The Human Centipede 2

Heard yesterday that the Human Centipede 2 has been officially banned by the BBFC. To be honest I'm not sure what I think of it. The original was a bad bad film, poor acting, dreadful script, didn't actually show any of the detail of what it hinted at, little horror, no suspense... you know the kind of moderate low budget horror that tried desperately to shock I'm talking about. But I watched it, and got through it.

Then the 2nd one came along and promised to fill the gaps in substance the first one left, promising! However, by all accounts all it tried to do was be a gross as it could with even less substance as the first, resulting in the ban. In a way I do think that they BFCC may have a point, but in a bigger way I'm thinking, how dare you fell me what I can watch.

All this ban is going to do is send everyone who wanted to see it + some extra now curious people onto the Internet to find the film and they'll watch it anyway. By banning something with the availability of information on the web, all you essentially do is make people keen to see what the fuss is all about.

Of what I read plot wise, it sounded a little sick (you have to think who writes these things) but compared to something like 'A Serbian Film', which I've never seen or have any desire to see, which was given a certificate as a slightly cut version in the UK, it sounds like nothing. So why ban it?

Things have come a long way in society since the days of cannibal holocaust and the like trying to shock, then subsequently being banned. With the rise of such things as the internet, is it right to ban things anymore, when they will just be freely available to anyone who wants them? Warn yes, but if there can be no real containment... why ban and create an extra stigma and hype? This has potentially created an audience where previously there was none, or at best a quite small one.

It wasn't going to be stinking out cinemas, I believe it was a straight to DVD jobby. No doubt it was awful and so wasn't going to gain popularity through content quality. Censorship is great publicity!

Dead Island

OK, yeah I'm a bit behind, but I've just got around to watching the Dead Island trainer (which can he found here), for the last few days I've heard numerous accounts of how disturbing it is, how it's plain wrong and should be banned... all the usual random stuff from people who are desperate to desynthesize everything to the content of Miffy and Friends.

However, deciding not to let people form opinions for me, as I very rarely do to be fair, I watched it. I can only say it was very effective, the setting of a family making a last stand against the fairly standard zombie enemies was very good. It gave it more of a sense of familiarity in it's setting than normal game trailers and to be 100% honest there was a hint of emotional reaction on my part, which doesn't happen often.

However, clearly it's been set out to do this, to try and get a reaction from the, everything must be PG brigade, to try and evoke a response and use the inevitable Internet banter to build hype and generate publicity. There's no possible way the developers could have thought featuring the death of a small child in the trailer (who was clearly already a zombie) would invoke any other kind of reaction. My reaction to this is, do they lack confidence in the game itself to get good reviews and build it's own hype.

The style of the trailer is somewhat unlikely to be indicative to the actual game play (haven't seen that much in action yet despite having a quick nose round youtube for a few videos), which will doubtless be a fairly standard FP, zombie slasher type game, and to be honest the trailer hasn't done much to get me excited or interested. My rule of thumb is if you need that much publicity, you probably don't deserve it.

I'm of course ready to be proved wrong by amazing reviews, but you wont find me holding my breath.