It's the Video Nasties Blog, Kids!

No one got overexcited about this at all...

Video Nasties.  The term sends chills down the spine, doesn’t it?  Even if you don’t know exactly what it means, it’s evocative.  It’s both sinister and utterly fucking absurd.  Which is pretty much where the Video Nasties situation lives as an historical event.

I’ve been fascinated with the whole business in one form or another pretty much since it happened.  I was aware of some of the most famous films when I was very young.  I discovered what happened and the list of films when I was fourteen or fifteen after picking up my first issue of the British horror magazine The Dark Side.

Some fond memories here.

Okay, that’s a tiny bit of interesting background, but why am I talking about this?  Well, from the middle of 2020 to the start of 2021 (last year to this year for current-me) I watched a bunch of Video Nasties that are on Amazon Prime.  I’ve idly thought that I should have filled my blog with thoughts on each film on an individual basis as I watched.  This isn’t how it panned out, so we’re here.  I didn’t find every Video Nasty, not by a long shout, but I filled in some holes in my watching.  A few things have been percolating in my brain since watching the last one, that I thought would be fun to share.

Hopefully more fun than watching the films.  Aye, it’s like that.

What this means, of course, that while I’m not going to go into deep detail on the plots of these films, really I’m just vaguely acknowledging their plots – fuck, some of them barely have plots to acknowledge – some of what I’m going to say will probably be able to be pieced together to work out story elements.  It’s spoilers.  I wanted to say it in a different way, but there are likely to be spoilers for these films.  Mind you, if you’re going to get bent out of shape about plot points from forty- and almost-fifty-year-old films, I think you should probably leave via the nearest exit.

For those of you who don’t know what the Video Nasties are or what happened, I’ll give you a quick overview.  There are loads of other people out there who have gone over the whole period in greater detail, this is just to get anyone who doesn’t know caught up.

In the early eighties in the UK, with the greater affordability of video cassette players, there was a boom in video rentals.  At this time the video distribution companies didn’t need to apply to the BBFC to have the videos classified – which is something I didn’t know until looking this up to make sure I got it right.

The legislation for dealing with videos was apparently covered by the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which wasn’t really fit for this purpose.  It essentially meant an unregulated market, and as we know that never leads to trouble, because companies trying to make money know how to behave themselves.  Nah.  They flooded the place with really dodgy stuff, that parents might not have been aware wasn’t suitable for their precious poppets.  Although looking at the lurid covers to the most famous stuff, it would have taken a particularly negligent or outright stupid parent to not know what they were getting into.  And things like Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, The Driller Killer and Gestapo’s Last Orgy are not ambiguous titles.

'Oh, the kids will love this!'

Still, sniffing a moral outrage to be vocally morally outraged about, white-haired publicity troll-pensioner Mary Whitehouse was awakened like Godzilla, if Godzilla really didn’t want you to see penises and boobs.  And when Mary Whitehouse and her crazed acolytes made demands, the quivering establishment twisted themselves into knots to obey.

With only that Obscene Publications Act for the establishment to wield, the Department of Public Prosecutions got involved in the whole mess.  The police stomped into video rental shops and scooped up anything they thought might fit the ‘obscene’ criteria.  I understand this led to a few things getting grabbed that weren’t even close to being in the Video Nasties category.

In total 72 films were hauled before the DPP, 39 of which were actually prosecuted.  It’s films from this list of 72 that I’ve been interested in over the years.  There is another supplemental list, but it doesn’t really interest me quite as much.  Then there are the banned films that aren’t considered Nasties, again not of interest here.

Anyway, the upshot is that the BBFC was given the remit to look at films for both cinematic and home release.  Meaning most films get looked at twice and could be given different ratings and cuts for home and theatrical release in the UK, which is…weird.

There’s obviously more to it than that, but I’m not interested in regurgitating the whole thing here.  I’ve got other things to say and I’d rather not drive away more of the few people reading this than absolutely necessary.

So, I stumbled on the Video Nasties on Amazon Prime while flicking through the available horror films at some point in the summer of 2020.  I had watched a few Dario Argento films, including Suspiria for the first time, and caught sight of The Burning and then, rather more surprisingly, Cannibal Holocaust in the list.  I was intrigued when I dug a bit more and found a clutch of other lesser-known nasties there.

As a sidenote, I have thoughts on Dario Argento and his films.  I’m not going into them here, but I may do so in the future.  Moreso if I can find Tenebrae to watch, which is his entry in the Video Nasties list.

There will be a reckoning.

Despite the reputation, not all of the Video Nasties are horror films.  There’s a section of them that are crime films and another that are concentration camp exploitation.  From what I’ve read of the concentration camp films, I’m not surprised they got picked up, there’s going to be a ‘too soon, man’ card on those for a long time.

What did I think of the of the Video Nasties I’ve watched?  In general, they are bad films.  There are a couple of standout films, like The Evil Dead and The Last House on the Left (which I haven’t seen, annoyingly), but mostly it’s a lot of shit movies.  They struggle to get over mediocre.

