10 Best Video Nasties (And Why They Were Banned)

No less than three of director Lucio Fulci's films made their way onto the nasties list, beating all of his peers, including fellow countryman Dario Argento, who scored just two. Of Fulci's three nasties, including The Beyond and House by the Cemetery, Zombie 2 is possibly the most visceral.

Following the international success of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which was released in Italy as Zombi, Fulci set about making Zombi 2 as an unofficial sequel. This shameless co-opting of an existing property is something actually permitted by Italian copyright law, hence Bruno Mattei's equally shameless, Terminator 2.

Zombie's story follows a group travelling to a tropical island which they find overrun by a plague of flesh-eating undead. The ensuing carnage includes an infamous eye impalement gag and a zombie fighting a shark, which is exactly as awesome as that sounds.

The dangerous shark fight, which used a real Tiger shark, was shot without Fulci's approval, but the aforementioned eye trauma was all on him. Inevitably, it would be this, the movie's most effective sequence which would be chopped by the BBFC, along with a scene of zombies devouring a corpse. Most gore in general lost a second (or ten) comprising a total of 1 minute and 46 seconds removed.

In 1999 the film was released with just 23 seconds of cuts to the same scenes. 2005 saw all footage restored.