helps him to attempt to escape. During his attempt encounters the fiancé of the chief’s daughter and kills him. Soon he is recaptured but the chief’s daughter decides that he will be her next fiancé. He then decides to live with the tribe; helping them to fight against a cannibal tribe that they're at war with

Just like Lenzi’s other film Cannibal Ferox this film largely found its way on to the video nasty list because of its scenes of animal cruelty. Unlike Cannibal Ferox there is not actually that much attention paid to the act of cannibalism. It is not so much a cannibal film as a film which happens to contain a bit of cannibalism in it.

I seemed to enjoy this film more than his latter film Cannibal Ferox, maybe it was the fact that it seemed like a more complete story, the things that happened in it even when they might have been a little gory seemed to exist to further the story as opposed to being there just to appeal to gore hounds. I still hate the whole animal crulty for the sake of a film thing and it seriously makes me want to punch the director in the face, I dont think the film should have been banned or prosecuted but if the director had been done for animal crulty then I would be quiet happy, heck I would love to see some kind of fine slapped in place where any old film that had real animal death or crulty loses a percentage of its profits to charities to help animals but I guess If I carry on talking about this anymore then ill be going really off on a tangent. Id give the film 7.5 , ignoring the above of course.

Cannibal Apocalypse

I want to explain this film but avoid giving to much away so I will start by saying it is not exactly your typical cannibal film in fact the title is in my opinion misleading the Spanish title Virus fits the nature of the film a little better. 

It rests almost between a cannibal movie and a zombie movie. The film starts in Vietnam where prisoners of war have developed a craving for human flesh. The film then goes forwards a decade or two and catches up with the Veterans who are now developing a real taste for flesh. As they bite people a rabies like infection spreads which gives the infected the same desire to eat human flesh. The film is not set in the jungle like the other Cannibal films it has a city setting more akin to the usual zombie fare. There is something I love about this film though maybe it is the fact that it features the acting talent of John Saxon which seems to push it beyond the other films I have been talking about with their largely unknown casts and low production values, every minute he is on screen is a bit of gold. Although this is the film I have talked about the least this is no bearing on my opinion on it. If you can only watch one of these films then make this the one. I would go so far as to give the film a nice solid 8, it is an under discussed film but its really a case of I think the less I say about it the more your likly to enjoy it.

DPP72: Cannibal Holocaust

So today I am going to be handling a second Cannibal film from the DPP72, this film is called Cannibal Holocaust. The film caused a scandal in Italy when released. Ten days after premiering the film was seized and the director, Ruggero Deodato, was arrested and charged with obscenity first and then eventually murder, there was allegations that it was in fact a snuff movie. For those not in the know the term Snuf film refers to a movie in  which a person is actually murdered on camera in reality, now its debatable if this kind of film has ever been made as far as I know every film to ever be accused of being a snuf film has been disproven, the FBI have been involved in investigating some of them and every time they have found proof that people have merly thought something was real that wasnt in fact real.

Despite it being proved that Cannibal Holocaust was not a snuf film and was instead an actual regular movie the film was still banned in Italy, the UK and several other countries because of its extreme gore, sexual violence, and the fact that a fair amount of animals were genuinly killed on camera. I have already talked about my oppinion on this when talking about Cannibal Ferox but I feel I need to state it again because I have strong feelings about this. I disagree with the idea of killing animals for the purpose of making a film, I wouldnt care if it was a low budget horror or the work of the most renowned director in the world I simply think killing any sentient living creature for pure cinematic entertainment is wrong; as I previously stated if you can simulate the deaths of people using effects then you can either simulate the death of an animal or merely offer up enough to suggest what has happened. I wont however judge the film based on this, I will for the purpose of reviewing it as a film without bias pretend that these deaths are artificial and not real (I really hope no film ever does this again as I hope we have evolved somewhat as a society).

Ok so I will try and briefly explain the plot without running the film. An anthropologist is sent to South America find out what happened to a previous film crew. His team on arriving are assigned a guide at first they meet one tribe and see several of their practices before meeting another tribe and helping them. This second tribe seems nervous of them despite the help they have given. It would seem that the tribe had killed the first crew but the anthropologist manages to barter for the crew’s films footage and leaves with it. He then views this footage so that he can learn what became of the first film crew. 

There are lots of opinions about Cannibal Holocaust. There are those who feel that the film is a sick piece of filth which should be banned. You can point to the murder and cruelty directed to animals or the level of gore or even the sexual violence. Then there are those who would argue that the film has a political message which it tries to put across to the viewer; that it is in fact a piece of social commentary about civilized society. Then there will be those who just simply enjoy violent, films full of gore and sadism because they happen to enjoy it. So which camp do I fit in?

I think that there can be an argument made that there is a degree of social commentery in the film, that the director is asking questions about if modern man is more or less civilised than the tribes that we look down upon, but this point is a little ruined by the animal crulty and on top of this the reports that the film maker treated his cast and extras like shit. The film is  a 7 out of 10 in my humble oppinion. It took a lot of supressing biases to score this film so highly though, I cant stand that animals were killed for it or the strong proof that the person behind it was suge a massive dick to those who worked for him. Also I guess I should have said this a long time ago when I did the first of these reviews but please remember that I am scoring these with fans of horror in mind, if you dont like horror and you have found my blog then you would most likly not get 7 out of 10 enjoyment out of something like this, I would rate them far more harshly if I thought I was communicating to the overage viewer who is more into hollywood style films.

DPP72: Last House on the Left

So what can I say about the The Last House on the Left well as you have proberbly guessed from the title of this post it was one of the DPP72 (to find out what this is look at my earlier posts on the subject), it is a 1972 American exploitation-horror film written, edited, and directed by Wes Craven, Yes that Wes Craven, the man who brought Freddy Krueger into our lives and dreams, and it was produced by Sean S. Cunningham yes that Sean S. Cunningham the creator of the Friday the 13TH series.

