Snow White and the Seven Perverts (1973)

Happy and dopey and dirty in places* this X-rated ‘Sextoon’ caused a considerable rumpus during its original release, somehow surviving both a ban from the British censor and a destruction order from the police. Its not hard to see why. The brainchild of notorious pornographer David Hamilton Grant, a man whose war on decency and good taste would result in him being imprisoned in the 1980s for distributing a Video Nasty and faking his own death in early 1990s. Grant and his crew hid out here under comedy pseudonyms that perfectly encapsulates the level of humour in Snow White and the Seven Perverts ‘written by Rinkus O’Penis’, ‘Edited by Jack Von Ripper’.

Updated to the permissive 1970s, Grant’s take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sees the big boobed Snow White escape the clutches of her wicked stepmother, throw some sex in the direction of the Huntsman and get urinated on by a rabbit. All before finding true happiness at the cottage of the seven perverts, who masturbate to blue movies and hang around soho stripclubs. That is, when they’re not taking glamour photographs of, and participating in gang bangs with the fairest of them all.

Merrily lewd, and a short that truly speaks the language of the dirty mackintosh brigade, Snow White and the Seven Perverts was one of a number of animated projects that Grant found himself involved in. His other animated adventures including this film’s equally controversial and banned companion piece ‘Sinderella’ (1972) and several collaborations with legendary animator Bob Godfrey. However, more ambitious plans for a blasphemous feature length animated film called ‘Big ‘G’’ failed to come to fruition. Big ‘G’ was to have depicted God as a David Grant type figure who ‘takes on a deal to build ‘Planet Earth’ in 7 days, but runs into a lot of problems’, and Jesus as a lovable hippie ‘Jessie smokes pot and does some incredible party tricks’. Meant to have been directed by Ron Inkpen of ‘Never Too Young To Rock’ fame, Inkpen’s premature death in 1977 appears to have been a factor in the Big ‘G’’s demise.

Snow White and the Seven Perverts has lost little of its ability to shock, what with its real and animated nudity, unconsensual sex and gang rape jokes. There is much here to cause the ‘It Was Alright in the 1970s’ mob to reach for their disapproving heads, but its also worth pointing out that this is one of the few adaptations of Snow White to not depict her housemates as dwarfs, and decades before Disney are to give the world a black Little Mermaid, Grant was here serving up a mixed-race Snow White. David Hamilton Grant- socially progressive? now theres something he hasn’t been accused of before.

*joke stolen from a Godley & Creme song