Video Nasties: Absurd
In this series I’m taking a look back at the films that, in the early 1980′s, were caught up in the Video Nasties moral panic in the UK. When video first arrived in the UK it was not covered by our censorship laws, and that, combined with the reluctance of the studios to embrace the technology, meant that many of the early releases were lurid, uncensored, horror films.
The tabloid press mounted a campaign against the films, and with a new right wing government in power and the growing influence of pro-censorship campaigner Mary Whitehouse, the Director of Public Prosecutions was instructed to draw up a list of films liable to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. I’ll be looking at every one of the 74 films that made this list, giving you a snapshot of the controversy around each film before watching and reviewing it.
The Ban
This Italian horror film – a pseudo sequel to director Joe D’Amato and writer/star George Eastman’s other DPP entry, Athropophagous the Beast was, like many of the nasties, released in two versions by its UK distributors, Medusa Video. One was uncut, the other presumably the cinema version, passed with two and a half minutes of cuts, those bearing the film’s title on a sticker on the spine of the box were the uncut copies. Absurd was on every iteration of the DPP list, and was therefore among the DPP 39. The film has never yet been resubmitted in the UK (though I can’t imagine it giving BBFC too much trouble now), but it is available uncut (as Horrible, though the on screen title remains Rosso Sangue) on DVD in the US.
The Film
Absurd is perhaps the film that best epitomises what a ‘video nasty’ is. It’s neither the best nor the worst of the films on the list, but it has everything (with the exception of gratuitous – or indeed any – nudity) that defines what is an often bafflingly disparate group of films.
It’s an exploitation film, made for purely financial reasons by an Italian filmmaker who has turned his hand to every genre under the sun (in this case Joe D’Amato). It’s brutally violent and gory, but not tremendously well written or paced, and the effects often have a home made quality about them, while the performances are marred by the fact that every actor is dubbed, often quite badly. All in all, it’s a film that demonstrates rather well the odd appeal of this generally shonky set of movies; it’s rough around the edges, and seems reasonably mild next to Martyrs and Serbian Films of today, but it still carries that cachet, that illicit thrill that comes from it having been banned, and for a horror fan there’s much to enjoy here besides that.
Absurd wastes no time at all in cutting to the chase, indeed it begins in the middle of one, which ends with George Eastman (as Nikos) impaling himself on a fence, then showing up at a local family home with his guts spilling out. From there he’s taken to the local hospital, where a surgeon observes that Nikos has an incredible capacity for healing (shouldn’t this mean his guts were stuck on the outside of his body before the operation… ah, who cares?) All you need to know after that is that Nikos wakes up and starts killing people, ending up at the same house whose kitchen floor he nearly dropped his intestines on (tch, careless), attempting to murder the babysitter and the kids (for no real reason).
Unfortunately between those two poles, the film has a rather saggy middle section, yes it’s occasionally enlivened with a nasty death scene (Nikos feeding a butcher into a bandsaw, for much the same reason people give for climbing mountains – because it’s there), but overall this half hour of getting to know you time with the yuppie family, interspersed, as much of the film is, with whatever they are watching on TV, feels slow and dull. It does throw up one interesting obstacle though, in that the teenage daughter of this family is bedridden, in traction to correct a curved spine. Once the parents leave and Nikos arrives at the house the film really ramps up again. Throughout, D’Amato’s kills are outrageously brutal and surprisingly varied, Nikos kills with a surgical drill, a pick-axe and, most memorably, an oven and each scene is executed with a different kind of panache. The pick-axe kill, for example, is swift and brutal, while the oven scene is horribly protracted and features some effective make up for Annie Belle (who was also in House on the Edge of the Park).
However, D’Amato and Eastman have saved the best for last, and in the last fifteen minutes they manage to combine the film’s brutality with a couple of effective suspense sequences as the bedridden Katia (stunningly beautiful seventeen year old Katya Berger) first has to free herself from her traction then escape and attempt to kill Nikos, in order to protect her little brother. The final scenes find a blind Nikos stalking Katya through the house in a beautifully realised sequence, before the film closes with one of the best Final Girl images I’ve seen in some time. That sequence alone helps make up for all Absurd‘s rough edges and its slow middle half hour.
This may not be a great film, but it’s definitely a good one, and tremendous entertainment for the most part. The imposing Eastman makes for a good boogeyman and Joe D’Amato is a perfectly solid horror director when the pace picks up. Rather than watch one of your old stand by slashers again, seek this one out, it’s a good time.
6 / 10