The story is inspired by a Swedish film called The Virgin Spring from the 1960’s which I have to admit I have never seen. It was the directorial debut of Wes Craven. The main thing this film is famous for in my opinion was bringing the phrase "To avoid fainting, keep repeating 'It's only a movie'..." in to the public’s eye with its advertising campaign. This phrase had been used by earlier film ads but it was really hammered home here and this phrase become highly associated with the whole Video Nasty’s scandal. 

The brief story of this film goes something like this, there is a group of wanted criminals who the police are looking for. A girl tells her parents she is going out to a concert with a friend, the girls run in to one member of the group of criminals who leads them back to their current hideout under the pretence of selling them drugs. Once there the girls are taken hostage, this leads to them being taken to a forest where they are physically and sexually abused for the groups amusement and finally murdered. The film was accused of being over the top in this regard but while it has a certain sadistic streak with members of the gang taking definite pleasure from the fear and humiliation of these young women, less is shown than in various other films. It can be disturbing at times but that is because you see enough to know what is happening and the villains come across as so deeply dislikeable that on any occasion where your imagination is left to fill in the blanks it is going to think of the worst possibility. 

I imagine back when this film was banned one of the things that led to that decision was the mixture of sexual assault and violence, I would say that there was a definite worry that with young ''attractive'' ladies being naked on screen while you saw characters clearly enjoying assaulting, humiliating and raping them worried some people. It perhaps made them wonder if there naked presence might somehow stimulate the viewer and cause some form of association between torture, assault, humiliation and gratification. It took until March the 17^th 2008 for the BBFC to pass the full film uncut as fit for release. This was one year before this film would actually recieve a remake

People have argued over whether this film is an import piece of horror history or a piece of gutter trash and I have to admit I do tend to agree it’s a part of horror history. It is the editorial debut of Wes Craven, a man who is huge in the world of horror, it’s not a great film, he has done much better films since, but it is where he started. I don’t agree with any worries that people will be taught to associate any of the unpleasantries in this film with gratification, I watched it and I felt sorry and uncomfortable with the victims and I didn’t want their killers to get away with it, because I thought they deserved to be punished. This shows that the film had an effect on me, it got me to feel one way or another for most of the characters in it and surly that is one of the main reasons for film to exist, to get us invested in stories, to get us to care about who lives and who dies, what they do, who they are and how this is dealt with by the world that that has been created. Yes I agree that there are some shocking things in this film but I think a lot of them were handled as tastefully as they could be without rendering them pointless and nuterd beyond point and purpose.

Some of the music and the attempts of humour with strange police characters threw me a little but I think it was a conscious attempt to throw something in to the mix to stop everything from getting overly bogged down in doom and gloom, when you look at a lot of cravens latter work there is humour mixed in there often far better than it is here but it needs to be remembered that he was finding his feet here. 

I would give this film a 6 out of 10, it’s not brilliant, it’s not bad though, it’s watchable and you can see some good ideas and good implementation shining through. Due to the rape this film tends to get compared to I spit on your grave and I can see why, I certainly think this one is far easier to watch though especially if your squeamish, everything in this in that particular area can be cut down to about 5 minutes and it’s a lot more implied than in I spit on your grave so this is a much better starting point if your looking for a film of this type which is a little less full on, in honesty though unless your looking at this film for its historical value I would tend to recomend that for a more enjoyable film you look at something a little latter in Wes Craven's career.

DPP72: Zombi 2 AKA Zombie Flesh Eaters

 Something which a lot of the DPP72 films seemed to share in common was the fact that they often had multiple titles, in the case of this film from region to region or even tape to tape you could find it will all of the following names and more Zombie, Island of the Living Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters , Zombie 2: The Dead are Among Us, Zombi, Zombi 2.

What is with all of the different names and what the proper name for this film you might be asking well a lot of it comes down to the fact that George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead was released in Italy with the title Zombi. Now the Italians always seemed to have this thing where if they thought they could sell people a film by giving it a name that would connect it to an already popular film even if there was no real relationship between the films then sod it that's exactly what they would do and thats what happened here. Zombi 2 had the working title of Gli Ultimi Zombi, but was renamed Zombi 2 in order to cash in on Romero's popular movie, by presenting this new film as some kind of sequel. Yes the plot bears practically zero relation to the events portrayed in the film Dawn of the Dead with the only common point basically being the inclusion of Zombies (even if they are portrayed in slightly different ways) but this kind of ''little'' detail is one that the Italian film industry has never really given much of a monkeys about. I think its important to mention that this was in fact done by the movie studio without Director Lucio Fulci's blessing or even his knowledge. This was not something he agreed with and he has reportedly always told fans that this is not a sequel that it is its own thing and that he was relieved when the film had the unconnected title of Zombie when released in America.

Lucio Fulci and his films are no stranger to controversy in fact Fulci had 3 films listed on the original UK list of 74 official video nasties, one being this film Zombie Flesh Eaters/Zombi 2 and the others being The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. On top of this his film City of the Living Dead narrowly missed the list following its recall and his later film The New York Ripper was banned in the UK as well. Fulci was more than just a horror movie maker though he had also tackled thrillers, adventures, Spaghetti Westerns, political spoofs, and crime-drama. I guess what I am trying to say is that the guy wasnt a hack who thought he could work his way into money just by throwing gore at the screen, he was an acomplished film maker.

