8 Movies Banned For Telling You How To Commit A Crime
T2 was basically a crash course in lockpicking.
Above all else, most movies are escapism in some form or another, intended to transport audiences away from the drudgery of everyday life and perhaps even take them to worlds that doesn't exist in real life.
But most films are also rooted in some sort of recognisable human reality, such that what's shown on screen is relatable to viewers. Hell, in some cases they might even learn a thing or two.
The more curious consequence of this, however, is that films can be instructive in ways that filmmakers and government-funded censorship bodies deem harmful to the general public.
One such issue arises whenever a film tells viewers how to commit a specific crime, be it breaking a lock, committing a heist, blowing something up, or overthrowing the government.
For many authorities, these scenes can appear problematic, giving sufficiently motivated individuals the information or inspiration they need to imitate these behaviours in real life.
As much as movies are fiction, they do nevertheless reflect our own reality back at us, and so in the case of these eight movies, it resulted in them being chopped up, censored, and even outright banned for a time...
8. Animal Cruelty - The Abyss
James Cameron's The Abyss features a memorable scene where Hippy's (Todd Graff) pet rat is submerged in liquid oxygen, whereby it's demonstrated that the rodent can survive immersed in the liquid because of the oxygen content, despite Hippy's protests.
The scene was nevertheless cut out of the UK version of the film due to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) having strict rules against depicting the crime of animal cruelty in films. The UK is a nation of animal lovers, after all.
Though this rule is typically reserved for egregious instances such as Cannibal Holocaust, where real animals were killed on-screen without necessity, in the case of The Abyss it was deemed that an impressionable person could watch the scene and then imitate it by drowning their own pet rodent.
The scene isn't particularly pleasant considering how anxious the rat seems, and it goes on for a solid minute full of lingering glances at the rodent scrambling around in the confined liquid space, but even so, the BBFC were rather erring on the side of caution here.