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Originally Posted by Rob4  So Eureka have chosen to pre-cut Murders in the Zoo for animal cruelty.
This is very disappointing because if it's the scene I'm thinking about I'm pretty sure the BBFC would have passed it because it's edited in such a way that you can't tell if the real animal was subjected to any cruelty - I suspect it wasn't.
Anyway, for Eureka not to even try to get it through is inexplicable. I can only think that it must be more expensive for the distributor if the BBFC mandates the cuts? |
I suspect either the animal cruelty so blatantly infringed the Animals Act that there wouldn’t have been any point submitting it uncut or they had private conversations with the BBFC prior to official submission.
The latter happens if a label is handling something that they know for certain is going to be problematic (and the rules governing animal cruelty are unusually clear-cut), because if there’s obviously no way certain material is going to get through (for legal rather than BBFC policy reasons) the main question concerns how best to make the cuts while damaging the film as little as possible.
I myself had a very useful pre-submission chat with the BBFC over half a dozen shots of genuine bestiality in a Walerian Borowczyk short. We knew that four shots were open-and-shut illegal, so removed them prior to submission (they were so illegal that even
possession was proscribed, meaning that the BBFC would be obliged to call the police if we’d left them in), but they said that they thought the first was probably OK and the last at least sounded ambiguous enough to make it worth submitting. In the event they let both shots through at 18.