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The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Was Thatcher right to ban ‘video nasties'? I binged Zombie Flesh Eaters and Slaughtered Vomit Dolls to find out
Later this month, the cult film service Arrow will do something that would once have plunged the UK into screaming fits of utter chaos. That's right, it's going to stream Zombie Flesh Eaters. The film comes with a tremendously confusing backstory. In Italy, George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead was recut by Dario Argento and retitled Zombi. Zombi, no relation to Bambi, was such a success that a sequel was commissioned, using the script of an unmade movie entitled Nightmare Island. This film became Zombi 2. In the UK, Zombi 2 was renamed Zombie Flesh Eaters. And then it was banned. This was largely down to the campaign waged against so-called 'video nasties' in the early 1980s. Driven by newspaper front pages screaming things like 'BAN VIDEO SADISM NOW', police officers began conducting raids on video shops, confiscating anything they saw as breaching the Obscene Publications Act. The confiscations felt arbitrary (in Slough, officers seized Dolly Parton's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, under the impression it was pornography), but eventually 39 films were successfully prosecuted under the act. Zombie Flesh Eaters was one of them. And now its unimaginable horrors are available to stream, uncut and in pin-sharp 4K. In truth, it's been around for a while. Around the turn of the century, the BBFC loosened its regulations, and the banned films began to trickle out. Not all of them – 1969's Nazi sex film Love Camp 7 is still routinely refused a certificate, as is the thematically similar Gestapo's Last Orgy – but Zombie Flesh Eaters has been available to legally watch uncut for two decades now. Which means that I probably should have watched it by now. After all, if you grew up in the 80s and 90s like I did, nothing gave a movie more cachet than being banned. All these films had a too-hot-for-TV thrill to them; if you weren't allowed to watch them, they had to be good. And yet I never got around to watching Zombie Flesh Eaters. Turns out I didn't need to bother. Not because the Thatcher government was right and the film has turned me into a depraved subversive, but because it lumbers on for ever, grinding through endless overlong, overacted dialogue scenes that go nowhere and do nothing. Admittedly there are hints of gleeful gore here and there. In one scene a woman's eyeball is impaled, and there's a tremendous underwater sequence with a zombie, a topless woman and what appears to be an actual live shark. Maybe there was some religious outrage that has lost its impact over the years (OK, a zombie does get its head caved in with a crucifix), but otherwise it contains nothing that wouldn't be found in a workaday Game of Thrones episode. Would it get banned today? Unlikely. In an age where Damien Leone can release three Terrifier movies (where, variously, a man is chainsawed to death through his scrotum and a woman has a rat-filled pipe hammered down her throat), it's practically daytime television. I grew up scared and fascinated by the prospect of Zombie Flesh Eaters corrupting my mind. Now that I have actually seen it, I'm afraid to report that Zombie Flesh Eaters is no Zombie Flesh Eaters. Were all the banned films like that? Has society moved on so much that everything we once feared would undo society has become unimaginably hokey? I decided to watch some of the other 39 films to find out. I started with the most notorious, John Alan Schwartz's Faces of Death. No film was arguably bolstered more by a banning than Faces of Death. A mockumentary that combines unaired news footage with material shot for the film, Faces of Death presented itself as a compilation of every kind of death: accidents, executions, suicide, cannibalism. Back when nobody could see it, it sounded like a kind of aggressively violent precursor to You've Been Framed. But that isn't what it is at all. It is, in fact, a harrowing look at human suffering. There's Holocaust footage. There are starving children. There's violence against animals (staged) and footage of body parts scattered across the ground following a plane crash (real). It is, to put it lightly, an incredible bummer to watch. Despite its reputation, Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust was slightly easier to watch. You can understand the nerves around releasing it – it features graphic sexual violence, and more than one scene of animals being killed – but at least it had the benefit of having an identifiable point of view. The film is a satire about cultural appropriation and media sensationalism, in which an American documentary crew travel to the Amazon rainforest and get in over their heads. Which in terms of intent puts it above a lot of the other banned films, but the execution muddles the message. After all, if you have to kill an animal to make a point about media sensationalism, you've already lost the argument. And then there's Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave, a film that lacks either the intellectual rigour of Cannibal Holocaust or the fun of Zombie Flesh Eaters. It is one of the least enjoyable films I have ever watched. I Spit on Your Grave is a film in which a woman exacts revenge against a group of men who gang rape her. It was banned in the UK, as well as in Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Norway and West Germany. This is likely due to the point of the film being the rape itself. So much time is dedicated to the rape sequence that the revenge part feels tacked on, as if it wants to trick you into thinking that it's a feminist film. It's worth pointing out that I Spit on Your Grave still hasn't been released here uncut – some heavily eroticised rape scenes still contravene BBFC guidance – but the edited version available on Amazon Prime was still so unpleasant that it represents the only time I have ever welcomed the intrusion of interstitial ads. And yet by modern standards, even these video nasties pale next to what is now circulating online. For the purposes of this feature, my editor ushered me towards a 2006 film called Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, part of