![]() ![]() Nick Moran, Dexter Fletcher, Jason Statham and Jason Flemyng in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. ‘Trying much too hard to sound like cockneys’. This was, clearly, a work of serious maturity and sophistication. There was smart editing, breakneck dialogue and a suave soundtrack. It was about nightclubs and boxing rings and poker tournaments. Lock, Stock wasn’t just about people getting beaten with blunt instruments, it was about gambling, drinking, pubs, drugs and black-market aftershave. We could have no complaints.īut just as gratifying as all that was the underlying sense of grownup-ness about the whole thing. Lock, Stock had four-letter words by the bucketload (more than 120 Fs in all, plus a generous handful of well-delivered Cs) and violence that was both consistent and imaginative: enacted with guns and knives, but also with tanning beds, garden tools, car doors, golfing paraphernalia and studded sex toys. It was pretty much everything we could have hoped for. Two of them carried the desired certificate: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – a British gangster flick starring Jason Statham and Vinnie Jones – and Crash, a slow-burn psychosexual drama about people who get erotic thrills from car accidents. It was the latter tactic that got me to see my first 18-rated film in full, thanks to a new DVD player, bought by a mate’s dad, that had come with a stack of recently released films. Human beings tend to want what they can’t have, and 12-year-old boys are no different: any film classified 18 was by definition a film I was desperate to see. ![]() Even the certificate itself – white numbering against a background of deep, carnal red – carried its own exhilaratingly adult connotations. That was where the really foul language flowed, where the sex got terrifyingly explicit and, crucially, where the real bloodletting went down. From my limited experience, that was a broad bracket that took in a whole new world of invective, some unnervingly moderate sex scenes and a decent amount of blood and gore.īut it was the 18-rated films that were the holy grail. The 15-rated films were where things got interesting. That little coloured shape in the bottom corner of the video box was the be-all and end-all, and there was a rigid hierarchy: U-rated films were to be avoided at all costs, PG piqued little interest, 12 suggested there might be something in there worthy of attention: a bit of swearing, the odd moment of violence, maybe even a glimpse of flesh. When I was 12, all that mattered was the certificate. ![]()
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