In a throwback to Britain’s dark days of Video Nasty prosecutions, a Canadian filmmaker is being hauled through court in Montreal accused of ibscenity after making a violent horror film.

Special make-up effecta artists Remy Couture will appear in court in April to face charges relating to his short film series Inner Depravity, which was posted online in 2005. The series was reported to Interpol by a German viewer who thought the killings shown were real – apparently, this delicate viewer had never seen a horror film before. In fact, Inner Depravity – at least the first part – is a grim, extremely violent but pretty well shot short film that Couture claims to be “to reproduce the deviant mind of a serial killer” and plays like a combination of arthouse/grindhouse crossover films like Aftermath, the transgressive cinema of Richard Kern and performance art, channelled via Guinea Pig and August Underground. Oh, and it has a full credits sequence with web links, which I suspect would be missing from a genuine snuff movie. Not a film for everyone, but clearly not real and certainly not made for purposes of sexual arousal.

Despite this, and the fact that a cursory Google search immediately pulls up various behind-the-scenes shots (like the one shown here) showing the cast alive and well, Interpol still passed the ‘crime’ onto Canadian police, who have now charged Couture with the production of obscene material. That was three years ago. Now, he is finally due his day in court. And whether you love or hate his films, this surely is a shameful development.

In Los Angeles, the long and winding trial of US extreme porn producer Ira Isaacs has ended in deadlock, with a hung jury being dismissed by the judge in charge of the case. The case now faces going to trial for a third time in April. The case was first heard in 2008, but a mistrial was declared when it turned out that presiding judge Alex Kozinski was involved in the online distribution of sexually explicit images himself.

Isaac worked at the fringes of the sex industry – an area that no mainstream producer would go near. The films he sold or produced, and which made up the titles he faced trial over, included Mako’s First Time Scat, Hollywood Scat Amateurs 7 and 10 and Japanese Doggie 3 Way – I’m sure you can work out the contents of the films from the titles alone, although Isaacs maintained that the poop featured in his Scat titles was in fact faked.

Isaac’s defence – a seemingly unwinnable one given the nature of the material – was that his films had artistic value, and apparently two jury members – both women – agreed with him. He’s lucky he wasn’t being tried in Britain, where you can be convicted even if a mere twelve people can’t reach an agreement on your guilt or not. Or, indeed, where merely owning a copy of Japanese Doggie 3 Way is enough to have you sent down, art or not.

While this case is reminiscent of the recent British obscenity trial, it is not yet over, and Isaacs has now run out of money to pay for an expert defence. This is the same way the US authorities finally got Rob Black and Lizzy Borden convicted after they were initially acquitted – keep on hauling people through court until they can’t afford to mount a defence, and you’ll probably win in the end.