The Celuloide gag.

Movies, aren’t they the best. Little moving picture packages of escapism. Anyone who says they don't like Movies are filthy liars and should be taken to the town hall, dipped in offal and thrown to a pack of hungry jack russell's, because Movies are great. They can make us laugh, they make us cry, some make us angry and some are just there to entertain, unless it has Sandra Bullock in it. No matter what genre you prefer there is a movie waiting, smuggley knowing you will love it. But jump in your time machine and travel back to the mid to late 1970's and you'll find a band of rag-tag rascal directors that had only one aim, to induce vomit fuelled disgust. These movies where made with the intention, to shock the viewer by showing everything in graphic detail. No stone was left unturned or indeed unused to bludgeon. From a power drill to the head, right through to the savage lopping off of a man member. The more brutal the better and a new format was approaching on the horizon more then willing to bring all this into the so called safe haven of your front room The home video player, a foot high by about 4 foot wide with button’s that took the force of a jack hammer to press, a wired remote that stretched 20 centimetres from the unit and the whole thing soaked up about the same amount of power used by Italy in a year. Everyone wanted one. Lower budget movie makers saw the untapped potential of this new media, this was their escape from kissing the fat money grabbing ass of the people that controlled the cinema’s. So a tide of extreme movies flooded onto your local video store shelves. We all ventured out and hired 'Blood for the cannibal virgins snatch 3' with its over coloured and very graphic cover art, hopping to get a delightful romp for a Saturday night in with the family and most of the time what we got was a poorly made romp full of a 1000 gallons of blood, an always naked (most of the time ugly) lead actress with huge boobs and a plot as thin as budget bog paper. But we didn't care, or did we? A small group of middle class do gooders where banding together to voice their absolute disgust and outrage, claiming that these movies would 'corrupt and deprave'. No longer would it be OK for little Johnny shit face to watch 'Nazi alien whore girls on crack 4' while eating his sugar puffs. Because this would without doubt turn him into a vicious cross dressing, stappler wielding maniac before he could grow his curly ones. And so in 1984 a Act was born 'The Video Recording Act 1984'. which meant by law a group of hard assed upper class suit wearing toffs could cut, edit and ban anything they deemed extreme. The British media being what it is, lovingly named these movie 'Video Nasties' telling of true life horror story's about how Mark Volvo from Norfolk had sat down to watch his hired copy of 'Death Boob island 12' only for the video tape to leap from the player and repeatedly smash him in the fizzog. With the help of the media pooh storm the public lived in fear and raids on video shops where undertaken. But as with everything, if your told you can't have it, you want it more and so the underground black market video tape business was born. This is how I managed to watch 'A clockwork orange' (never a real 'video nastie' but still banned) which was well made and quite a good movie. I also saw 'Cannibal holocaust' which is the type of movie that robs you of an hour and half of you life and then sits there grinning about it like a adolescent knob. I also got a very suspect copy of 'I spit on your grave' which turned out to be, as I had suspected just a bunch of killing strung together by a rape. There where about 35 films that stayed on the list for any period of time. Most of these have now been released uncut and you can go down to your local DVD retailer buy one and mock at how once a whole country had feared that this would bring chaos to the streets and eventually destroy everything we hold dear to us including fluffy teddy bears. Even now, although the restrictions have been reduced to the minimal the ramifications of the era still show. This was the golden age of video where people talked in hushed corners and handed over brown paper bags with over viewed video tapes in, I miss the blood soaked old days.