Egyptian movie distributors have recast a 10-year-old action movie as a film about the hunt for suspected terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden to get past a ban on its screening, Agence France Presse (AFP) quoted Egypt's state censor as saying Tuesday.
Egyptian censors had previously banned the 1991 film, "Delta Force 3," in which US commandos try to capture a terrorist kingpin, on the grounds that it was offensive to Arabs and Muslims, Madkur Thabet told AFP.
This year, however, the same film turned up on Thabet's desk under the name "Bin Laden Procurement Team", in what Thabet said was an attempt to take advantage of more liberal censorship policy.
Costarring in "Delta Force 3" Nick Cassavetes, Eric Douglas, Mike Norris, Matthew Penn, John P. Ryan and Gregory Tal. It is directed by Sam Firstenberg and written by Boaz Davidson, Andrew Deutsch and Greg Latter.
Among the beneficiaries of this policy has been the 2001 movie "The Mummy Returns". Shown in cinemas earlier this year, its 1999 predecessor, "The Mummy," was banned for scenes that "insulted ancient Egyptian civilization."
A panel of critics working for the censor's office said at the time that, even though the sequel was as historically flawed as the original, there was no point banning "The Mummy Returns" in Egypt when it was being shown elsewhere in the world – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
