The FORBIDDEN spectacle
September 29th 2006 00:37
As a rule I abhor censorship. I believe in indicating to a potential audience, especially viewers likely to be offended or disturbed, what kind of content a film has, so that the viewer can make his or her own mind up about whether to see the film or not. And sure, there are obviously examples of films where the ethics of the filmmaker are in considerable question, and perhaps their films shouldn’t be made readily available to the general public. Or should they?
Age restrictions are a necessity, but deciding whether something considered too violent or too disgusting should be cut out of a film in an effort to cushion the film for mass consumption is diabolical. It smacks of Draconian measures, and indicates a society under the thumb.
Of course, the forbidden always seems to taste sweeter doesn’t it? There’s something intrinsically alluring about being told you can’t see something because you’re too young and easily corruptible, or that it is designed for adults and you’re not quite mature enough to understand.
My first taste of the forbidden was in 1982. This was around the same time as the VCR was making its way into more and more domestic homes, and video titles in the local store were separated onto two shelves; VHS and BETA-MAX, and none of the video carried ratings. But my video adventures are a different story.
My sly and sneaky adventures with the big screen, the movies in the local cinema, are what I want to talk about. “Fooling” the old lady in the ticket booth that my friend and I were really much older than we were but dressing as maturely as we could, acting cool, calm and collected, and fibbing about our birthdates.
I’d seen the trailers on TV for Halloween (1978), but of course I was only 10 or 11 when that came out. It screamed out “adult horror!” So when the sequel Halloween II (1981) hit the cinema shores of my home town of Wellington, my friend and I decided this would be our first R16 rated movie. We were 13. We spent what felt like hours across the street, hidden, scoping the cinema foyer, practicing our stories; basically stating the year we were born (making us three years older than we were) with authority and conviction. The old lady squinted at us, and then said “Well, I’ll sell you the tickets here, but I don’t think the usher will let you in.” Of course that was a load of crap. The usher didn’t say a bloody word! And the rest is history. Halloween II rocked! We were finally watching the super-violent, supernatural-evil spectacle of the forbidden!
The next year, aged 14, a different friend and I “fooled” another box office lady and got into The Hunger (1983), an R18 rated vampire flick which turned out to be as boring as bat shit. A year later again, and the same friend and I tackled the final frontier; the rare realm of the notorious R20 rated movie. In this case it was an old print of a doco on the French porn scene called Exhibition (1975), and that’s another kettle of forbidden fish entirely.
* the image on this page was taken from the following wikipedia page:
Halloween II (movie poster)
This is licensed from the GNU Free Document License
Age restrictions are a necessity, but deciding whether something considered too violent or too disgusting should be cut out of a film in an effort to cushion the film for mass consumption is diabolical. It smacks of Draconian measures, and indicates a society under the thumb.
Of course, the forbidden always seems to taste sweeter doesn’t it? There’s something intrinsically alluring about being told you can’t see something because you’re too young and easily corruptible, or that it is designed for adults and you’re not quite mature enough to understand.
My first taste of the forbidden was in 1982. This was around the same time as the VCR was making its way into more and more domestic homes, and video titles in the local store were separated onto two shelves; VHS and BETA-MAX, and none of the video carried ratings. But my video adventures are a different story.
My sly and sneaky adventures with the big screen, the movies in the local cinema, are what I want to talk about. “Fooling” the old lady in the ticket booth that my friend and I were really much older than we were but dressing as maturely as we could, acting cool, calm and collected, and fibbing about our birthdates.
I’d seen the trailers on TV for Halloween (1978), but of course I was only 10 or 11 when that came out. It screamed out “adult horror!” So when the sequel Halloween II (1981) hit the cinema shores of my home town of Wellington, my friend and I decided this would be our first R16 rated movie. We were 13. We spent what felt like hours across the street, hidden, scoping the cinema foyer, practicing our stories; basically stating the year we were born (making us three years older than we were) with authority and conviction. The old lady squinted at us, and then said “Well, I’ll sell you the tickets here, but I don’t think the usher will let you in.” Of course that was a load of crap. The usher didn’t say a bloody word! And the rest is history. Halloween II rocked! We were finally watching the super-violent, supernatural-evil spectacle of the forbidden!
The next year, aged 14, a different friend and I “fooled” another box office lady and got into The Hunger (1983), an R18 rated vampire flick which turned out to be as boring as bat shit. A year later again, and the same friend and I tackled the final frontier; the rare realm of the notorious R20 rated movie. In this case it was an old print of a doco on the French porn scene called Exhibition (1975), and that’s another kettle of forbidden fish entirely.
* the image on this page was taken from the following wikipedia page:
Halloween II (movie poster)
This is licensed from the GNU Free Document License
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