SHOCK! HORROR! Astounding Artwork from the Video Nasty Era (Book Review)
Publisher: FAB PRESS
Year Published: 2005
Author(s): Francis Brewster, Harvey Fenton, Marc Morris
What if the police broke down the door of every “mom ‘n pop” video store in your town and arrested and fined the owner for selling and/or renting out horror DVDs? What if they marched into YOUR home, confiscated your exploitation movie collection and put you in jail? It would be unthinkable, like something out of a… well, movie. But it did happen. The place and time was England in the ’80s during Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s reign of censorship and oppression. It was a time that spawned anger, political and social upheaval, punk music, and the video nasties. The violent and sexual nature in these “nasty” films were said to be harmful to the children and was blamed for the rise in violent crimes perpetrated by young people.
In the late 70′s and early 80′s the video market was in its infancy and a lot of big market movie studios still didn’t trust it even though it was gaining in popularity. In order to cash in on this popularity, some studios made low budget horror and exploitation movies that went straight to video or had a very limited theater run. To entice people to pick up there videos, the companies would adorn their VHS and BETA tapes with graphically violent and/or salacious art depicting the contents of the tape (although a lot of times the art was much better than the movie). Today, some of these original videos and video boxes are traded and sold for hundreds of dollars by hungry collectors who want to own a piece of exploitation movie history.
British publisher FAB PRESS (distributors of some of the best genre books available including, my favorite, the DVD Delirium library) has put together the most beautiful hardcover books on this subject. Brewster, Fenton and Morris have done exhaustive research on the “nasties”. They not only have a complete list of all of the banned videos but also what versions, the time line and so much more. The introduction tells everything you could ever want to know about the history of the era and get this, the last 75 pages are “reviews” of each and every video nasty with all of the individual info.
But the best part is the art itself. There are no less than 165 pages of wonderful FULL PAGE scans of the video covers with no text at all outside of the art itself. You have to see it to believe it. If you are like me and would love to own the originals (or maybe you just love genre art) but don’t have the dough or time to hunt them down, this is the next best thing. It may even be better because the quality is nothing short of amazing and they are all in one nice, neat, disgusting, vile and child-scarring little package. So don’t be told what you want, don’t be told what you need because there’s no future for you without this book in your library.
