Review: VIDEO NASTIES: Moral Panic, Censorship, and Video Tape

Editor, U.S. ; Dallas, Texas (@HatefulJosh)
Review: VIDEO NASTIES: Moral Panic, Censorship, and Video Tape
[FYI, this review will cover the documentary only, the rest of the package will be covered separately]

The early 1980's was a magical time for movie lovers.  The dawn of home video.  Everyone was scooping up $700 VCRs like their lives depended on it.  Thousands upon thousands of films that you'd never had a chance to see either in a theater or at home on television were suddenly at one's fingertips.  This was the same all around the world.  In the UK, something happened in those early years that went on to define the tastes of a generation of horror fans, the advent of the Video Nasty.

I'll assume that most of you, my fair readers, are at least aware of the Video Nasty.  Here is the briefest of descriptions, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Video nasty" was a term coined in the United Kingdom in the 1980s that originally applied to a number of films distributed on video cassette that were criticized for their violent content by various religious organizations, in the press and by commentators such as Mary Whitehouse. While violence in cinema had been subject of censorship for many years, the lack of a regulatory system for video sales combined with the claim that any film could fall into children's hands led to new levels of concern. Many of these "video nasties" were low-budget horror films produced in Italy and the United States. The furor created by the moral crusade against video nasties led to the introduction of the UK's Video Recordings Act 1984 which imposed a stricter code of censorship on videos than was required for cinema release. Several major studio productions ended up being banned on video, falling afoul of legislation that was designed to control the distribution of video nasties.
That's a fair enough description for you who are a bit in the dark.  I'm a bit of an anglophile, a bit of a cinephile, and a bit of a history geek, so the Video Nasty phenomenon is something I've been interested in for quite some time, going back to my teenage years, long after the initial uproar had died down.  I would have been quite happy with a dry retelling of the factual history of the legislation and public outcry against these films, but what producer Marc Morris and director Jake West (Evil Aliens, Razor Blade Smile) have given us is more of a cultural history with a healthy bit of historical and archival footage.  The film features interviews with both people who were there and fighting the fight on both sides and contemporary filmmakers who were impressionable children and teens during that time period.  It does make for an interesting mix.  For anyone not familiar with the Video Nasty, this documentary will be revelatory, it is a bit hard to believe that as recently as the 1980's that full-blown censorship of this kind was going on in the United Kingdom.

The documentary begins with an introduction to the home video craze, how video shops were popping up everywhere and everyone was trying to cash in.  This was also the case in the US and in countries around the world.  In this opening segment regarding VHS, Jake West displays some clever reproductions of what many of us who watched those video tapes had to endure to see some of our favorite films.  Dubbed and re-dubbed tapes were passed from miscreant to miscreant.  VHS tapes were analog and magnetic, which meant that through extensive use, they wore out considerably, leaving the cassettes often borderline unwatchable, especially when the really good parts came up.  West presents recreations of these kinds of re-dubbing nightmares and mind-bending tracking issues to the viewer in a way that brings both sigh-inducing nostalgia and latent rage to the home viewer at the memory of having to fuck with these problems on a regular basis.  I still have a couple of ex-rental VHS tapes of films that have never made it to DVD and they suffer from these issues badly.  Younger viewers of Video Nasties may not quite understand and think that their machines are malfunctioning, but we old farts know the deal. 