Of the ones I watched last year, Cannibal Holocaust is probably the best film.  I’ll talk about that later, though.

I’ll instead start at the absolute bottom of the barrel and talk about Zombie Creeping Flesh, or Hell of the Living Dead.  Quite a few of the Video Nasties have multiple titles, I’ve noticed, I mean in the case of something like Anthropophagous: The Beast it’s because of multiple cuts of the films in question.  From what I can tell about Zombie Creeping Flesh, this is not the case, it’s just the one terrible film that’s been re-titled, like a way of fooling people into watching it over and over again.  Believe me, there has to trickery involved to watch this a second time.  Getting through once was a dubious achievement for me.

Even the cover looks low-effort.

I need to confess at this point that I don’t like zombie films as a genre to start with.  I have enjoyed zombie films, but they tend to be comedies like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland or The Return of the Living Dead.  The whole premise of serious zombie films leaves me cold.  I don’t think liking zombie films would have increased my enjoyment of Zombie Creeping Flesh.

Zombie Creeping Flesh seems to straddle the intersection between zombie films and cannibal films and benefits from neither.  It has the stupid protagonists of zombie films and the racism of cannibal films.  Lump that in with an obvious non-budget and you’re onto a complete loser.  Everything about it is bad, from the script to the acting to the awful, awful ‘action’ sequences.  The notable thing about some of the action scenes is the special forces guy who is supposed to be so agile and quick the zombies can’t get him, but the actor has all the grace and speed of a dried pile of mud, so that the zombie actors have to hold back from grabbing the idiot.

You almost have to give the makers a few points for trying to make the obvious European location (Spain, specifically) look like Papua New Guinea by splicing in stock footage of exotic animals.  It doesn’t work and looks even more ridiculous when you see that the tropical trees in the stock footage look nothing like the European trees in the footage the director shot.  There’s a lot to rag on in this film, but I’ll leave it at it’s by the far the worst quality of the Video Nasties I’ve seen.  The awful cut of Anthropophagous: The Beast might come close to the shit quality but manages to pip it by having something approaching a coherent, albeit boring, plot.

Another film that’s almost as bad as Zombie Creeping Flesh is Night of the Demon.  I’m going to add a caveat that the print Amazon streams seems to be a third-generation VHS copy, so that’s fantastic.  This one is about a horny-angry sasquatch who stomps around the woods murdering unwary travellers (including the biker who gets his dick wrenched off for the crime of needing to go for a pee, one of the oft-mentioned scenes from this turd) and having sex with a distressingly underaged girl.  This is one of those films where I probably wondered aloud if the makers actually know what a story is or are really just a lone wind-up car bumping endlessly against a typewriter.

Penis removal not shown.

The Toolbox Murders, Death Trap, The Burning and The Beyond are all of a similar terrible-but-better-than-Zombie-Creeping-Flesh quality.  The Beyond is the best of these because it goes for and hits a demented dream-like quality.  The effects are still laughably bad and it’s more confusing than scary, but it does have the distinction of having an interesting take on hell, which I’m sure inspired The Void from 2016, which is a plus.

Death Trap was Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it is nowhere near as good.  He jumps at bonkers and, to be fair to him, hits it, but then slithers down into stupid and dull.  I couldn’t get away from the weirdly stagy lighting of the whole film.  I suppose the constant red glow supplements the relentlessly sleazy atmosphere but doesn’t make it a good film.  Robert Englund’s presence doesn’t save it and neither does the original Morticia Addams, Carolyn Jones.

The Burning seems to be a bigger budget production, scurrying as it does on the heels of the extremely successful Friday the 13^th.  The producers were even able to spring for a score composed by arch-prog-rock keyboard botherer Rick Wakeman.  Not that bigger US studio productions completely dodged being hauled in, there are far fewer of them on DPP’s list.  Y’know that Friday the 13^th comparison?  It runs fucking deep, I’ll tell ya.  You’ve got your summer camp with a tragic prank-gone-wrong in its past, a bunch of randy teenagers and a disfigured killer, although this came out a week after Friday the 13^th Part 2, (in case you didn’t know, Jason Voorhees didn’t become the antagonist of the series until part two) so that last one was probably coincidence.  The teenagers getting offed plot is, however very much in the Friday the 13^th mould.

I’ve seen reviews for The Burning saying it’s a decent horror effort and I’m going to have to strongly disagree.  For one of these films there needs to be tension and that gets lost in the Meatballs-esque antics of the kids and councillors.  There are attempts at creating atmosphere at sporadic points for the first half, like the makers forgot it was a horror and they were putting together a charming summer camp comedy.  Almost like they lost faith in what they were doing, and given how slapshod it all plays out, I don’t blame them.  If you’re up for watching it, look out for Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter in very early roles.

The Toolbox Murders is another relentlessly dull effort.  Supposedly based on a true story, but not really.  This one opens with a flurry of murders, but then runs out of steam for what seems like two hours, but is only about half an hour before a mid-film plot-twist tells you that the makers should have put together a completely different and probably more interesting film.  I’ll go so far as to say that the story doesn’t actually start until halfway through the film.  As it is, it blunders along like the worst made-for-TV-movie true story you could imagine.  It blunders along as much as the completely superfluous police investigation.  I mean, seriously, the police don’t do anything to even advance the plot and aren’t even interesting characters.  Mannequins in paper hats with ‘COP’ written on them would have done as good a job.

