Top 10 Banned Films

Photo credit: F.D Cinematogrofia

Photo credit: F.D Cinematogrofia

Some movies, for whatever reason, wind up on the scrap pile. Censors are known to be a tricky bunch, and over the years they’ve leapt on movies for featuring sex, drugs and rock and roll-though mostly violence. Violence is usually the most likely thing to get a film banned from cinemas-but some movies that are now considered classics were once deemed too much by censors and thrown onto the cutting room floor. So, what movies did you nearly not see? You’ll be surprised by number ten!

1. Cannibal Holocaust

Although I’m not sure if everyone would call this a classic, but it’s certainly a seminal movie-marking a huge step forward for the cinema verite style of found footage horror that would dominate in years to come. But in the seventies, the violent depiction of what it says on the tin was too much for censors-finding itself banned in the UK and a number of other countries to boot. Some of the violence was so convincing the filmmakers were taken to court to prove it wasn’t real.

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  • Butgh

    I was expecting another list of guilty pleasure movies paired with a whole lot of whining about a critic’s job being to tell you which movies are just good films period. Instead, though a couple entries were like that, the rest were just baffling. (You do know that Unforgiven won the Oscar, right?) At first I was wondering how I’d missed the reception that was just hands-down bad, but by The Wizard of Oz, it was pretty clear that this was just mistaking one or two negative reviews for “negative reception.” There’s basically no movie on the planet that didn’t get a negative review at one point or another. And for the record, Speed racer is not 1/10 the movie The Matrix Reloaded is, and not just because The Matrix Reloaded is alright.

  • Dan Cochran

    The Last Temptation is a film that could only be made about Christianity – any other religion would have (rightly) claimed that this film was defaming and just-plain-lying about them.

  • lbatfish

    I was visiting my parents in Appleton, WI (the hometown of both me and the actor once known as Bill Dafoe) at the time that “Last Temptation of Christ” was released, and was disgusted that even there, the theaters wouldn’t show what I thought was his best performance ever. Sad.

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