Tom,
 
The excised scenes you asked about are the following:
1) The serial killer and his film crew gang-rape a woman while forcing her
husband(lover/boyfriend?) at gunpoint to watch.  I may be wrong, but I
believe the scene ends with the killer and crew lounging about the
apartment amongst the disemboweled bodies of their victims, blood and
entrails everywhere a la Manson.
 
2) After breaking into the suburban home and killing the man and woman,
killer and crew go after the little boy.  In the unedited version, we see
the actual pursuit, capture, and finally the young boy being smothered
with a pillow.
 
Man Bites Dog is one of the most disturbing films I've seen in recent
memory.  As far as whether our intellectualizing is just an excuse to
groove on the violence, I'm not sure.  I hope not.  For me, the violence
in this film quite unsettling if not offensive, both in terms of its raw
visual impact and what it represents as far as being an indictment of
cultural commodities which sustain and reinforce such depictions as even
remotely acceptable.  It's quite late, so I hope I answered your question
with what at least looks like some degree of thought.
 
Edward B Hargrove, Univ. of IL @ Urbana-Champaign
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