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Later this month, the cult film service Arrow will do something that would once have plunged the UK into screaming fits of utter chaos. That’s right, it’s going to stream Zombie Flesh Eaters.

The film comes with a tremendously confusing backstory. In Italy, George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was recut by Dario Argento and retitled Zombi. Zombi, no relation to Bambi, was such a success that a sequel was commissioned, using the script of an unmade movie entitled Nightmare Island. This film became Zombi 2. In the UK, Zombi 2 was renamed Zombie Flesh Eaters. And then it was banned.

This was largely down to the campaign waged against so-called “video nasties” in the early 1980s. Driven by newspaper front pages screaming things like “BAN VIDEO SADISM NOW”, police officers began conducting raids on video shops, confiscating anything they saw as breaching the Obscene Publications Act.

The confiscations felt arbitrary (in Slough, officers seized Dolly Parton’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, under the impression it was pornography), but eventually 39 films were successfully prosecuted under the act. Zombie Flesh Eaters was one of them. And now its unimaginable horrors are available to stream, uncut and in pin-sharp 4K.

In truth, it’s been around for a while. Around the turn of the century, the BBFC loosened its regulations, and the banned films began to trickle out. Not all of them – 1969’s Nazi sex film Love Camp 7 is still routinely refused a certificate, as is the thematically similar Gestapo’s Last Orgy – but Zombie Flesh Eaters has been available to legally watch uncut for two decades now.

Which means that I probably should have watched it by now. After all, if you grew up in the 80s and 90s like I did, nothing gave a movie more cachet than being banned. All these films had a too-hot-for-TV thrill to them; if you weren’t allowed to watch them, they had to be good. And yet I never got around to watching Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Turns out I didn’t need to bother. Not because the Thatcher government was right and the film has turned me into a depraved subversive, but because it lumbers on for ever, grinding through endless overlong, overacted dialogue scenes that go nowhere and do nothing. Admittedly there are hints of gleeful gore here and there. In one scene a woman’s eyeball is impaled, and there’s a tremendous underwater sequence with a zombie, a topless woman and what appears to be an actual live shark. Maybe there was some religious outrage that has lost its impact over the years (OK, a zombie does get its head caved in with a crucifix), but otherwise it contains nothing that wouldn’t be found in a workaday Game of Thrones episode.

Would it get banned today? Unlikely. In an age where Damien Leone can release three Terrifier movies (where, variously, a man is chainsawed to death through his scrotum and a woman has a rat-filled pipe hammered down her throat), it’s practically daytime television. I grew up scared and fascinated by the prospect of Zombie Flesh Eaters corrupting my mind. Now that I have actually seen it, I’m afraid to report that Zombie Flesh Eaters is no Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Were all the banned films like that? Has society moved on so much that everything we once feared would undo society has become unimaginably hokey? I decided to watch some of the other 39 films to find out. I started with the most notorious, John Alan Schwartz’s Faces of Death.

No film was arguably bolstered more by a banning than Faces of Death. A mockumentary that combines unaired news footage with material shot for the film, Faces of Death presented itself as a compilation of every kind of death: accidents, executions, suicide, cannibalism. Back when nobody could see it, it sounded like a kind of aggressively violent precursor to You’ve Been Framed. But that isn’t what it is at all. It is, in fact, a harrowing look at human suffering. There’s Holocaust footage. There are starving children. There’s violence against animals (staged) and footage of body parts scattered across the ground following a plane crash (real). It is, to put it lightly, an incredible bummer to watch.

Despite its reputation, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust was slightly easier to watch. You can understand the nerves around releasing it – it features graphic sexual violence, and more than one scene of animals being killed – but at least it had the benefit of having an identifiable point of view. The film is a satire about cultural appropriation and media sensationalism, in which an American documentary crew travel to the Amazon rainforest and get in over their heads. Which in terms of intent puts it above a lot of the other banned films, but the execution muddles the message. After all, if you have to kill an animal to make a point about media sensationalism, you’ve already lost the argument.

And then there’s Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave, a film that lacks either the intellectual rigour of Cannibal Holocaust or the fun of Zombie Flesh Eaters. It is one of the least enjoyable films I have ever watched.

I Spit on Your Grave is a film in which a woman exacts revenge against a group of men who gang rape her. It was banned in the UK, as well as in Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Norway and West Germany. This is likely due to the point of the film being the rape itself. So much time is dedicated to the rape sequence that the revenge part feels tacked on, as if it wants to trick you into thinking that it’s a feminist film. It’s worth pointing out that I Spit on Your Grave still hasn’t been released here uncut – some heavily eroticised rape scenes still contravene BBFC guidance – but the edited version available on Amazon Prime was still so unpleasant that it represents the only time I have ever welcomed the intrusion of interstitial ads.

