 Originally Posted by SymphonicX
I agree 100% - I actually just watched Grotesque - and I can see wholeheartedly why that and the HC2 are banned. If HC2 is anything remotely like Grotesque, then they are saving your time by banning it. Grotestque started out with a shot of a couple walking into a tunnel, a guy gets out, hammers them over the head, and they wake up on in a torture chamber. From there its 90 minutes of ridiculous sexual and physical torture with absolutely NO narrative or point to it whatsoever. They banned it because it was "torture for its own sake". I agree - if there's no reason to understand what's happening, no rationale, no narrative, then there's no point. It didn't tell a story, in the same way a pron video won't tell a story. It just starts, then it ends.
There was a flash of genius in the middle of the movie, but just a tiny, tiny flash. It provides the viewer with about 2% of the detail it needs to actually be considered even a shitty low budget horror movie. It's not - its just Gorn, as it's come to be known.
As for the HC2, I imagine it's just the same as that - a guy kidnaps a bunch of people, and we just watch them feeding off the other's shit for 2 hours. I never used to agree with BBFC bannings - but you know what, in these two cases I do. Not so much because of the risk to minors, although that's a factor, it's just saving people's time, effort, and money investing in such a terrible, pointless escapade into violence.
Now if you look back on banned movies - by and large most of them are turgid shite. The Excorcist, as much as I despise that movie, at least was intelligent, thought provoking, intense....gimmie that over Nekromatic any day. To my knowledge that really was the only intelligent movie to be banned (The Excorcist), A Clockwork Orange WASN'T banned (it just wasn't released by Kubrick). Oh Texas Chainsaw was amazing, and banned...forgot about that one...I think as soon as the BBFC started to look at the bigger picture ie: the narrative constructed around a violent movie, that they really started being a lot more rational about their censorship.
-- -------- Post added at 08:54 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:51 AM ----------
But then there was the controversial A Serbian Film - which to be honest I had on a memory stick not two weeks ago - but I deleted it because to be perfectly frank, I couldn't bring myself to watch that movie. Although I'm told there is a strong narrative reason for what happens in that movie - I just don't want to see it. I won't go into details, for the sake of this boards innocence - it's got a truly fucking sick pay off to the whole thing.
Indeed - there are still some out there who believe the BBFC is some dictatorship, but since 1999 they've become something entirely different to what they were during the 1980s - which was a ridiculous time for horror movies, and not just because of the BBFC, but because of legislation, MPs (from all sides of the house with hardly, if any, dissenting voices supporting the banned flicks), and a moral panic instigated by tabloid papers looking to flog some dead trees ... ... we've come a long way since then. Bans are extremely rare these days, and censorship is extremely rare too - oftentimes it's usually at the behest of the distributors and for something minor (e.g. 2 seconds from The Expendables for one knife stab to get a 15 rather than an 18 ... or a couple of re-framed photos from The Hangover 2's end credits to get a 15 and not an 18), but the BBFC themselves have their heads screwed on.
Now, the debate continues about whether or not a pointless load of old violence (such as Grotesque, as you mentioned), should be allowed in for people to make up their own minds - that's a whole other thing I'm not interested in getting into, but judging from the description and reasoning behind the ban, I'm hardly surprised they did. There was miniscule characterisation in the first Human Centipede as it was (and they weren't particularly likeable characters either), so if the second has sod all, and goes running into the world of sexual violence, then I'm hardly surprised.
Interestingly, with that 'Extreme Porn' legislation that Labour barged through when they were still in government, some have pondered whether if you'd be liable for a spanking by the law for possessing THC2 ... but then considering it's primary purpose isn't for sexual arousal, you'd probably be alright ... although what the primary purpose of THC2 is, I really don't know.
Interesting that you mention A Serbian Film - I too have no interest in seeing that movie. The first time I read the description of the film, including what was cut by the BBFC, I genuinely felt depressed afterwards ... I felt dirty just reading the description. Then seeing relatively modest pictoral representations of the cuts on Movie Censorship further compounding my lack of want in seeing this flick. I don't see how gross sexual violence (sometimes involving children) translates to a biting critique of Serbian politics - and it certainly doesn't bring the debate around to such things, because the debate only ends up being about the sexual violence within the film. A documentary directly about the horrors of Serbia's past and present would have actually gotten the media talking about the important issue.
I remember when I was a teenager, my idea to become a filmmaker was "make the most disgusting film ever and ride the controversy" - but it was just that, the moronic half-baked insta-thought of a teenager ... however, it seems some filmmakers much older (and surely, by default even, wiser) still possess such a train of thought.
|
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
I'm sure "A Serbain Film II" won't be far behind.
Bookmarks