I remember it perfectly. I stand by my earlier statements – the slime-covered dog would still pas your average PG movie filter. The shotfgun blast wasn;'t particularly disturbing (they let THAT one stand when broadcast on CBS.)
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Mind you, I wouldn’t show it to a child or anything.
Which is why it doesn’t belong in this thread. Not remotely.
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It does, absolutely. I’m making a point here cabout what’s allowed and what isn’t/ As it stands, the scene with Doc Copper losing his hands and the two shots to the head would’ve been sufficient for the “R” rating, but I feel pretty certain that’s not what garnered the film its rating b-- it was the rest of the grossness, as evidenced by how ludicrously cut and re–arranged the film was for its one and only networjk broadcast. But the things shown there would not, by the usual definitions, be what would be forbidden – it’s not showing the death, desxtruction, or dismemberment of living creatures, but activities of a wholly imaginary creature. Of course, if you’re not paying close attention, or aren’t essentially a functioning adult, it’s easy to mistake those scenes of the Thing with a dog being mutilated, a guy’s head being split iopen, ot being torn off, or his stomach splitting open. All those scenes got chopped by CBS. They left in the scene at the end of the composite Blair/Dog/tentacled thing, precisely because it COULDN’T be mistaken for anything else.
Consider another example brought in upthread – the chest-burster from Alien. Alien gets an R, too. There are other disturbing scenes (you get a brief flash of a skull being broken and the brain inside), but that chest-burster scene has to be a big part of it.
But you get a chest-burster scene in Spaceballs, too. And with the same actor, no less. Spaceballs gets a PG.
Don’t say that it’s because it’'s played for laughs. When the beastie first appears it looks just like the chest-burster in Alien, except it’s got eyes. It’s only after a brief setup as the horrific thing that it smiles, puts on a boater, and breaks into Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese’s “Ragtime Gal”. Otherwise, it’s pretty similar to the scene it’s parodying. Except there’s no blood and guts.
So a film can garner an “R” rating for containing a scene which is totally unreal and made-up, with plenty of clues that it’s not something real and gory, if, in the opinion of the rating people, it still looks too much like something real and gory.
I don’t think these were cases of – “I’m not touching you; I’m not touching you” skirting of the law, trying to just barely get around the letter. The filmmakers in both cases wanted to show realistically what would happen if an alien parasite puts its young in a human body, or assimilated creatures in a realistic manner (you can still show Caltiki the Immortal Monster, or the Blob assimilating people on the 4:30 movie, as long as there’s no blood and guts)