Cinema has an almost unparalleled ability to upset and offend. From the terror caused by the train heading towards the audience to the copy-cat crimes that caused Stanley Kubrick to voluntarily remove A Clockwork Orange from circulation, films have inspired negative reaction since their very beginning. That's where the censors come in. It's the job of ratings boards like the BBFC (in Britain) and the MPAA (in America) to make sure films that have the ability to disturb, offend or otherwise be awful on a wide scale are either cut as is the case with every Human Centipede film or otherwise banned as it the case with every Human Centipede film until Tom Six acquiesces with the requested cuts. Without wanting to celebrate censorship, most ratings boards usually have a good reason for banning a film: it's horribly violent, racist, sexist, involves rape, invokes terrorism, that sort of thing. Nobody really wants to watch A Serbian Film, do they. Other countries, meanwhile, have gotten more creative with their reason for blocking films from release. And not just your video nasties Brief Encounter upset the religious Ireland of 1945, Burma took with the skin colours in The Simpsons Movie, and Nigeria spectacularly misunderstood the racial politics of District 9. All of those and more in the ten classic films banned for ridiculous reasons.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