Lucifer Valentine's Vomit Gore trilogy, along with ReGOREgitated Sacrifice and Slow Torture Puke Chamber. A surreal satanist film about a woman with an eating disorder, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls contains scenes of torture and several scenes in which people vomit various fluids, some of which are gobbled straight back up. It was awful. If this was 1983, it would have been banned in a heartbeat. Because time has rendered Zombie Flesh Eaters so quaint, my assumption was that all the other banned films would be equally silly and kitschy. After all, we're talking about a government so jumpy that it also banned the third word in the title of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But that isn't the case, since a lot of these films are still genuinely repellant. What has changed, though, is our attitude to them. Clearly, banning them only served to boost their reputation, whereas if they had been allowed to remain in public, I'm convinced that they would have all died in obscurity decades ago. In other words, less 'BAN VIDEO SADISM NOW' and more 'LET'S WATCH SOMETHING THAT'S ACTUALLY GOOD'. Zombie Flesh Eaters is available to stream on Arrow and on Limited Edition 4K UHD from 28 July Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at
Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
28 Years Later — it's like a zombie movie made by Ken Loach
It can't be — can it — after all this time? Nostalgic pop-culture references to the old Tango adverts and the Teletubbies. Fancy freeze-frames and lickety-split editing. A banging mixtape of ambient house on the soundtrack so that even when the characters are battling for their life against zombies the audience feel like they are tying one on at the Haçienda on a Saturday night with their mates. It has to be … yes, it's a Danny Boyle film. Last seen directing Yesterday in 2019, Boyle returns to screens this week with 28 Years Later, an unusually thoughtful sequel to his 2002 classic 28 Days Later, which shows much has changed since the zombie apocalypse — sorry, Rage Virus — was first loosed on the world. England is now cut off from the rest of Europe and a small group of the uninfected are holed up on an island. It's a community that defends itself with homemade bows and arrows and has returned to the values of the 1950s including waving St George's flags. Boyle splices their defence of the fortified causeway that leads to the mainland with snatches of footage from the Battle of Agincourt in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V. We seem to be in one of those remote Hebridean communities beloved of old folk-horror films where villagers worship pagan gods, copulate in the fields and cure sore throats with toads. If George A Romero's zombie movies in the Seventies set themselves up as allegories of mass-market consumerism, Boyle's seem to be about the Little Englander belligerence that fuelled Brexit. These zombies don't want to eat our brains, just our unbendy cucumbers. • Danny Boyle: Road rage, Brexit — and why I'm returning to 28 Days Later Tutoring his son, Spike (Alfie Williams), in the ways of the postapocalyptic patriarchy is Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose sick wife, Isla (Jodie Comer), languishes in the bedroom upstairs. He takes his son on his first trip to the mainland to hunt for zombies, a blood sport-cum-rite of passage for the island's young men. 'The more you kill the easier it gets,' Jamie tells him, but there's a new breed of 'alpha zombie': big, naked brutes who run like the clappers, willies bouncing, who seem to represent all the coarse male energies at large in this postapocalyptic world. The screenwriter Alex Garland has bigger issues in his sights than just zombies. After Spike cottons on to his father's lies and escapes to the mainland with his mother in the hope of finding a cure for what ails her, the film downshifts into an odyssey that owes as much to Garland's Civil War last year as to the original 2002 Boyle film. The mother and son's journey is punctuated by images of societal breakdown — an abandoned Happy Eater roadside café, a rusting train carriage, a compound of human bones ruled by a bald, blood-and-mud-encrusted doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who raves about the 'magic of the placenta' in the crackpot fashion of Colonel Kurtz. • The best films of 2025 so far Garland's copy of Heart of Darkness must be well thumbed. Joseph Conrad's novella provided much of the thematic superstructure of The Beach as well. Do the slim fillets of action justify the weightier themes that are hung on them? He and Boyle are trying to make a wider statement about societal collapse — it's like a zombie movie made by Ken Loach. But what will gamers make of the gentle, ruminative climax? My guess is a slight but unshakeable feeling of bamboozlement. Boyle adds a bloody coda of zombie slaughter, freeze-framing on every arterial spray and brain splatter, just to be on the safe side. ★★★☆☆15, 115min Disney Pixar hits most of its marks, but not all. Elio is about an orphaned 11-year-old, Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab), now in the care of his aunt (Zoe Saldaña), who channels his loneliness and longing into the sky. Sending messages using a ham radio and a colander for aliens to come and beam him up, he is one day granted that wish by a benevolent collective of alien races known as the Communiverse, who are facing down a threat from a warlord called Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett), who looks like a crab crossed with a Swiss army knife with plasma cannon for limbs. Anyone recalling the showdowns between Donald Trump and the United Nations would not be far off. • Read more film reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews The film gives kids a framework to understand the world's strong men — beneath his military-grade exoskeleton, Lord Grigon turns out to be a soft, caterpillar-like sweetheart — but suffers from the Pixar blight of too many bright ideas, an excess of benevolence and a story that doesn't know which lane to pick. We're almost 50 minutes into the film before we meet Grigon's pudgy, pacifist son, Glordon, whose friendship with Elio should have been the emotional core of the film. But they have to wait their turn in a plot set on heartwarming reconciliations for everyone — Elio and his aunt, Glordon and his dad, Grigon and the Communiverse. These things were so much simpler in ET's day. In this film, everyone has a heart light. ★★★☆☆PG, 99min Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit to find out moreWhich films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments below and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