So what about the films story? Well the two main characters are a local reporter named Peter West and Anne Bowles the daughter of the missing Captain of a boat. Peter and Anne fly to the Dominican Republic and meet an American tourist couple who are about to embark on a sailing tour of the Caribbean. Peter and Anne ask them for help to go to the island of Matul, the last place Anne heard from her. Despite the couples claim about warnings from the superstitious locals about Matul, they agree to take them to the island. What they find on Matul is basically zombies and thats as much of the story as I want to give away as I feel this film is well worth watching. Lots of people know this film as the film with the large sharp piece of wood being driven into the womans eye, or as the film in which a shark fights a zombie. I think a lot of what you think about this film will come down to what you think about the last sentance I have written, if your thinking wow that sounds cool then this is the film for you. Personally I would give this film an 8 out of 10, I dont think that it is on par with the Evil Dead but I do think that it is a great film. Yes there are certain films on the DPP72 that are just gore for the sake of gore but this is not one of them, it just so happens to be a good film that has a lot of gore in it, I think the elimination of the gore would harm the final product but I still think it would be a good film which is not something I could say about a lot of the other films on the DPP72.

DPP72: Blood Feast

 Blood Feast is one of the oldest films on the dpp72 list which would make some think that it would be one of the tamest but if you were under the belief that its age would get in its way then you’re wrong. Inside the first 5 minutes you see a murder and then you see a body be partially carved up. It is generally considered to be the very first splatter film. I did consider making this the first of the DPP72 films I talked about due to its age but decided I would rather go with something more well known to start with.

The concept for Blood Feast arose in the early 1960s, three years after the release of director Alfred Hitchcock’s famous horror film Psycho. Apparently one of the films writers Herschell Gordon Lewis had seen Psycho and felt that the film had cheated by showing the results of the murders in the film without actually showing them happening. He apparently felt that it had been done in this way because Hitchcock simply could not risk getting turned down by theatres. So the idea was that this film would be a sort of Psycho which didn’t cheat, it would show the murders as well as the aftermath of them.

I hate to think that I might come across as being full of my own self importance or that I feel that things are as simple as wrong and right or black and white but as far as I am concerned Herschell Gordon Lewis didnt understand what Hitchcock had done or achieved. I feel that the man is as entitled to his oppinon as I am mine but I think Hitchcock was simply smart enough to know that sometimes less is in fact more. I think Psycho manages to be scary on a deep level rather than just on a simply shocking one.

The above fact that this was almost written as some kind of response to Psycho is going to make people try to compare the two on at least some level and it’s not a comparison that is going to do this film any favours in my oppinion. Psycho had a budget of $806,947. Blood Feast had the much lower budget of $24,500. Now I am not saying that a low budget means a film is cursed from the beginning, but it can be a factor. There seems to be a lot of over acting in Blood Feast, the Camera is close to the actors at times but there performances the way they are talking and delivering lines feels like they are trying to project to a whole theatre. The film shows more than Pscyho but I feel this comes off as less. Yes you see the gore but you also see the killer straight away, this somehow robs you of the feeling of being threatened and stalked which you get from a film like Psycho, they could have showed the blood and the guts and still kept an element of surprise in it. The film just feels cheap because you know who is committing the crimes and your left with little reason to watch it, unless you simply enjoy seeing murder and mayhem for mayhem sake.

There is a scene where the killer is literally scooping up bits of a girls smashed in head in to a bag, you can even see him almost playing with the messy former contents of her head but the music playing in the background is this old fashioned awful organ music which seems to over hammer home the point that oh this is a macabre scary moment not only that but it is seriously headache inducing. This is not the only weird bit of sound which is annoying there is also this these weird gong and drum type noises and slow beats which are just off putting, it’s like it is trying far too hard. When this film invites comparison to Psycho then its music is going to be judged against it as well. Psycho has some of the best music found in film, not only does it perfectly suit the mood of the moments it is used in but it’s used in the right places, played just loud enough to be heard without getting in the way of the film itself. Music can if good and used correctly sublte add to the mood of a scene or film but in this case it seems more like it is pathetically shouting ''look at me im scary look at me im so scary''.

Now one person connected to this film that I have to admit to having a lot of respect for is Producer David F. Friedman who came up with some effective publicity stunts for "Blood Feast" these included giving out vomit bags reading "You may need this when you see 'Blood Feast'" as well as obtaining an injunction against the film in Sarasota, Florida, as a publicity stunt in order to increase interest in the film. How many times have we seen that the banning or restricting of films and other forms of media just leads to an increased intrest in them, this was something he clearly understood and used to his advantage. I have to admit though that I love stuff like the blood bags, I love anything that gives a film a novel feel which comes from its promotion or how it is shown.

It would be easy to really give this film a kicking but it has a sort of homemade feel to it, if you have ever wanted to make your own film and played around with video cameras and your friends then you will realise that even a bad film requires a lot of work and effort.

What needs to be remembered is that without the gore in this film and the whole fuss of the Video Nasties situation this film would have been long forgotten, its prosecution has actually helped it to live for far longer than it otherwise would have. I think what really made people object to this film wasn’t the fact that the director showed you the killings when other films would have merely showed you the aftermath or let you hear a scream in the dark, it was how long the camera choose to stay focused on the hands of the main actor as he played with the gore covered parts. This added nothing to the film, sure at first it was a bit shocking but soon it just felt like the moment was being held on to for too long, I think it helped you to see how fake it all was, if the gore had flashed in front of you and then been removed then you wouldn’t have the time to study it to pick faults with it. Show us enough to tantalise us, for us to make our own pictures in our head instead of showing us the same ones for so long we become bored of them.

