Pulp Censored

Hey y'all... we're sitting here in Arkansas at the end of the Buffy conference (I'll have LOTS to report on that later) and we're watching Pulp Fiction on VH1... this is the WORST censoring job I've ever seen on a movie. If you'd never seen it before, you would have no clue what is going on. There's dubbing, and then there's, well, this. Examples.

We tuned in during the scene where Bruce Willis runs into Ving Rhames and they begin their fight. Most of it is cut out, and then Bruce runs into Zed's. At one point one of them yells out, "You motherf*ckin'" something-or-other, and it was overdubbed to "you pipe-fittin'" something-or-other. Pipe-fittin'? WTF?!

Butch and Marcellus are tied to the chairs with the red balls in their mouths, and as Zed enters the basement, my friend Sue and I started saying, "Bring out the gimp."

But the line never happens. THE GIMP never happens. Instead a bunch of lines are removed, and Zed is suddenly sitting in a chair, drumming his fingers on the leather hood of the gimp. You can't SEE the gimp (they've zoomed in on the scene and are using pan and scan in the most invasive way possible) and we just knew he was there. They grab Marcellus and pull him into the other room. Butch gets out of his binds and runs upstairs (a bunch of the scene is removed so you don't hear too much yelling) and then goes back downstairs. I say to Sue, "How the hell are they going to deal with the scene with the backdoor action?" (OK, in my original post I put a phrase that rhymes with "maynal mape" but someone posted the very good observation that I might be deluged with the wrong sort of people googling my blog). Butch throws the door open, and there is no maynal mape scene. Instead, we have a closeup of the one post and the back wall, and you can hear some sounds, but you see NOTHING. We were screaming (literally). Butch impales the one guy on the sword -- mostly off-camera, of course -- and then Marcellus gets the gun. He shoots Zed in the groin... not that you'd know that if you hadn't already seen the movie.

But WAY better. In the Bonnie Situation segment, Vincent turns around in the car and asks Marvin what he thinks about divine intervention, and the gun goes off. The screen goes BLACK (seriously!) and we hear a voiceover of Vincent saying, 'I shot Marvin in the face.' The rest of the scene is completely gone. Cut to Marcellus saying he'll deal with it, and then Wolf showing up. Wolf goes out to the car with Vincent and Jules, and the camera zooms in on Keitel so that we never see any blood in the car.

At that point, we turned it off.

Why censor a movie that badly? There's overdubbing, and then there's this. Why show it at all? If you don't want to show it either in its entirety or in an overdub, then show Steel Magnolias instead.

I wish we'd been able to stick around and watch it... it was worth it for the shock value. Pulp Fiction in 90 minutes, with no swearing or graphic violence. Fun.