It apparently gets a bit parky murdering a bunch of people.

An interesting thing about The Toolbox Murders, is that there was a ‘remake’ in 2005 directed by Tobe Hooper called Toolbox Murders.  This is better than both Death Trap and the original The Toolbox Murders.  Toolbox Murders bears no relation, as far as I can tell, to The Toolbox Murders other than the similar title, and benefits greatly from it.

I’ve decided to put the cannibal films in as a separate thing.  Why?  Because they share a lot of things.  They are all Italian productions of one sort or another.  Really a huge portion of the Video Nasties list groans under the weight of the excesses of Italian cinema.

They are all racist as fuck.  Even Cannibal Holocaust with its ‘white people are the real villains’ manages to do this by depicted the native people as a bunch of barely-sentient and backward idiots.  They all manage to have the white person hard-on for how amazing white people are in comparison to brown and black people.  It makes an already unpleasant watching experience even more awkward.

And speaking of unpleasant, let’s mention the fucking animal cruelty.  Animal cruelty is never acceptable as entertainment, not even close to it.  Yet the makers of these cannibal films twist it to make it even worse.  Imagine that!  Taking something that’s already abhorrent and managing to find away of making it even worse.  That takes a certain kind of talent, I suppose, but not a talent that should be practiced.  The makers of these film kill and torture animals who were otherwise getting on with their day for no plot reason.  It’s just in there for the gratuitous titillation of a bunch of trogs.  Don’t worry I’m not going to catalogue that shit, if you want to know, either watch the films or look them up.  It’s what makes the cannibal film unique amongst the Video Nasties, along with the concentration camp stuff, where you can see the censors might have had a point.

I was wavering on leaving it to the end, but I think I’ll kick off by talking about Cannibal Holocaust.  The most famous of this subsection of the Video Nasties list.

Better effects than feature in most of the film.

I do mean it when I say this is by far the best Video Nasty I watched in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good film by any means.  It has noticeable themes, even if those themes are wrapped in a crunchy coating of racism and an unfortunate helping of irony.  The whole point of this film is that the filmmakers depicted in it are horrible people who did horrible things to the locals.  This includes the heavy suggestion that they murdered a woman and staged her body in one of the most iconic images from the film.  The irony being that the director, Ruggero Deodato, was a complete prick to the actors and real-life locals he used as extras.  He filmed nude scenes of the female lead against her wishes as just one example.

There’s no need to go into all the prosecution stuff.  I’ve been repeating enough information in this as it is.  If you want to find out about the controversies around Cannibal Holocaust, there’s lots of places to find it.

It’s all very nice that Deodato admitted he regretted the animal cruelty in the film.  Which I suppose is something, but his treatment of cast and crew in light of what he was trying to say with the film weakens his thesis just a tiny bit.

This brings me on to Prisoner of the Cannibal God.  I don’t actually have a lot to say about this film in all honesty.  It’s as dumb as fuck, tries to be critical of western greed, flubs it and leaves us with a film whose biggest point of interest is a naked Ursula Andress.  Very diverting and all, but not worth nearly one-hundred minutes of humdrum pish.

Finally, we come to Man from Deep River.  This one’s a bit of a curiosity as it’s a retelling of A Man Called Horse.  I have never seen A Man Called Horse, mainly because as a genre the Western has never interested me, so I’m not in a position to compare the two films, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say the 1970 film is much better.  Just a wild guess there.  The only notable thing about this one, and it is not a good thing, is it has by far the most animal cruelty of the three cannibal films I watched.  To begin with I was congratulating it on having very little, then the filmmakers roll up their sleeves and really ram that shit in there.  Golden Turd for going that extra mile to be complete cunts, people.

Still not sure what that thing is.

What all this boils down to is how stupid and nonsensical the whole Video Nasties situation was.  Yeah, there needed to be control over the films put onto the shelves.  The solution of having ratings on the cases was fine.  The furore caused by people like Mary Whitehouse is always going to go all Streisand and a slew of terrible-to-mediocre films are going become famous even though they really don’t deserve it.  The cannibal films are the only ones that deserved that kind of scrutiny but getting rid of the animal cruelty would have cleared most of them up like lotion on haemorrhoids.  Films like The Toolbox Murders, Night of the Demon and Zombie Creeping Flesh should never have tickled the general population’s consciousness, but here they are with more power than their ineptitude and artlessness should warrant.  And the top-tier of the Video Nasties like The Evil Dead, Possession and The Last House on the Left should never have been lumped in with the rest.  You may think I’ve judged these films harshly and frankly, yes I have, because they are terrible films and must be punished.

Now I still need to watch a bunch of less-terrible and less-depressing films to flush out some of the shit left by these films.  If you’re going to watch any of these films, remember to have a happy or comforting film on standby as remedy, you’ll thank me if you do.