 There
were major problems with the British film censors over Killer
Bitch. We were told the BBFC was very concerned at the
content of the movie and it was screened at least four times
to various combinations of censors, eventually including the
Chairman of the Board. I suspect it was just a case of a movie
with a high-profile tabloid reputation being referred-up because
each person was too scared to take the risk of passing it
himself/herself…. At one point, a BBFC Examiner sent an e-mail
to the UK distributor saying it was more likely than not
that there would be several cuts.
I was amazed when I found out what they
claimed the problem was. We were told there were two areas of
concern:
The first was a glimpse of part of the
erect shaft of porn star Ben Dover's penis at the beginning of
the movie. This gobsmacked me. Apart from the fact neither the
director nor I had ever noticed this and the censors must have
gone through it frame by frame with a magnifying glass (no
reflection on Ben Dover), I have still never spotted the
offending shot in the movie.
The second problem was the scene which
had got the tabloids worldwide into such a tizzy when (without
ever having seen it) they had denounced it as a ghastly and
vile rape scene. What the BBFC was worried about was not the
actual sex scene itself (which was not a rape scene at all) but
the pre-amble to the sex scene, in which leading lady Yvette
Rowland initially resists Alex Reid then melts in his arms.
There IS a rape scene in Killer Bitch
(which in no way glamorises nor diminishes the horror but it is
not the scene the tabloids got into a tizz about). And someone
DOES get his cock cut off in vision. But apparently neither of
these scenes worried the censors.
What seems to have worried them was the
movie's reputation. It worried everyone. It was, ironically,
passed uncut by the BBFC, but banned from display on the shelves
of ASDA, Morrison's, Sainsbury, WH Smith, Tesco and others
(although most of those sell it online). It was even withdrawn
by iTunes after two days on sale for rather vague reasons. HMV
remained a sole beacon of high street retail sanity and online
retailers like Amazon and Play.com never had any problem.
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