I would give this film 3 out of 10. Unless you’re trying to watch all of the video nasties or have another good reason to view it, then just give it a miss and find a better way to spend your time. It is much better seen as a piece of historical cinema than it is as a film as far as I am concerned. A lot of the Video Nasties have this sort of legendary status around them but the truth is that there are a lot of horror films which get the job done with less gore and still manage to be far more frightening for it, I would rather have one Psycho than one hundred films like Blood Feast, I am just the kind of guy who will always take quality over quantity.

DPP72: Cannibal Ferox

Cannibal Ferox also known as Make them Die Slowly and Woman from Deep River was written and directed by Umberto Lenzi. Upon its initial release it was claimed that it was the most violent movie ever made. It contains scenes of eye-gouging, torture, animal cruelty, castration and of course cannibalism. It should be noted that like Cannibal Holocaust, this movie features several actual cases of animals being killed on screen.

I have to admit that when I first watched this it was a downloaded copy, recenty I have gotten an actual DVD of it one of the Vipco Vaults of Horror releases which despite brgagging about how it was previously banned in 31 countries and claims it to be ''THE MOST VIOLENT FILM EVER MADE'' actually is not the full film, the original cut of the film was 93 minutes the feature on this film is only 83 minutes, so its lacking an entire 10 minutes. I point this out merly to say that if your looking for this film you might want to do a little research to find out if your paying for the full thing or a cut down version (I got my copy from a charity shop for £1 so cant really complain, plus I have watched the longer cut online).

The plot of this film can quickly be described as being about a small group of anthropologists who take a trip to the jungles of Colombia to try to disprove the existence of cannibalism. Once there they find drug dealers who have been using the natives to harvest coca leaves. The natives grow tired of being tortured slaves and as a result of this decide to turn their anger on the dealers and the anthropologists.

The opinions most often voiced in regards of Canibal Ferox seem to fall in to one of two camps. There are those who feel that the film is sick, and that it was justifiably banned. Sometimes this is due to the actual murder of animals and other times just because of its depraved and gory nature. Again there will be those who just simply enjoy violent films. No one really seems to try and argue that this movie contains any kind of deep or meaningful message.

I guess it is my turn to give my actual opinion on this film. Well I think it should be clear by this point that I am quiet anti-censorship, I believe that adults should be able to decide what they want to watch and what they can and cannot cope with seeing. There are limits to this for example you shouldn’t be able to see actual murder on film or any other action which violates a living persons rights. I also disagree with the idea of killing animals for the purpose of making a film; if you can simulate the deaths of people using effects then you can either simulate the death of an animal or merely offer up enough to suggest what has happened. It is not like seeing a turtles head shatter or a goat getting its throat slit is going to make or break a movie. 

 I have to admit that I walk into a lot of the DPP72 movies with very low expections, its not that I believe that something good cant come out of a low budget enviroment in fact I often think that good ideas can be destroyed by having too much money thrown at them, its simply the fact that I think in a lot of cases a lot of the people making these films didnt have that solid an idea in the first place, they just simply wanted to draw people in with the promise of blood and guts.

 I was kind of shocked to find that Cannibal Ferox is better than I thought it would be. The storyline, acting and production values were far beyond what I expected of them especially given the fact that it was one of those multi-lingual sort of productions were there are various language barriers getting in the way of things. There is a bit of a mix when it comes to the performances provided by the actors and actresses Lorraine De Selle delivers a very serious perforrmance trying to give it her all and act as if she is in real situations  while in comparison Giovanni Lombardo Radice in comparison basically overacts to an almost camp degree but overall all of it seems to fit togther well.

The gore is not quiet as heavy as you might expect for a film that was banned but what there is was used very effectivly, yes there is the castration scene that people might have mentioned when talking about this film but its handled rather quickly really, there are far more slowly paced grusome things in other films and indeed there are a few in this film. I despise the animal cruelty but I have to begrudgingly admit that some of it really isn't as awful as people have made out, bits of it are on the level of Discovery Channel style documentary footage the sort were animals chase attack and kill each other which as disturbing as it can be at times I think you need to kind of stop and remember that well thats just the way the animal kingdom works in real life. You could make the argument that showing it for entertainment purposes is wrong but then documenterys as much as people might argue are for aiding in the pursuit of knowledge are also a form of entertainment are they not?

I still hate the bits where people actively kill animals, I dont think they have any part in this film or any other for that matter and I personally would edit them out of the film but I guess some might call me naieve after all I eat meat and animals die for that to happen. If I had to rate this and bear in mind I am ignoring the fact the animal killings are real so as not to be biased to do so I would rate it a 7 out of 10

DPP72 The Gestapo's Last Orgy. Revisited

The film I am going to talk about today is called The Gestapo's Last Orgy. The film was listed as an official video nasty and subsequently banned by the BBFC. It has yet to receive a UK release. It is also known as Last Orgy of the Third Reich and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler. So with the words Gestapo, Third Reich, Hitler and the word orgy I think it is very obvious what kind of territory we are in here if you had not guessed it’s a Nazi sexploitation film.

So why did I decide to takle this film, well the DPP72 has a number of Naziploitation films among its number and as I was trying to keep things fresh by reviewing diffrent types of film from among the DPP72 list and I had already done a zombie film and a mockumentary I figured I would either need to do a cannibal film or a a Naziploitation and as some of the promotional material for The Gestapo's Last Orgy had refered to it as the sickeest of the Naziploitation films then why not start here.

The film is about a prisoner-of-war camp for female Jews. There is the typical Nazi rhetoric about them being the super race and how Jews are inferior. The camp itself is basically run as some kind of bordello; training centre where the German officers and soldiers can learn to see Jewish people as animals, use them for sex and generally do as they please.

