Box Of The Banned
Remember the 1980s? Remember the time between the arrival of video and the arrival of video censorship? Remember sneaking downstairs late at night to watch some appalingly naff horror film - a film that you had been trying to get hold of ever since you saw it mentioned in a sensationalist scare story in the Daily Mail?
Although the ‘video nasty’ phenomenon was very much tied to a particular time and place - Britain in the 1980s - it followed exactly the same course as every other media-driven moral panic that has exploded over the years, from comics to computers.
It was a brief, but golden age in which an endless stream of zombies, cannibals, Nazis and others attempted to break every taboo they could find - often with more creativity being expended on the cover of the video than its contents.
But, for every twenty or so cheap shockers there was a film that was actually quite good - such as Cannibal Holocaust which managed to combine extreme gore with a sense of morality that seems strangely out of place in an Italian exploitation flick. It also beat The Blair Witch Project to the ‘mock-doc’ punch by 20 years.
Cannibal Holocaust isn’t on Anchor Bay’s Box of the Banned, but the six films that are - The Evil Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters, I Spit on Your Grave, The Driller Killer, The Last House on The Left and Nightmares in a Damaged Brain - are all worth revisiting.
The DVD also includes a 47 minute documentary: Ban The Sadist Videos.
Monday 12 Sep 2005 | Paul | DVD, Film Sets
