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Thursday, July 2, 2009

So you think you've seen it all

11:43 PM / Cinema / 6 Comments

Donkey Punch is a low budget British horror movie from 2008. It was, for the most part, shredded by the critics when it came out, but personally I thought it was better than its reputation suggested. It genuinely surprised me on a number of occasions, particularly with regard to the explicitness of the sex scene that occurs around half an hour into its running time. Said sex scene, I knew, would be guaranteed to run afoul of the American censorship body, the MPAA, once it crossed the Atlantic. It would be a difficult scene to cut out entirely, given that an event that occurs during it is crucial to the progression of the plot. It would also be tough to trim, since, beyond the various shots of breasts, buttocks and willies flopping around, the overall tone of the entire scene is one that I imagine would give your average puritanical American film censor the heebie-jeebies.

Here's what they did.

That's right: someone finally managed to make the censorship of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut seem subtle by comparison. It just goes to show - a couple of blown-out, DV-quality ass shots and a fleeting glimpse of a lady's hoo-ha make all the difference to the MPAA. Ironic, then, that the R-rated remake of My Bloody Valentine apparently features a woman running around naked as the day she was born, showing everything including the kitchen sink for a good five minutes. (Unless I've been misinformed - as of writing, I haven't seen the film.) Double standards rear their ugly head once again, and I'm tempted to suggest that what frightened the spawn of Jack Valenti about this scene was not so much its explicitness but its realness. As is so often the case with censors, though, they were unable to articulate (or admit to) precisely what was bothering them, and instead went for easy targets - "I saw an ass-crack at 31:29. We can't have that!" It's easy to rag on the BBFC - god knows, they themselves don't exactly make it hard - but I can't remember them ever pulling anything quite as bloody ridiculous as this. (Actually, scratch that - they have.)

I'm well aware that the MPAA do not actually wield the scissors themselves, simply censoring by proxy - in other words, having the studios do their dirty work for them. As such, I doubt they were the ones who made the decision to obscure the actors' backsides and crotches in this manner. I'm sure it was simply a case of them telling the distributors that they objected to the visibility of certain body parts, and the distributors then opted to employ these extremely crude techniques to obscure the offending organs rather than cutting the shots entirely. This doesn't change the fact that, to these censors, the most objectionable element in a scene in which a girl has her neck broken while being buggered after being plied with drugs is a handful of glimpses of backsides and genitalia. I doubt the overall tone of the scene in question is changed by the presence of a few black squares, but it just goes to show how completely and utterly petty these censors are.

6 Comments

 
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