South China Morning Post
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
As 28 Years Later hits cinemas, how zombie films infected pop culture like little else
The Rage Virus is, well, all the rage once more, as the much-anticipated 28 Years Later tears its way into cinemas this week. In the 23 years since the release of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, zombies and the infected have invaded pop culture like no one could have predicted. No one should therefore be surprised the series is back. Certainly not George A. Romero, the director of 1968's Night of the Living Dead, the grandfather of all zombie movies, which set the template by using horror to explore societal tensions in late-'60s America. When Romero released Land of the Dead, his fourth zombie film, in 2005, he was no longer alone. Boyle's 28 Days Later – in which a virus turns victims into rage-fuelled, fast-paced flesh-eaters – became a surprise hit in 2002. The same year, Paul WS Anderson's Resident Evil – an adaptation of the popular video game – earned US$102 million. And then there was Shaun of the Dead , Edgar Wright's affectionate 2004 homage to Romero's films. Meanwhile, Dawn of the Dead, Zack Snyder's visceral remake of Romero's 1978 sequel to Night of the Living Dead, also landed that year. Play Already irked that Boyle and Snyder's films featured zombies capable of running, Romero was aggrieved that studios had begun to see the profitability in zombie films while he struggled to get Land of the Dead made.
Gizmodo
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
George Romero's Daughter Made a Gay Zombie Movie, With Her Father's Blessing
With Queens of the Dead, Tina Romero, daughter of the legendary filmmaker George A. Romero, is set to make her first directorial outing, premiering the feature at the Tribeca Film Festival June 7. The filmmaker recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly and reflected on her father's influence. 'I am his kid. There's no denying it. And he has influenced me greatly.' Romero said. Queens of the Dead will feature Easter eggs to honor her father's legacy. 'And this is his monster, this is his genre. I had fun doing my little Romero nods throughout the film, and we have some good ones,' she shared, including appearances by notable figures such as makeup artist and actor Tom Savini and Dawn of the Dead star Gaylen Ross. 'The zombie apocalypse is such a rich sandbox to play in when it comes to social commentary. I can't be my dad's daughter without making an attempt at saying something with zombies,' Romero told the magazine. 'I did want this to be a film in which I am paying homage to the world and the monster he created, but I'm also introducing my own voice. It's very much not a film he would make, but it is using his vocabulary and is playing by his rules. As far as the queer element, on one hand, I just feel like the gays need a zombie film. It's time that we get to have a big gay zombie movie.' 'I didn't want to touch the genre unless it felt authentic to me,' Romero emphasized. Queens of the Dead revolves around a night in the queer party scene when the nightlife vibes at a warehouse drag show get interrupted by the zombie apocalypse. The inspiration came from intense conflict on social media among party promoters during her stint as a DJ. Romero recounted, 'The original promoter posted this manifesto begging the question, 'When will the queer community stop devouring its own?' And it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was like, 'Oh my God! This would be how I want to explore the zombie genre in this world of queer nightlife.'' The Mandalorian baddie Katy O'Brien plays the fictionalized promoter who leads the film; Romero noted that there's a special thanks to Tom Cruise in the credits for letting them take the time off their Mission: Impossible shoot to film the horror flick. Romero hopes the film will shine a light on the hunger for more genre films that represent an intersection of gay scream queens with that familiar flair for horror and dark comedy from her father's roots. The legendary filmmaker didn't get to see a completed script but mentored his daughter during the development process. Romero shared, 'He said, 'I love it! Run with it. Go for it.' Unfortunately, he never got to read the completed script because it took me about seven years to get this developed… but I did have this blessing.'
Geek Tyrant
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Retro Trailer For George A. Romero and Stephen King's 1982 Horror Film CREEPSHOW — GeekTyrant
This week's retro trailer is for the the classic 1982 anthology horror film Creepshow directed by George A. Romero and written by Stephen King, paying tribute to the EC horror comics of the 1950s. The movie is structured as a comic book come to life, with five distinct and macabre tales, each steeped in dark humor, supernatural justice, and gruesome consequences. The segments range from a vengeful father rising from the grave in 'Father's Day,' to a meteorite turning a lonely man into a moss-covered monstrosity in 'The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,' played by King himself. Other tales include a cuckolded man seeking revenge with a watery twist, a mysterious crate housing a ravenous creature, and a wealthy recluse battling cockroaches in a sterile penthouse. Framed by a wraparound story about a young boy punished for reading horror comics, Creepshow uses comic panel transitions, animated effects, and exaggerated colors to evoke its pulp roots. With a cast that includes Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, and E.G. Marshall, the film blends camp and dread to deliver a delightfully grotesque viewing experience. Creepshow stands out as a cult classic not only for its creative storytelling and practical effects, but also for capturing the twisted fun of horror in its most playful and gruesome form.