The female inmates are raped, tortured, sodomized, you see a woman thrown into a pit of quicklime you see whippings, there is cannibalism, infanticide and an Officer is sodomised with the end of his whip. SS staff sit and debate Nazi theories over dinner and one of them mentions his dream that eventually they will have farms where Jews are bred as to be eaten. There are so many things in this film that someone could take offense to that it is not hard to see why the Director of Public Prosecutions decided this film should be banned.

I need to make it clear here that I have seen far worse in other films but I think part and parcel of the issues people have with this film are connected to the fact that its about Nazi's, lets be honest Zombies and Demons and such do not exist but Nazi's did and well to some degree still do, the fact that we know that at least some of what is done in this film was done in real life during World War 2. Some people will dislike this film and films like it because it is trying to make a profit out of one of the worst things to have ever happend in our history, others will simply not want to think about it or be faced with this kind of stuff.

I have visited the concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau and it was an experience I will never forget. I am not a man who is typically a believer of the supernatural but when your there at one of the camps you can practically feel the death in the air. You can see the ovens where people where cremated, there’s a room full of human hair, and there are bullet holes in a wall which people were shot against. Having been there you would expect me to be the first to complain about this film or any other film making light of what happened or trying to turn it in to some horror porno in order to make money.

This might be the case if not for the fact that I also had the honour of meeting and talking to Leon Greenman. For those of you who have not heard of him he was a British anti-fascism campaigner and an actual survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the latter part of his life he made it his mission in life to make sure that no one ever forgot what had happened in those camps. He gave regular talks to school children about his experience at Auschwitz, and also wrote a book about his experiences. This was not enough for him though he also campaigned against the far right and he regularly received threats of violence as a result of this but he never gave up. I asked him what he thought of the fact that parts of world war 2, concentration camps, Nazi’s etcetera had been used to make films and he was of the opinion that as long as it meant that what happened was never forgotten then it was a good thing.

Sure The Gestapo's Last Orgy is a strange film it’s a Nazi exploitation film a mix of horror and porn yet it occasionally it almost shows a bit of class and moves into art-house territory with some editing and camera work which would not be out of place in a far better movie. The films use of montage and inter-cutting images in certain scenes nearly makes you forget that it is an exploitation film. The uniforms the camp itself everything seems so real and we all know that the Nazi’s did some awful things so at times it even seems to come across in an almost documentary for a second or two in a kind of way. I am not suggesting that anyone goes and watches this as part of their degree in history, but if one person watches this and it makes them pick up a book or go looking for documentaries so they can learn more about the past then in a strange and twisted way wouldn’t that make this movies existence worthwhile? 

This was not the only film in the Nazi Exploitation genre to end up on the Director of Public Prosecutions list of banned films but it is the only one I will be talking about. The rest of them are similar the only difference is that I found them to come of a lot cheaper and with more of an air of campiness about them. I decided that in my opinion this was the one that it would be easiest for people to see why it was banned and so this would be the one I would tackle. I will end with a question, I won’t answer it, it is for you to go away and consider yourself. The Nazi’s where fascists, they believed that what they held as true was the only truth and that they had the right to say who should live and die, who could have freedom. Given the fact that one of the reasons we went to war was to protect our freedom from a government which felt it knew better than us can our government justifiably ban films or books in an attempt to try to tell us what is right and wrong?

I would find this film very hard to give some kind of score to, its hard to score a lot of these banned films, I guess its because a lot of them seem to be so much more about shocking people rather than telling a good story, and thats very much the case here, the level of story is equal to the worst of low budget soap operas, but at the same time there is some good camera work, some good costumes and sets, I do think when originally talking about this though I sounded too poitive, its definetly a 3 out of 10.

DPP72 I spit on your grave (Revisited)

So here we are again talking about yet another film involved in the DPP72/Video Nasty controversy of the 1980’s. This time I thought I would talk about I Spit on Your Grave; this is always going to be a controversial film to talk about what with its plot basically being about the rape of a woman and then her gruesome revenge.

I decided to tackle I spit on your grave at this point because I figured after a Zombie/Demon film and then a well basically a mocumentery that I wanted to carry on with a diffrent type of film so went for the revenge film, I just figured it would be more intresting  to keep mixing things up instead of wwatching previously banned zombie movie after previously banned Zombie movie.

 

The contreversy surounding this film is not helped by the fact that the film contains a 25 minute rape scene, when hearing this it seems a little too much to show for a film, one might argue that you could understand that she had been raped and that it was terrible even if you were only shown a moment or two of it even from a distance. In my opinion though the viewer is supposed to view the main female character as a hero and sympathise with her situation and even see her revenge as justified even if it is incredibly violent.

I think what I was trying to get across is that the film was trying to put you in her place, trying to make you feel violated, I think a lot of the issues with this film revolved around some people being scared people would get off on the rape when that was not the intention at all, your supposed to be revolted by it and want it to stop. Yes I admit that with every film, there are at least two meanings and two sets of feelings, the first  will be those  that were intended by the director/writer the other will be down to the individual watching its personal interpretation, so yes you can in theory design a scene to shock which ends up instead arousing someone  but if you think thats reason to ban something then you would have to be prepared to ban almost everything, after all we live in a world were there are people out there who have the strangest thoughts and desires and triggers you only have to watch a documentery or two to find that out (there is a woman who eats sofa ccushions, a man in a sexual relationship with his car and thats just things I have bumped into in the last week.)

Does it say something about our society now that the remake of this movie came out with virtually no fuss being made in the media about it and yet in the 80’s the makers of the original version faced prosecution? Maybe it says that we are a sicker society one which is more willing to ignore shocking things and to take them for granted as part of life, or maybe it shows that we are a more enlightened society which is less eager to sensor things and hide them away from the public, one which is more willing to acknowledge different types of art form and the complex questions they wrestle with.