And yet by modern standards, even these video nasties pale next to what is now circulating online. For the purposes of this feature, my editor ushered me towards a 2006 film called Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, part of Lucifer Valentine’s Vomit Gore trilogy, along with ReGOREgitated Sacrifice and Slow Torture Puke Chamber. A surreal satanist film about a woman with an eating disorder, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls contains scenes of torture and several scenes in which people vomit various fluids, some of which are gobbled straight back up. It was awful. If this was 1983, it would have been banned in a heartbeat.

Because time has rendered Zombie Flesh Eaters so quaint, my assumption was that all the other banned films would be equally silly and kitschy. After all, we’re talking about a government so jumpy that it also banned the third word in the title of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But that isn’t the case, since a lot of these films are still genuinely repellent. What has changed, though, is our attitude to them. Clearly, banning them only served to boost their reputation, whereas if they had been allowed to remain in public, I’m convinced that they would have all died in obscurity decades ago. In other words, less “BAN VIDEO SADISM NOW” and more “LET’S WATCH SOMETHING THAT’S ACTUALLY GOOD”.

Zombie Flesh Eaters is available to stream on Arrow and on Limited Edition 4K UHD from 28 July

As long as you can hear a beat or someone singing, you can dabke.

“The official definition, if there is one for dabke, is when a group of people dance together, usually in a synchronised way,” Tareq Halawa says.

Unofficially, the musician continues, the dabke is when a group of people jump in no particular order, prompted by the sound of music. Sometimes the only beat is the sound of feet hitting the floor, without a drum.

“All the beat and rhythm that you need actually comes from the stomping,” he says. “It’s an expression of our culture. It can be an expression of our joy, frustration – a show of power.”

A celebration of the Levantine folk dance forms part of Dabke and Tatreez, an Artists for Peace event showing at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday.

There, Halawa will play the riq – one of the world’s oldest instruments.

It is “like a tambourine but it’s especially for Arabic music,” Palestinian musician Seraj Jelda says.

Jelda, who played with the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Gaza before fleeing Israel’s bombardment for Australia a year ago, will play the riq and oud on Sunday.

He’s one of an ensemble of 10 artists performing at the event, which brings together musicians and dancers with Palestinian, Lebanese, Turkish, Indonesian and Cypriot heritage.

“It means a lot because we are delivering our culture, our songs,” Jelda says.

‘A window of understanding’

From the routine of harvest, joys of weddings and honouring of family matriarchs to being forced to leave a homeland, the event’s repertoire is “a journey through people’s lives”, Halawa says.

Most pieces come from before the 1948 Nakba – “how our grandfathers, and our ancient people, [were] singing their songs,” Jelda says.

“Once they want to collect vegetables and fruits and olives … they start singing these songs. Once they want to get married, they sing these songs for the groom and for the bride.

“Some songs will talk about the Nakba and how songs are transferred from cultural and happy songs to songs that talk about Palestine and how it was occupied and our land was stolen.”

Halawa says Sunday’s show is “a window of understanding” into the Levant culture.

“What this means to me … is that I am seen and heard and accepted here in Australia, with the background and the culture that I bring with me,” the Palestinian, Syrian and Turkish musician says. He has lived in Australia for 12 years.

“The language of storytelling and music is so universal that it’s compelling, and having that as our medium of conversing with Australia is important.”

As Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza – which has destroyed cultural heritage sites across the strip – Halawa says the performance becomes “more than just sharing of culture and understanding and music”.

“It’s a plea for connection,” he says. “It also means that it’s part of our contribution as performers to lifting the injustice.”

It has made Halawa reflect on “what these songs actually mean”.

A song telling the story of a person leaving home, for example, wields the meaning “that it’s not about the taste of the food as much as the togetherness, the caring and connection with the land and with one another, endurance as a collective thing”.

“Now that I need to convey its content and its spirit, it led me to really rethink these stories and what they mean and what the original authors were thinking and experiencing that potentially led to them writing these stories.”

The Opera House event is a work of cultural preservation, Ayşe Göknur Shanal says.

Music is “one of the most important mediums in expressing culture and identity and heritage and tradition”.

“There are songs for celebration, for grief, lamenting,” the Turkish-Cypriot Australian curator and opera singer says. “You dance in anger, and you dance in love and passion and celebration.”

Shanal felt a sense of urgency to perform.

“I feel like the complacency of the arts industry and sector has propelled the urgency in me,” she says.

“The silence has propelled the urgency in me. We are proponents of arts and culture and heritage and history … and to see Palestinian music being absent from the musical vernacular and landscape frustrated me.

“So many mosques and churches [are] being bombed in Gaza and elsewhere – that’s destroying heritage and history and culture. We are trying to protect and preserve, as opposed to what’s happening, which is destroy, erase.”

Jelda says: “Sometimes it is sad for us to play music and do happy things [when] our families and friends [are] in Gaza facing a difficult time.

“But it is [also] like a happy moment, because we are delivering something for them, making people know what’s happening in Palestine and Gaza.”