My Bloody Valentine (film)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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My Bloody Valentine is a 1981 Canadian slasher film released in the wake of the popularity of the slasher genre that had overtaken the 1970s. Considered an example of the low-budget cult films reminiscent of popular slasher films such as Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), the movie was filmed on location in Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia Canada.
The movie is infamous for having had 9 minutes cut by the MPAA due to the amount of violence and gore. Though co-producer Dunning confirmed that the excised footage still existed, attempts to release it proved difficult as Paramount Pictures refused to offer an uncut version. Lionsgate subsequently secured DVD rights to the film (as well as several other Paramount features) and released the uncut version on January 13, 2009.
Censorship
Much has been made of the censorship issues around My Bloody Valentine. For the MPAA to award the movie with an R-rating, cuts were requested to every death sequence in the movie. Even after cutting the movie to match the requirements made by the MPAA, the film was returned with an X-rating and more cuts were demanded. Stills of the trimmed footage were published in Fangoria magazine whilst the movie was still in production, even though the sequences were excised in the theatrical version; it was only on January 13, 2009 that the film was finally released for the first time ever with the cut footage re-instated.
There are two reasons that are frequently attributed to the extreme cutting of the film. It has been suggested that Paramount Pictures was keen to remove the offending footage due to the backlash they had received from releasing Friday the 13th the previous year - as a side note, Paramount's Friday the 13th Part 2, which premiered a couple of months after My Bloody Valentine, also suffered extensive cutting, which has never been released.
The second reason, that Mihalka attributes, is that the movie was cut due to the murder of John Lennon in December 1980, stating that there was a major backlash against movie violence in wake of his death.
The 2009 DVD re-instates around three and a half minutes of footage back into the movie, which contradicts an earlier claim by director Mihalka that the film had been trimmed by 8–9 minutes. It has been argued that the so-called uncut DVD still has some sequences missing, particularly the double-impalement of Mike and Harriet which the director recalls filming. It is thought that the remaining footage appears to be composed of expository scenes, such as dialogue and other non-violence related material. This is given credence by the fact that Mihalka gave his seal of approval to this release, and a written introduction by him precedes the beginning of the special edition DVD, stating that this version was the way that the film was meant to be seen.
The pay-cable service ON-TV is believed to have shown the entire uncut version in 1982, the only time it was seen publicly until 2009.