British feminist Julie Bindel actively opposed the original film when it was released in the UK. She later changed her mind and she has now said that she considers it to be "a feminist film". Yet the late and great Roger Ebert gave both the original and the remake zero stars in fact Ebert Often referred to the original as the worst movie ever made. My own opinion on the film is more flexible like Julie Bindel’s. The first time I watched the film I found it hard to swallow, I didn’t particularly want to watch twenty five minutes of a woman being raped regardless of whether it was fake or not, it just felt wrong and watching it I felt for want of a better term uncomfortable. I have to admit though that I never felt so much as a shred of sympathy for the men as she killed them, I always thought that they were getting exactly what they deserved and I have to ask would I have felt like this if the rape had not been as intense as it was?

Thinking about it in depth I do think there are lots of ways you could show how tortured she was without having to show as much of the rape, and I even think with some work that you could keep the impact. Now I have never been raped but I have been beat and held hostage and although the event itself was horrible it was all of the things after that were really horrid, the flashbacks and the fears it brought to the surface, I think a smart writer could have showed more of how it affected her than of it actually happening yet still have you understanding her anger and feeling that on some level her seeking violent revenge was justified.

Maybe it is just my personal view but I found the 2010 focused less on the rape but this combined with the fact that they made one of the villains a little more sympathetic, yes he was mentally disabled in the original but he just seems even more so in this one to the point you wonder how much of what he was involved in he understood.

I also found the main character of Jennifer to be very different between the two films, in the original she seemed like a regular woman who had been driven to her actions because of her anger at what had happened to her, she did some twisted things in the pursuit of her revenge but they seemed plausible for a regular woman to have done. In comparison new Jennifer just seemed like she suddenly turned in to some kind of female Rambo, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had summersaulted through the air wielding dual machine guns. As with most modern horror movies, the remake has plenty of what you could call gross-out scenes in fact they seem to make up the majority of the film but I guess this is part of the way it tries to appeal to a new audience. I think that as a society we find it more acceptable to allow people to see extreme gore rather than sex, which is in itself strange, and maybe that’s one of the reasons the modern take got less flack because some of its attention had moved from the rape and towards violence.

Personally I don’t think this film should have been banned, sure some of it is difficult to watch and if someone told me that they particularly enjoyed watching the rape scene I would be very concerned but I believe that this film tells a story which asks important questions if you just open your mind and really listen to the themes that are running through it.

Which you should watch the old or the new depends entirely on personal taste do you prefer the raw nature of the original with a believable heroine, believable gore and some tense scenes that are hard to watch or would you prefer a film with a more modern flavour? As for me, well I will take the original every time.

I didnt really give the film any kind of score when reviewing it, I just talked about why it was banned and how times had changed, if I was to try and pin a score to the film though it would have to be something around a 6, but I would deffinetly give the film a warning, if your easily triggerd or upset then it is not for you. Lets face it there is a certain safty in something like the Evil Dead because we all know that Zombies do not exist yet things like rapists and murderers are actually out there wwhich I think makes them more freightening because the things seen in a film like this could actually happen. I dont think it deserved banning but it deserves its 18 and some sensible caution in who you show or recomend it to.

DPP72 Faces of Death (Revisited)

So just like with my last post I intend to reproduce the full text from a post on my previous blog about a film on the DPP72 List in this case Faces of Death, and then add to this review with new material in bold and italics either restating my oppinion or arguing with what I said back when this was written.

Last time we talked, well last time I typed and you read it to be specific, I told you all about The Evil Dead and the DPP72/Video Nasty controversy of the 1980’s. So this time I thought that I would tell you a little more about the kinds of films which made their way on to this list and about one in particular. The law at the time existed to try and protect us from ourselves and from the ‘filth’ that certain studios were producing. We were to be protected from films which would to quote the Obscene Publications Act “deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it".

Personally both at the time and now I think the Obscene Publicatons Act was a joke, I do not think that someone can be depraved or corrupted by a piece of fictional entertainment, sure someone might enjoy it in a disturbing way or choose to repeat something from it but I would strongly argue that this is due to something that is wrong inside of them, something which doesnt come as a result of them watching a film but is instead a deep seated problem...the only time I would argue this is possibly not the case is when people are subjected to things there minds are not ready for, if you see and experiance things before your mind has gotten a firm grasp on reality then I think this can be a bad thing but only if this is the only real input your getting but its the job of parents and careers to make sure that your not watching what you shouldnt and that you learn the basic life lessons you should learn not the governments. As harsh as it might sound if you dont want to undertake the hard task of raising children then dont have them.

The kind of films which got included in the term video nasty’s tended to be Zombie films, Sexploitation movies, cannibal movies, revenge movies and even one film that claimed to be footage of real deaths and executions. I have to admit it is easy to see how some of these things would upset certain people even if you don’t believe in censorship.

The film I have chosen to discuss today is Faces of Death and it was released in 1978, a few years before I was even born and yet I was still in school when I learned about its existence. It is a film which advertised itself as being a look at the many ways in which people can die, there was no story to it, and it was more of a cassette filled with various different macabre sequences.

In recent years people who were involved in the movie have admitted that several of the human death scenes were fakes produced specifically for the film but they were mixed in with genuine pieces of footage such as stock footage of napalm bombings in Vietnam and various pieces of footage from newsreels. There are also actual on-camera animal deaths/killings, which include seals being clubbed to death and animals being killed in a slaughterhouse. The high or low point of the film depending on how you view these things is the inclusion of real footage taken from a newsreel which shows a very unpleasant fatal accident, in which shattered remains of a cyclist are seen under a semi-tractor trailer. The footage includes a brief look at paramedics scooping up the remains of the individuals head from the road side.

