10 Video Nasties That Shouldn’t Have Been Banned
6. The Cannibal Man
The Cannibal Man is one of the few films that never got a DVD re-release after it was banned in Britain in 1984. To this day if one wishes to watch this movie, they’ll have to buy an imported version from either America or Spain. With this in mind, it's easy to imagine that a film called The Cannibal Man was so violent that the BBFC rejected it year after year, but that is nowhere near the fact of the matter.
The Cannibal Man was yet another film that was banned despite being no more violent than plenty of other films at the time. It’s actually less violent than a lot of horror films that were released at the time such as Friday The 13th, Phantasm and Suspiria. The reason for its banning was quite absurd: with the slew of cannibal films that were released at the time which were genuinely quite vile, such as Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox, The Cannibal Man was just thrown into that category without considering that the film isn’t actually about cannibal tribes in the jungle.
The film is actually about a poor man who accidentally kills a taxi driver, and ends up killing more people to hide what he’s done. The title ‘The Cannibal Man’ is incredibly misleading, as the character isn't even a cannibal. This silly, misleading title is the sole thing that got the film banned back in 1984.