Thank you, Blockbuster Video. Thank you for sheltering our fragile little minds from events and depictions that just might warp them. Thank you for being parent, guardian, and Big Brother to legally emancipated adults over the age of eighteen who SHOULD be able to watch whatever they damn well please, you miserable sons of—-

Oh! Hi! Didn’t see you there. Well, you came in on sort of the back end of the party, so let me fill you in on why I’m screaming vitriolic fury at Blockbuster Video this week.

The word came down from the boys at Cinematical that, apparently, Blockbuster decided to play media watchdog with the recent cut of the French horror movie “Inside”. This was, of course, the positively gut-wrenching title about someone who wants to take a pregnant woman’s baby and not bothering to wait until she actually, you know, gives birth. There were originally two versions of “Inside”, an R-rated work to get it some slight theatrical release in the US and a somewhat harder unrated cut. The harder version features a definitive fifty-five minute making-of featurette—something some die-hard horror fans just cannot live without. Me, I’m not one of them as I watch a horror flick just for the story and really don’t care how it’s made, but still. Also in the harder version is an extra eight minutes of movie footage.

Not only did Dimension Extreme, who has an exclusive arrangement with Blockbuster, do some cutting of its own to make the film a little cuddlier, but Blockbuster seems fairly bound and determined to only stock the R version. Blockbuster Online claims to have it available in unrated, but subscribers are shaking their heads in negation on that one, saying that it’s just R.

This, of course, is why I was screaming fury at Blockbuster in the opening—this is not the first time Blockbuster has told consenting adults what they can and cannot rent through their stores. Leave aside for a moment porn, we’re talking about ACTUAL FILM here. You know, stuff with storylines and redeeming features and not a whole lot of nudity but way more graphic violence?

Is it really only a matter of time before Blockbuster decides that you can’t handle R-rated films either, in their self-professed quest to “provide a wholesome environment for you and your family”?

This is why I rent Netflix.

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