My Favorite DVD Misnomer: "UNRATED!"

Today, while feeling wonky and woozy, the Cap'n got to thinking about one of my favorite lies perpetrated by marketing departments: that any movie slapped with an "UNRATED" automatically means that a normally lackluster film is suddenly scandalous.

The lie is hidden in plain sight on almost every dvd cover. If you look at the bottom of every "special features" box, you'll notice a disclaimer that says "special features have not been rated." And the reason why is that the studios don't have to; MPAA submission is only required for films entering theatrical distribution. Because they're counting on you not knowing that, it's easy to trick people into thinking that releasing an "unrated" version of the film is something totally forbidden.

And sometimes they aren't totally lying. Frequently horror movies released in "unrated" cuts (say Land of the Dead) do restore some violence and gore. This is not always the norm, of course. Sometimes, the horror films pull a fast one on you too: the "unrated" director's cuts of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, 1408, and A Haunting in Connecticut don't actually add any scares to the movies. 1408 changes the film to a much darker ending, but the first 80 minutes are exactly the same.

On the other hand, the studios got a little too excited about this and would slap the "unrated" tag on movies that don't make sense, like Remember the Titans. Worse still, they'll wildly mislead people with movies like Coyote Ugly, which are "unrated" because two or three minutes of character development were re-inserted. Of course, marketing is counting on people assuming (not unreasonably) that "unrated" = nudity.

Running time can often cue you into just how "unrated" these cuts are. Judd Apatow and Apatow-related comedies tend to reincorporate significant footage into the film, although it's questionable how risque the extra fifteen minutes are. For the most part, "unrated" cuts of movies are usually two to five minutes longer and impact the story in no way.

My favorite, however, are the Saw films. If you've looked at the "unrated" versions of Saw, Saw II, and I believe Saw III, all of the cuts are actually shorter than the theatrical versions. Whether they just removed some cut-aways from gore or wisely cut some of the terrible acting out, I don't know.

At any rate, many of you are wise to this already, but it frequently drives me crazy to see movies marketed as "unrated" when you could make that argument about ANY film on dvd (studios usually just keep the rating on there out of courtesy). If "unrated" meant what studio marketing wanted us to think it did, I'm willing to bet more retail outlets would refuse to carry those discs. That's why NC-17 and "UNRATED" have the reputation they do theatrically: most of the time, no theatre will play those movies. Don't get duped into believing just any old movie in an "Extended, Unrated" cut is anything more than technically accurate. What it actually means and what you think it means are two very different things.