10 Video Nasties That Shouldn’t Have Been Banned

Before making Bad Lieutenant and King Of New York, Exploitation film-maker Abel Ferrera made Driller Killer; a black comedy about a struggling artist who goes mad and starts killing homeless people with a drill. It wasn’t a film that made waves, and it would be soon drowned out by Abel Ferrera’s subsequent movies which were much better in quality, but Driller killer was at the forefront of the ‘Video Nasty’ panic. It was the film that everybody pointed to when talking about movies that were far too violent to exist in conservative Britain, and it was all because of one silly decision.

Again, Driller Killer was no more violent than other movies of its time. It only contained one two-second scene that can really be described as ‘gory’. It could have safely avoided being banned had it not been for Vipco, the film’s distributer in Britain. In 1984, Vipco gained the licence to release Driller Killer to the public, but to market the film, they stupidly decided to take the most violent scene from the movie, and stick it on the front cover of the box for all to see. Unsurprisingly, this got the film in hot water, and it was paraded by people who wanted violent movies to be banned altogether. It became the poster child for video nasties, and Vipco never made the same mistake ever again - by purposely releasing their DVDs without cover art.