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http://www.realmofhorror.co.uk/nasties.htm (http://www.realmofhorror.co.uk/nasties.htm)

I'd heard of them before, & I knew the basics; that the British government banned certain videos in the 80's, but I'd never known the full story. While trying to find info on Vidco I stumbled on this. It's a history of the controversy with reviews of all 72 banned films.

Germany did the same in the 80s and 90s, banning tons of movies that usually glorified violence. The outrage about this wasn't as loud as in the UK I suppose.
Most films have been "unbanned" in recent years including The Evil Dead.
Sam Raimi's classic cabin massacre even got a new lower "16" rating, which would be like a PG-13 in the U.S.
Most recently David Cronenberg's Videodrome was unbanned after 32 years (!) and now sports a "PG-13" (!) as well.

A lot of it made no sense at all. A movie called BLOOD FREAK about a turkey monster! was rated X.
Bulls**t.

The only thing the video nasties  s**t achived was making those movies more famous. Which is a good thing. Good movies

I remember this time well. I'd went from being able to watch pretty much any horror movie to come out to suddenly not being allowed to watch The Evil Dead or The Hills Have Eyes. Most of them all throughout this period banned or otherwise were generally freely available, it was my parents who suddenly weren't letting me watch them which I hated as I was the only kid in school who hadn't seen The Evil Dead. I however did get to see movies like Death Wish, Shogun Assassin, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and so on. The reality was that the bans weren't really as widespread or as much of a problem as the article suggests and the whole thing was more of something whipped up by the gutter press.

I've watched a lot of the films that were affected by this in the years since (I was in my mid 20's before finally got to see the first Evil Dead, although I'd seen parts 2 and 3 long before that). With the exception of The Last House On The Left and possibly I Spit On Your Grave my reaction after watching was along the lines of *shrug* meh, what was all the fuss about?

In many cases what people thought were banned were actually the film would be submitted for classification, the board would say "Ok, we'll give you the age rating you want if you cut this and this out", which would then go back to the distributer who could say "We are fine with this being removed, but we want to keep this in because..." and it would go back and forth normally. However some movies after being asked for certain cuts would then not be resubmitted and the video would then somehow sneak out claiming to be a banned video nasty which would then of course be like a red rag to a bull in getting people to want to watch it and Mary Whitehouses moral crusade would kick up a stink about it, giving an otherwise forgetable movie tons of free advertising and publicity.

There was a lot of manipulation of people by both sides on this.

A quick link for anyone interested in what films were actually banned. If you look for the ones during this time there aren't actually that many and as I've said the ones that were people got to watch regardless mostly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_United_Kingdom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_United_Kingdom)

You were there. :thumbup:

South Africa had the worst censorship system under apartheid: hundreds of films were banned and the two censor boards we had were faceless and had frightening powers.

and who exactly were these god-like beings, who could withstand viewing thousands of clips of pretend special fx without getting corrupted themselves, but who also knew exactly which ones would corrupt the brains of lesser mortals than they!!!

very few things p**s me off more than this.

the fact that DONT GO IN THE WOODS ALONE was deemed banworthy shows how clueless these guys were/are... and yet JAWS - which contains some ridiculously gory kills - is a mere PG in this country.

In South Africa, TV was also banned until 1975 and a certain book entitled Black Beauty.  :buggedout: