It’s Special. Why did I almost cry at this low-budget movie which everyone else seems to see as a comedy?

So this is the movie’s plot, right?

A man takes a pill. He believes it has given him limitless superhuman powers.

The movie is this year’s release Limitless. Right?… Wrong.

An ordinary person tries to become a superhero with mixed consequences.

The movie is last year’s release Kick-Ass. Right?… Wrong.

Now let’s bring in the Marx Brothers…

When I was a kid, I used to see Marx Brothers movies on TV and I didn’t think they were particularly funny. But, when I later saw them in a cinema, with an audience, they were very very very funny indeed.

As I mentioned last week I received a DVD in the post from mad inventor John Ward who, in a previous incarnation was a cinema projectionist and therefore has an interest in movies.

The 2006 movie he sent me was Special – Specioprin Hyrdrochloride.

I only got round to watching it last night alone in the dark in a living room with a friend. We expected a quirky comedy.

Quirky it was. A comedy it was not.

Yet UK distributors Revolver sell the movie as “a comedy spectacular” and have a review quote on the back cover saying it is “hilarious”.

When I went to look at the reviews on IMDB, they were 100% positive and they kept saying it is a funny film.

I did not find it funny at all.

It was visibly low-budget and shot in documentary-style washed-out colours.

The film I saw was not a comedy.

Yet everyone else I have read seems to think it is. Maybe it is another Marx Brothers film: you have to see it with an audience to get the full comic effect. Or maybe I am odd and have just missed something.

I do not like Robert Altman films. Except for one: Images.

It is about schizophrenic delusions and the editing between reality and fantasy is exceptional.

Special is better.

The plot involves a (very) ordinary man who takes part in the clinical trials of a drug called ‘Special’. He believes the drug has given him superhero powers. It has not. He dresses as a superhero and decides to fight crime. The result is a moving, mesmerisingly-gripping, sad and immensely humane film about madness and delusion which includes sparse and understated but astonishingly good special effects for a such cheap film.

According to IMDB, Special cost about $1 million to make and grossed $6,387 in the US. Normally, that would not be a good recommendation. What seems to have happened is that Special has been successful on the film festival circuit but not commercially. Admittedly a nightmare to market, it has slipped under the radar.

It has one of the best scripts I have seen in years – and it is one of the few movies to actually use film editing to its full potential, interweaving reality and fantasy. Plus it has top-notch acting by an entire cast of (to me) unknowns; and spot-on direction. It is a wonderful jewel of a little film (77 minutes).

It was written and directed by Hal Haberman & Jeremy Passmore, a pair of recent graduates from USC.

I saw Dark Star at the Edinburgh Film Festival in the 1970s. It was directed by the then unknown John Carpenter and co-written by him and the then unknown Dan O’Bannon. They, too, were USC students. Dark Star screamed rough talent. And so does Special.

John Carpenter went on to direct movies like Halloween, The Fog and Escape From New York. O’Bannon’s later scripts included Alien and Total Recall.

Special’s Jeremy Passmore is one of the credited screenwriters on the upcoming re-make of John Milius’ Red Dawn.

Having seen Special, that can only bode well for Red Dawn.

I did not laugh when I watched Special but lots of others seem to have laughed. So it must be me that’s odd.

I found it sad, touching and bittersweet.

Almost everyone who has seen it seems to agree it’s exceptionally well-made and psychologically gripping.

Is “Killer Bitch” worse than hardcore pornography and what does the dead poet William Blake know about it?

The actor Jack Nicholson said of film censorship: “The reality is, if you suck a tit, you’re an X, but if you cut it off with a sword, you’re a PG.”

As if the power of the tabloid press to overcome common sense and logic needed to be proved, consider the case of the movie Killer Bitch. (I was always a fan of early Roger Corman movies…)

This much-pre-publicised modern-day B-movie was attacked before it was even finished as “vile” porn by newspapers from London to Sydney to New York to New Delhi (yes, literally those places) by journalists who had never seen even a single frame of it. Indeed, the attacks started in the News of the World just two weeks after shooting began: subsequent news reports assumed what had been written the the News of the World was true.

Despite this, when the movie was eventually submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (the UK film censors), I didn’t actually expect much of a problem. It was a  low-budget film, so there was no wildly explicit gore – lots of fake blood but no OTT gore, no bullets exploding on bodies, no exploding heads – and the sex, it seemed to me, though much hyped, was not especially explicit – not by current standards.

There IS a sequence in the film which shows actual sexual intercourse but it was edited soft-core and is far less explicit than many a Hollywood studio movie. Almost everything that is seen to happen in Killer Bitch had been passed by the BBFC in a more extreme and more realistic form in previous films and, since 2002, the BBFC have in fact been passing hardcore sex scenes for general distribution. Why the Daily Mail has never picked up on this as a sign of the utter disintegration of British moral culture I don’t know. I think the BBFC started doing it so quietly that, by the time the Daily Mail twigged, it was old news and not worth attacking.

As it turned out, though, 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 BBFC have been giving 18 certificates to hard core sex scenes (erect penises; visible sexual penetration) since 2002. This was, apparently, a glimpse of part of a shaft.

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.

I understand the BBFC’s worry to an extent though, really, it’s not much more than 1950s/1960s James Bond sexism – a rugged hero takes woman roughly in arms; kisses her; she resists very briefly then melts in his mouth. Arguably sexist, but repeated a thousand times in other movies: hardly a hanging offence. Especially considering what the BBFC have been passing uncut since 2002. This is one description by  critic (not by me) of Willem Dafoe’s 2009 arthouse film Antichrist which was passed uncut by the BBFC:

“After knocking him unconscious, Gainsbourg bores a hole in Dafoe’s leg with a hand drill and bolts him to a grindstone to keep him from escaping. Then, she smashes his scrotum with some sort of blunt object (the moment of impact happens slightly below the frame). We don’t actually see his testicles become disengaged from this body, though it’s implied. Next, she brings him to a climax with her hands and he ejaculates blood (yes, it’s shown). But that’s not all! Later, in an extreme closeup — lensed by Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle! — Gainsbourg cuts off her own clitoris with a pair of scissors.”

The girl’s masturbation of the erect penis is in close-up and is real plus it’s an erect penis that is ejaculating blood.

Killer Bitch and Ben Dover’s imperceptibly-glimpsed bit of shaft should almost get a U if Antichrist gets an 18…

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.

Is the movie Killer Bitch really so much worse than hardcore pornography? Or did tabloid perception overcome reality?

William Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is.”

But, then, what the fuck did William Blake know about anything?

Although he did know a lot about dreams… and I do think it’s slightly odd no-one has noticed Killer Bitch can be seen as an OTT surreal dream by the heroine who may or may not awake, terrified, from unconsciousness early in the movie.