Seems there are problems with the rating system, as parents are pressuring Dan Glickman and the MPAA to keep children out of such gore heavy films such as Hostel and the Saw series. The problem is that that there actually is an existing rating and it’s called NC-17.

The well intentioned rating system as implemented in 1968 was doomed from the start when the MPAA did not register the X rating, eventually allowing the rating to evolve into a designation for porn. There was a time when an X rating was acceptable and even welcomed, with such major productions as Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange, and Last Tango in Paris. By the mid-Seventies, the Hollywood studios shunned the X rating. Newspapers refused to run ads for X rated films. There developed an assumption that anything rated X was pornographic. What is curious is that before the rating system, a film could be advertised as being for viewers above a certain age and there was no problem. Of course such “adult” fare such as La Dolce Vita or What’s New Pussycat? are tame by current standards.

The MPAA introduced a new, theoretically responsible adult rating, NC-17, in 1990, which has also proven unpopular.

For me, it isn’t about letters. It’s about a lack of common sense. Some movies are simply not made to be seen by children of a certain age. Just because you can take your six year old or sixteen year old to see Saw doesn’t mean that you should. It’s not about creating a new rating, but instead having everyone embrace the fact that there are movies that were not made to be seen by children, period. The whole point of the rating system in the first place was to allow Hollywood filmmakers the same kind of freedom to address adult subject matter as European fimmakers had been doing in the late Fifites and early Sixties. Creating a new rating might be a step in the right direction, but the bigger obstacle is overcoming the mind-set that forces filmmakers to either release films unrated or to compromise their vision, lumping a serious film like The Dreamers or Eyes Wide Shut with films that boast of being XXX rated.