Friday, June 10, 2011

Banned from Television I & II Uncensored (1998)

Banned from Television I & II (1998)
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1 / Color / 107 mns
Language: English / Subtitles: none
Divx Avi - 352x264 - 753mb
Banned from Television is a narrated collection of wildly variable in quality clips culled from news reports, amateur home video footage & police tapes that depict some of the more gruesome incidents shot. It's the sort of footage that, you know, would be banned from television!

From police chases that end in tragedy (a man speeding on a motorcycle slamming into a bus) to tragic stunts gone wrong (a daredevil motorbike jump that goes wrong & the rider misses the ramp) to sporting catastrophes (rally cars ploughing into spectators) to undercover sex tapes (a police detective getting a blow job from a prostitute in exchange for letting her go) to executions (rapists killed by firing squads) to accidents (an impatient woman hit by a speeding train) to tragic human suffering (a woman has her leg bitten off in a Shark attack) to suicide (a depressed Japanese man shoots himself) to police taking out criminals (a robber holding a woman at gunpoint is shot in the face by marksmen) to CCTV footage (convience store workers being attacked & shot dead by thieves) to the odd funny moment (a guy swearing at a policeman for giving him a speeding fine) this is nothing more than 110 minutes of real life tragedy edited together. Personally I thought it was watchable if you have a certain morbid & ghoulish fascination but a lot of the footage isn't that graphic, it goes on for too long in the sense that there's a lot of 'before' & 'after' the event footage present & a lot of it is repeated in slow motion which doesn't help the often abysmal quality.

Banned here in the UK by the BBFC, their justification for the ban was because the footage was presented as entertainment, I quote from the website 'there is no attempt to justify the images by placing the incidents in any other journalistic or educational context. Whatever current relevance the images might have had when they were originally photographed has been lost in the general compilation of horrors'. Well, that's crap because there is narration all the way through this which clearly indicates the context of the original footage & often whether people survived or died & a little bit of background is given too so their argument there doesn't hold up. Anyway, not that it matters since Banned from television is easily enough found if you want to see it.





 
 

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