The DPP 39: Video Nasties List - Part 8

In 1984, the Video Recordings Act ushered in a terrifying new era in UK home video entertainment.  The regulation and subsequent censorship of home videos by the British Board of Film Classification led to a number of films being seized by the authorities and prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. In total, 39 of these films were successfully prosecuted, over the coming months The Horror Video will look very briefly at the release history of each film and its current status. To view the rest of the series…

Part 1: ‘Absurd’, ‘Anthropophagus’ and ‘Axe’, click here
Part 2: ‘Bay of Blood’, ‘The Beast in Heat’ and ‘Blood Feast’, click here
Part 3: ‘Blood Rites’, ‘Bloody Moon’ and ‘The Burning’, click here
Part 4: ‘Cannibal Apocalypse’, ‘Cannibal Ferox’ and ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, click here
Part 5: ‘The Cannibal Man’, ‘The Devil Hunter’ and ‘Don’t Go in the Woods’ click here
Part 6: ‘The Driller Killer’, ‘Evilspeak’ and ‘Expose’. Click here
Part 7: ‘Faces of Death’, ‘Fight for Your Life’, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ click here

Title: ‘Forest of Fear’ (1980)

Director: Charles McCrann
Uncut running time: 89 minutes
Alternative titles: ‘Toxic Zombies’, ‘The Bloodeaters’, ‘Blood Butchers’

Quite possibly the first of the deep south, redneck zombie sub-genre, there’s not a great deal to get excited about here in what is essentially a low budget drive in movie. Charles McCrann wrote, directed, produced, edited, acted and most likely made the tea for this film…a real labour of love.

A bunch of dim-witted hippies have produced their own marijuana plantation, large enough to draw the attention of the government who decide to kill the crop with a chemical spray. No doubt it worked but the side effects were much worse than smoking the crop as the hippies are turned into flesh eating zombies…was there any other kind after Romero? It’s entertaining enough if you’re in the right mood and there is some pretty decent gore with a few lost limbs, blood spurts and severed heads. It’s near impossible to see what the authorities saw in this that put it on the same level as the likes of ‘Cannibal Ferox’ and ‘Faces of Death’. It clearly was a different time!

Bizarrely the film has never really suffered from any censorship issues. Released on Monte Video in November 1982 the only edit was an inconsequential epilogue telling us that the FBI agent involved quit his job! Quite why it then made the nasties list almost exactly a year later is a mystery. It stayed there throughout the moral panic and has never seen a UK release since, which tells you a lot about its almost total lack of notoriety.

Current status: unavailable in the UK, though surely not through any moral or censorship issues, available uncut on Telavista in the US.

Title: ‘The Gestapo’s Last Orgy’ (1977)

Director: Cesare Canevari
Uncut running time: 81 minutes
Alternative titles: ‘Last Orgy of the Third Reich’, ‘Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler’


I’ve never quite understood the Nazi bongo flicks, it’s a genre that I’ve never had any interest in and has completely passed me by. Consequently I’ve not seen this particular ‘gem’, in fact in the UK in particular you have to look very hard as it is still banned here.

It seems that the entire film is told in flashback as Lise meets a former Commandant at the remains of an old death camp and she recalls the horrors she had to endure. A little research reveals those horrors to be rape, ritual humiliation, mother-daughter incest, sodomisation with bats and the killing of a baby born through rape. Not the kind of stuff you find in your average Sam Raimi flick! This type of film clearly had an audience at the time but it’s certainly not for me so I hold my hands up and claim to know absolutely nothing else about what this film has to offer.

In terms of censorship, VFP released the film on VHS in the UK in 1983 with 10m 48s of missing footage, mainly from two scenes of an Aryan fantasy and cannibalism. It was banned in March 1984 and has never seen the light of day since. You can, if you so wish, obtain the movie in the US on Intervision…a region free release that is uncut.

Current status: Banned in the UK, available uncut in the US through Intervision DVD.

Title: The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Director: Lucio Fulci
Uncut running time: 87 minutes
Alternative title: ‘The House Outside the Cemetery’, ‘Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero’


The third part of Fulci’s ‘Gates of Hell’ trilogy and the second to make the official nasties list (only ‘City of the Living Dead’ escaped that fate), this is a classy film and ranks as one of the finest on the list. Dr Freudstein ‘lives’ in the cellar of the titular house and keeps his rotting flesh alive by feasting on the living. When another Doctor brings his family to the house to carry on the work of his colleague whilst investigating his suicide, it brings a whole new buffet of bodies for Freudstein to feast on.

Owing more to the tropes of the haunted house movie than the zombie (despite the best efforts of the tagline which promised ‘marauding zombies’!) there is a literary influence from Lovecraft and Henry James, most notably ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and its cinematic incarnation ‘The Innocents’. With plenty to say about the nature of children, childhood and how they channel their fears, the ghostly Mae and the tediously irritating Bob (you have the English dub track to thank for that!) appear to hold the key to the whole mystery whilst being the only ones to escape Freudstein’s clutches. Having scant regard for causal logic and linear time, it’s a suitable conclusion to the trilogy.

The BBFC didn’t get this film at all, focussing only the gore and heavily editing the film, Vampix releasing the cinema version missing close to a minute and a half. Following the nasties panic Elephant put out a version missing a further four minutes, VIPCO going one better in the 90s with a version shorn of 6m 19s of gore! VIPCO tried a little harder in 2001 when a release missing 33 seconds was brought out before Arrow succeeded in bringing UK audiences the uncut version on 2012. For full review click here

Current status: Uncut in the UK on Arrow Video being out of print, uncut on Blue Underground in the US.