A lot of what is seen in this film although shocking at the time doesnt seem all that big a deal now, I guess its partly down to the fact that our own news broadcasts and other forms of media have gotten so dark, scary and sensational now that we are just kind of used to this kind of thing. The news is showing you war zones and animal rights prrotestors are trying to show you what goes on in a slaughter house, I guess we are just a lot more used to this kind of stuff, where as the odd weird person used to hunt out Faces of Death we know have a whole society that is watching crime reconstructions and shocking news reports to try and give there fear sensors a cheeky tickle. The worst part in Faces of Death actually was taken from a news reel so I think that in a way kind of says it all.

 

When I saw the film as a young man I did not know how much of it was fake or that news footage had been used, in fact by the time I was aware of its existence there was a whole series of Faces of death movies. I remember it being used as a form of initiation by some of the lads in school, if you could watch the whole of the film from start to finish without turning away then you would prove that you were a real man.

To be honest yes I passed this initiation but the more I sit and think about it the more I think most young people are just dicks looking for reasons to call each other, to claim that they are better than each other and rub this or that in each others faces, this isent just something I feel looking back at my youth its something I have come to feel from watching my daughter grow up. She came home at one time telling me that lots of people at school were doing the Freddy rhyme from Nightmare on Elm street and calling the children who didnt know the words pussys because they hadnt seen the film, now she was too young for me to want her to watch it (I have since shown it to her). She told me the words they were singing to the rhyme and they wernt even right, so I taught her the proper rhyme gave her a story book sort of 12 certificate version of what happens and told her to say she had seen it and correct them on the rhyme and tell them they were talking shit, I thought this was a novel way of dealing with the situation and to me thats a lot of what being a parent is about finding the best way to deal with things.

I am anti-censorship, I believe that when you start to tell people what they can and cannot watch you attack people’s rights, including their right to watch what they want to watch and there right to formulate their own opinions but even I find myself having problems trying to defend this movie. The movie in itself is not wrong, at least it is not wrong when you realise that some of the deaths are fake and that others were either filmed as part of the news or in the case of the animals you are just seeing how cattle is really treated. The issue I have is with how this is presented, I have a problem in regards to the fact that the creators of this movie tried to lie to everyone in order to sell their movie. Sure they are not the first to do it and nor are they the last, after all look at the Blair Witch that was presented as being a real life recording of those teenagers last few hours and their demise. Faces of death was different though it was trying to appeal to our dark side to the side of us that can’t help but turn to look at a road traffic accident, that can’t help but stare at the bloody corpse. The film itself has no merit as a piece of art, it is not an example of storytelling or plot pacing all it does prove is how, with the right hype and the right angle one set of people can con another set of people in to believing that they need to experience something.

A lot of people might think that when reviewing or talking about games or films I and/or other writers randomly decidide what to talk about next, sometimes that might be true but most of the time I put a lot of thought in to what I am going to review next. In this case I had started with The Evil Dead for two reasons one of them being that when compared to a lot of the other films on the DPP72 it is one of the films that most people would have heard of so I thought it would be a nice starting point. The other reason was because I adore The Evil Dead and wanted a goood reason to watch it and look at it, when it came to my second review I wanted something that was very diffrent and that I didnt like. I wanted to make it clear that I like some of the DPP72 and dislike others. For me Faces of Death is about as far removed from The Evil Dead as you can get. Evil Dead is a good film that just so happens to be gory , it has a story to tell and a solid middle, begining and end I wwent from that to Faces of Death as it is so diffrent it lacks any real story or purpose it is just shock for the sake of shock and while I wouldnt ban it being pro free speach I will happily call it a piece of crap. I tried to get this across in the first place but think maybe I was a bit too subtle.

If I was to compare Blair witch to Faces of Death then this is most definitely a case where the modern film wins. Blair Witch might have tried to make us think that it was real but we all knew that it wasn’t and the only people who were really fooled were those who wanted to be and for them it provided a fun piece of horror, whereas anyone who found Faces of Death to be an enjoyable film? Well I would seriously question their mental well-being.

This film clearly had an audience though as mutliple sequeels and spiritual sequels were made but I have to say I just simply do not get its appeal, unless you want to see every film from the DPP72 list then I would give this one a miss.

The Evil Dead, another look at this classic film and at the DPP72 list in general

 Seeing as my old blog was taken down due to the host site going out of business a lot of my old posts are no longer up for people to read, I at first resisted the urge to repost too much of it here on my new blog unless I in some way added to it. I did this when I took a second look at the Sega Mega Drive game, I esssentially put my post up but then added comments to it almost reviewing my own review and seeing if my attitude had changed. any of my followers will know that I have been trying to review 150 SNES games but if you have followed me for a long time then you will Know that at one stage I had the intenton of reviewing all of what are called the DPP72 Films otherwise known as the Video Nasties. Here is my original review of the Evil Dead which is from this list with some additional thoughts. If youd like to ignore my ramblings and merly read the original Review then ignore the bolded Italic sections.

 I am a child of the 80’s. I was born in 1981 and one year later the term "Video Nasty" was coined. It was a term which applied to a number of films distributed on video cassette that were being criticized for their violent content. The first time I remember being terrified was when I saw part of the horror movie Critters which was released in 1986. This was far from a video nasty it wouldn’t be until the year 1997 when I saw my first Video Nasty it was the well-known horror masterpiece The Evil Dead. At this point in time the Video Recordings Act of 1984 was still in effect so The Evil Dead was still technically illegal in the UK. The video cassette I watched it on was a very bad pirate with foreign subtitles running across the bottom of the screen, it had that incredibly blurry nature you get when something is a copy of a copy of a copy but somehow this lent itself to the nature of the film. As I put the cassette in the video recorder and me and a few of my close friends began to watch it, it felt otherworldly, it was like we had found our own copy of the book of the dead and we were reading it out loud.