West interviews several of his contemporaries in order to help explain what the Video Nasties did to children in those days, and it wasn't what the British government thought.  Directors Neil Marshall (Centurion, Dog Soldiers, Doomsday, The Descent) and Christopher Smith (Severance, Creep, Triangle, Black Death) are the most interesting contributors on this front.  They both offer up stories of seeing these films as pre-teens and teenagers, and their stories are similar.  The films did nor warp them, but the actual banning of the films did give them a "must see" list of films.  That was the case across Britain, the list only succeeded in creating a bigger market for these films than they, honestly, deserved.  I am a big fan of sleaze and horror, and my recent columns on Arrow Video and Severin Films are a testament to that, so I can imagine myself in their shoes.  Finding out that these 72 films are banned and being actively pulled from the shelves and burned, yes, BURNED, would have only made my interest grow tenfold.  To this day, the specter of the Video Nasty gives these films a special cache that they were the worst of the worst, if you were a horror fan and you hadn't seen I Spit on Your Grave, Cannibal Holocaust, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Anthropophagus, etc., you might have been laughed out of town!  Unfortunately, this was even the case when the film wasn't particularly good or engaging, which I think is a damned shame.

For me, the more interesting part of the story was the history of the evolution of the Video Nasty legislation.  West and Morris have, to their credit, brought along voices from both sides of the argument.  Film critics and horror film scholars face off, so to speak, with the people who were actively involved in banning and burning these films.  Of course, I know with whom I side in this argument, but I must say that I was really surprised at how weak the case for banning these films really was.  The most powerful voice among these contemporary interviews is that of Martin Barker, a lecturer and a man who had researched and defended the more questionable videos against the loudest of voices who were intent on banning anything they thought might be a depraving influence.  Several members of the teams responsible for the creation of legislation and enforcement of the legislation make appearances as well in order to make their case.  They all stick by their guns and insist that these films were not fit for viewing by Britons even 25 years later.  Graham Bright, the MP who actually put the legislation up to a vote, insists to this day that people were actually killed on film in these movies with a profit motive in mind.  He was half right, there was certainly a profit motive in mind, but the films on this list are often made so cheaply that anyone insisting that the murders are real must never have seen a special effect in their lives.

One of the most astonishing things about this to me was having seen the historical headlines in newspapers and archival footage of interviews and news broadcasts concerning the Video Nasties because there was really no dissenting voice in the mainstream.  One might have thought, as I did, that this was certainly a product of the conservative politicians and surely the liberals would have fought it, but that wasn't the case.  The entire government got behind this, England was in the 80's was a very conservative nation on the whole, and those dissenting voices may have been there, but there were nowhere to be seen in the public sphere, with very few exceptions, a point which Martin Barker illustrates both in his interview and the archival footage of him on a talk show attempting to have a thoughtful debate about the subject.  I hesitate to make comparisons to the US's current political climate, but I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make analogies.

There really is a lot of meat to this documentary, despite the fact that it seems to speed by at a very lean 70 minutes.  I do wish there was more to it, but I think that as a primer it works very well.  I haven't even managed to make mention of the ridiculous archival footage of British horror fans' public enemy #1, Mary Whitehouse, or the member of the DPP from the documentary, both of whom provide very telling points of view and do nothing to strengthen their arguments for banning evil sadist videos.  This could have been a hatchet job, there was no need for West or Morris to seek out members of the other team for interviews, archival footage would've sufficed.  Chances are that the vast majority of viewers of this documentary will be people like me who embrace all that is dirty and sleazy in films.  However, I give them credit for doing so.  By allowing the opposition to voice their views and the expose some of the behind the scenes machinations on the part of Ms. Whitehouse and the government, they show just how silly the whole thing really was, despite some real, lasting consequences for a few video shop owners and video distributors whose lives were forever changed because of the Video Recordings Act.

If you are interested in the Video Nasties, the history of home video, or censorship, this documentary will be very informative.  It provides many different views, both historical and contemporary, of the subject matter and allows for a very nice back and forth on the matter.  I could've done without the short film styled asides with the video tape attacking the girl, but it is a small price to pay.  This will be especially enlightening for non-Britons and younger viewers to whom this may seem a million years ago, just keep in mind, it was only 25 years, many of the people involved are still alive and involved in politics.  Ard has promised me that he'll tackle the rest of the package, and I think I've rambled on long enough anyway.  SEE THIS FILM!  You'll be glad you did.
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