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August 1998
Fallen Angel:
What you won't see
In response to the growing climate of repression in the U.S., Titan Media has released
Fallen Angel in two versions, one of them censored. The censorship amounts to more than a few nips and tucks. The uncut version,
which earned this video the 1997 Gay Video
Guide Award and the 1998 Adult Video
News Award for Best Special Interest Video (and here rates four stars), is 27 minutes longer than the bowdlerized edition.
The shortened version tears the heart out of the first scene, where Cole Tucker and Mark Hamilton torment a cuffed, gagged, rawhide-bound Tony Zerega. (Badly re-edited, the sequence is close to
incoherent.) It tones down some of the orgiastic sex club action. It completely omits an astonishing 13-minute sequence involving flogging and pectoral piercing. The missing footage pushes the envelope, but does not go beyond
safe, consensual role-play. The abridged video is tamer, less honest, less erotic, and less worth your time.
If you rent or buy Fallen Angel, demand the uncut version-- because it's better, and because to accept any instance of censorship is to help make the practice commonplace. To Titan Media's credit, the
censored version is labeled as such on screen; to its discredit, there's no indication on the box or on the cassette that this is not the award-winning full-length video. The existence of alternate versions isn't mentioned on Titan's web
site, though there is a warning that the video can't be shipped to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, or Utah, period.
Exactly what purpose is the censored edition supposed to serve? If Titan wants to minimize the likelihood of prosecution, there has to be a more principled way.
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