Fifty Shades Of Grey: Censored Vietnam version has NO sex scenes

Film fans in Vietnam keen to see ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ left cinemas gutted, according to reports, after it emerged that all the movie’s sex scenes had been completely removed.

The announcement that the film would be playing in the culturally conservative country was apparently met with a mixture of excitement and surprise, reports the Independent.

But once the movie was seen, it became clear that it had actually been heavily edited to take out all of the explicit scenes.

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Xuan Thao, who had queued to get a ticket for the film’s debut on Valentine’s Day, told the newspaper: “The film was promoted a lot, so it made us excited and curious. We wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

But on realising that 20 minutes of the film had been taken out, leaving just a handful of kisses, she slated the move.

“It’s totally ridiculous,” she said. “This version is rated 16+, but it doesn’t need an age restriction; a five-year-old could watch it. Even the trailer was sexier. They’d have been better banning it altogether.”

“Everyone was shouting and complaining at each scene that followed an obvious cut,” added fellow movie-goer Bien Thuy Nguyen.

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“They should have had a notice to say it had been edited. No one knew what was going on [in the story], especially if they had no idea about what BDSM is, or if they hadn’t read the book.”

The end of the film is also changed, with Anastasia leaving Christian Grey abruptly and giving no explanation, rather than following the scene in which she is beaten by Grey with a belt.

Prior to release, the media had greeted the news of the film’s release in a frenzy of coverage, particularly as it had been banned as ‘pornography’ in nearby Indonesia, Cambodia and Malaysia.

“Cutting is a normal thing in Vietnam,” says Cat Khue, a film writer on Vietnamese newspaper Tuoi Tre.

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“It has become a familiar thing to us to watch films that have had scenes of sex and violence removed.”

Angry film fans have taken to social media to air their grievances over the censorship, Bien adding: “We are not kids who need to be protected from sex scenes.

“Educators are always saying that watching [such scenes] will damage people’s morality and make them misbehave, but instead of educating them about how to deal with sexual troubles they make things worse by restricting access to information.”

The movie, starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, was also banned completely in India, Kenya, the UAE, Papua New Guinea and Nigeria.

Ben Arnold writes for Yahoo UK Movies