Resovoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction - were they ever banned?

[Captain_Chaos]

Just wondered if anyone knew the story surrounding these films when they were released, as I was still in school, and had no real interest in film at that time, were these films banned in any countries.

I do know that a shot in Pulp Fiction had to be "re-framed".

[Kryten]

I think Res Dogs was banned on home video for a while (because of the ear scene I think) but was allowed in cinemas. I don't think Pulp Fiction was banned in the UK, jujst re-framed as you said.

[Nathan-Wind]

IIRC Pulp Fiction was at least delayed on home video because of the John Travolta drug taking sequence.

[biggis]

Reservoir Dogs was banned for ages on video as it never got released till around the same time that pulp fiction came out on vid.

[anield]

All of this resulted in 'True Romance' being the first Tarantino film to be released on video over here.

[Michael Brooke]

Both films were passed uncut for cinema release, and were permanent fixtures on both repertory and mainstream cinema schedules until well into the mid-1990s.

I don't recall any delays over the <I>Pulp Fiction</I> video - and the only alteration was, as said above, a brief bit of reframing to eliminate an explicit shot of heroin injection.

<I>Reservoir Dogs</I>, on the other hand, had its video release delayed for two years - largely thanks to an accident of timing, as it was in the wake of the James Bulger killing and the accompanying video censorship hysteria that it produced (with tabloids running lurid headlines like "FOR GOD'S SAKE, BURN YOUR VIDEO NASTY" over pictures of bonfires of copies of <I>Child's Play 3</I>) - which led to various video censorship provisions being made in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act.

So while all this was going on, the BBFC essentially sat on the fence - they didn't want to cut the film (and in any case, as former BBFC head James Ferman pointed out, it was pretty much impossible to cut in any meaningful sense, as nothing graphic happens onscreen), but neither did they want to turn it into a hostage to fortune - and as it just happened to be the most high-profile then-current release renowned for its violence, that's undoubtedly what it would have been!

This was a standard Ferman technique - essentially amounting to "delay classification and hope the film's would-be censors get bored and forget about it". This approach had its merits, because when the film was eventually released, it was usually uncut - but the downside was that distributors had to sit fuming without any guarantee that their investment would be recouped (given that distribution rights are only leased for a relatively brief period). So when Ferman was replaced, his successor Robin Duval vowed that decisions would be far faster - and he's pretty much kept that promise.