The directors are the real winners here.
To shamelessly rip someone else's comment:
The Guardian article wrote,"The BBFC's decision to ban Tom Six's shock-horror film lays bare a phobia about violence, but only when it's sexual."
Reading the interview with Six for the original film, I think this was exactly the phobia he was aiming at. That for most people, true horror lay in the threat of "being interfered with". In some ways, the catharsis in most horror films is when the victim dies - it would be more horrible, and horrific, to continue living after mutilation than to die, and in context, death becomes the happy ending. That ending doesn't really happen here, and is amplified by the mundane fashion in which the victims become victims.
And if the film was truly meant as a piece of art, it's banning by the BBFC on these grounds, without viewing, and from all possible forms of distribution, is the finishing touch. The two films offer an analysis of what true horror is: the fantasy of something ghastly happening to you in the first, and the post-modernist nightmare of what the consequence of watching such a film could be. Then, like the final part of the triptych, is the banning of this second film by the BBFC.
It achieves brilliance as art by being banned. The happy ending is the confirmation that it's not real because the horror can be stopped, not by a hero with a gun in side the film, but by a judicial board outside of it. If the horror rests on the concept of ultimate victim-hood, the final message and ultimate rescue is that the horror can be destroyed by an act of personal control and will (the deducted judgement of a voting panel set up within a democratic society).
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clockworkrat has nice pants, Tue 7 Jun 2011, 18:35,
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Also, Srpski was brilliant
Basically as a metaphor for how the population of Yugoslavia was turned against each other by outsiders with visions of grandeur, and no-one wants to really see the vicious horror of the entire situation.
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clockworkrat has nice pants, Tue 7 Jun 2011, 18:39,
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