I actually wish I still had a copy of the Evil Dead like this, dont get me wrong I greatly enjoy wathcing the Evil Dead when its a nice crisp transfer on an optical disk being viewed on a glorius high definition telly but a sort of grindhouse video nasty filter would make a great addition to one of the films re-releases, a bit like how scan lines and distortion sometimes get added in to game emulators or as options in game re-releases.

 If you are in to horror then chances are you have seen The Evil Dead and to this day it is popular, it spawned 2 sequels and a remake so far. It has ceased to be just a part of the Video Nasty media frenzy but in some ways I would argue it never really was. When me and my friends watched The Evil Dead it touched something inside of us, it was raw in a way a lot of other films are not. It was a brilliantly enjoyable film but with its setting and its limited cast size it had that sort of anyone could make this flavour to it. My friends and I would quote lines from it, we would reinact parts of it and it was one of a small number of films which led to several of us wanting to make films, star in films or write scripts and that is impressive for a film which many people including the founder of the National Viewers and Listeners Association Mary Whitehouse tried to label as obscene. 

The Obscene Publications Act defines obscenity as something which may "tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it". The Evil dead opened my mind to the possibilities of making movies, of writing horror stories, it made me aware that film was more than just something you watch. I do not have a criminal record, I have never served time in jail nor have any of the individuals who watched the evil dead with me on that day. On this evidence alone I deny the claim that The Evil Dead is obscene therefore I do not believe it deserves its place as a ‘’Video Nasty’’.

You see a lot of people wanted the films on the DPP72 banned because they believed that they would taint children in some way, that they would harm us, but the Evil Dead actually had the opposite effect not just on me as I stated during my review but on all of my friends, none of us saw it and wanted to go out there and comit acts of violence, actually we wanted to learn. We wanted to learn about how films were made, about lighting, camera angles, acgting, script writting. The film seemed like not only a great film but a how to guide, a guide on how to make a great film with a small budget, a low number of actors and just a lot of raw energy and drive. It is funny when you think about it that a lot of these Video Nasties were in a way built on the essence of sort of 80's Thatcher economics, they showed that with not much money or resources but a lot of effort you could make it as a sucess and climb out of the economic situation you were born into, and yet they were ultimatly shunned by the people who promoted one of the ideals that they were built upon.

 The Evil Dead is no longer banned in the UK. On the DPP list of 'Video Nasties' there are a total of 72 films. 39 of these films were successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, the remaining 33 were either not prosecuted or had unsuccessful prosecutions. Only 10 of these films still remain banned in the UK, the main reason for this being that most of them have not been resubmitted for classification. So if they were so awful then why are we allowed them now? I think the truth is that we have moved on, as a society we were caught in a moral panic one which has now moved from the world of films and in to the world of games. Some of the films which get released now days make the Video Nasties look like footage of a child’s teddy bear’s picnic in comparison and yet they manage to come out with very little resistance.

I also think that its not just the fact that society has grown more tolernt of gore I also think there has been a shift in terms of class relations. When you watch a lot of the old documenteries about the Video Nasties you will come across this attitude whereby basically posh upper middle and upper class people look down on certain forms of media while simultaniously trying to say that it will rot the poor mans mind and make a murderer of him because the poor man is stupid and easily manipulated. We went through a whole set of changes where certain politicians were trying to push the idea of a classless society and that in combination with things such as the growth of speaking  platforms for all because of the internet have led to a socierty where ideas as stupid as ''oh it would corrupt the poor idiots'' are challanged. The net itself also acts against any one country being overly protective of its people and treating them like kids,, because if something is illegal in your country but is accepted in most others then it will be easy to find online, and the truth is while certain people in the UK were making a big fuss of the whole Video Nasties thing in a lot of countries they just couldnt understand the big deal we were making

If you look at the modern remake of The Evil Dead which is titled Evil Dead the film is no less bloody, the concept is virtually the same and yet it was practically applauded upon its release. Do I think this is because we live in a more morally corrupt society or that it is because we have all been changed and depraved by the Video Nasties we have lived through? Of course not, there is a difference between fantasy and reality and I think that just maybe those in control of the formation of home movie related policies have started to realise that most adults know the difference between the two.

So why did I end here? I hadnt really even reviewed The Evil Dead , I had basically just wrote a peiece about why it didnt deserve to be banned while introducing people to the whole DPP72 thing, the biggest irony being that before I did each of the I think in the end it was about 6 reviews I did of DPP72 films I actually watched the films at least once, most of the time a few times so I could enjoy or not enjoy each film and so that I could then do it again and make notes. What I should have said is that the Evil Dead is a brilliant film, it is full of intresting ideas, great camera angles and tricks that really make you feel like a part of everything that is going on around you, special effects which look far better than you would imagine and some brilliant acting. Watching the lead Bruce Campbell its not hard to see why he has ended up becoming a B-Movie legend, he simply acts the living heck out of the role and everyone else does a more than fair job. A lot of the criticism of Video Nasties seemed to lay with the fact that they were gore for gores ake but I dont feel that this is the case at all in Evil Dead the gore always serves the story and so I dont think it should be resented, you wouldnt complain about a bit of blood in a theatre production of a Shakespere play so why should you here? I would give Evil Dead a very solid 8.5 out of 10 as a film, it is something I have watched time and time again and I m sure I will continue to do so, there is a reason this film spawned 2 sequels, countless video game and comic book adaptions and recently its own TV series and thats because its GROOVY.