WARNING: The following blog entry contains several very gruesome pictures. If you're a squeamish pussy who finds exploitation films nauseating, go
here instead.
Well, this blog has undergone a variety of changes recently. Given I've canned the Kojiro Abe penname, I've decided to change the name of the blog. I'm kicking off this new edition of the blog with something of a retrospective on one of my all time favorite Hong Kong exploitation directors: Mou Tun Fei (better known as T.F. Mou or Mous). The
man himself is something of a mystery, save for a few recently conducted interviews with him, not a whole lot of information is available about the man. He started off making films in Taiwan before going to Hong Kong to work for the Shaw Brothers themsleves, after about five films with them he left and started making movies in the mainland before getting the idea to make a film about Japan's war atrocities,
Black Sun 731 (or
Men Behind the Sun), which was finished a few years later and gained something of a cult following among gore hounds in the years that followed. T.F. Mou has way more in common with such Italian exploitation directors as Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi and Ruggero Deodato than with the likes of Chang Cheh and Lau Kar Leung. Sure, I hardly rank him with Stanley Kubrick, but while creating the disturbing dungeon and cannibalism sequences in
Little Red Riding Hood I watched several of his films for inspiration. Following is probably the only partially complete retrospective on his films in English in existence.
A Deadly Secret (1980)
While the film doesn't quite scream "Mou" save for in one or two sequences, this is still quite morbid for a kung fu film produced by the Shaw Brothers themselves. It's got a couple of gruesome but very well shot and edited torture sequences, a somewhat disturbing subplot involving the burial alive of Shih Szu by her father, an incredibly twisted and evil magistrate played by Shaw Brothers veteran Yueh Hua (though in reality he's only about ten years older than Shih) and more. Mou's direction is quite energetic and even the film's color scheme is
pretty muted and muddy looking. It's no doubt one of the more watchable of his films but still has some of the Mou-esque elements that we know and love. You don't see many films where the main character gets tortured with a device designed to rip his rectum apart, do you?
Lost Souls (1980)
I haven't actually seen this due to the VCD now being unavailable pretty much anywhere, but I've heard so much about it and figured I'd include it here anyways. Apparently this film dethrones
The Killer Snakes as being the most outrageous thing to come out of the Shaw Brothers studios
. It is also said to be quite a foreshadowing of the cinematic perversity that Mou would later exhibit in
Men Behind the Sun containing a parade of torture and sexual abuse straight out of Pasolini's
Salo except with a group of poor mainlanders being subjected to this by evil human traffickers in Hong Kong rather than a bunch of teenagers in Italy by sick
fascists. That said,
Salo is a surprisingly subtle film given it's content with none of the sick torture being shown in close up or with much detail. Subtlety does not exist in the world of T.F. Mou and thus, from what I hear, everything is lovingly rendering in graphic detail, from candle wax torture to beatings to rape to sodomy. If ANYBODY reading this has the VCD, I'll pay up to $50 for a backup of it! Send me an e-mail at sspacejesus@aol.com.
Haunted Tales (1980)
1980 was a suprisingly busy year for T.F. Mou at the Shaw Brothers studios. Not only did he visit the kung fu genre with
A Deadly Secret as well as create one of the most outragous exploitation films around with
Lost Souls, he also dabbled in horror by helming an episode of this two part Shaw horror anthology. The first episode, directed by Chor Yuen (
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, House of 72 Tenants, The Magic Blade), while containing several very cool visuals, is nothing too spectacular and is a little on the boring side, it's a pretty typical modern day haunted house story. The film really belongs to T.F. Mou and his tale, featuring frequent Shaw Brothers villian actor (and lead of Mou's
Lost Souls) Chan Shen, best known as the bald rapist henchman dude in
Five Fingers of Death, as a pathetic, loathesome douchebag living in a tenament. Not even the whores will sleep with him and he spends most of his time fantasizing about Polly, the little girl who lives near by. All that changes
when he uses what is essentially a Chinese Ouija board to win the lottery, but in the end his greed is his undoing and he meets a gruesome end. One only needs to watch the sequence where Chan Shen has some fun with a hooker by sticking money all over her body and then making her jump up high so her tits shake to see Mou as his finest, with his truly brilliant choice of voyeuristic camera angles that really put you right into the action. This film is quite perverse fun.
Men Behind the Sun (1987)
This was, as with most people, my first introduction to Mou's unique brand of cinema. Whenever I watch this truly harrowing cinematic indurance test, I wonder if what I just saw is an important film with a very important message about the nature of war or a Grand Guignol festival of grotesque torture and death. Perhaps the real truth lies somewhere inbetween. One film I find a lot of similarites to
Men Behind the Sun is
Mondo Cane filmmakers' Jacopetti and Prosperi's opus
Goodbye Uncle Tom. Both films depict, in a historically accurate manner, the sick perversities visited on one race by another (in
Uncle Tom it's the tortures of the black slaves at the hands of white Southerners, in
Men Behind the Sun it's the horrific experiments performed on the Chinese by the Japanese) and both have been defended by their makers as important political statements and yet are done in an
incredibly exploitative and tasteless manner. While the film does have a bit of a story to it involving the children in the Unit 731 Youth Corps, a group of Japanese teenagers similar to the Hitler Youth who were forced to witness and even take part in some of the atrocities, the real focus, of course, is on the actual atrocities, which the film is basically a catalogue of. One particularly unlucky Chinese woman has her baby thrown in the snow and smothered to death, then is taken and tied to a post where she has ice cold water dumped on her hands for hours on end before being taken inside Unit 731 and has her frostbitten hands dipped in some kind of solution, whereupon they fall right off the bone. And that's actually one of the films less disturbing experiment sequences. Another sequence involves a man put inside of a pressure chamber.
Eventually his intestines explode right out of his anus. The film's most disturbing sequence, however, is a scene where a young child is vivisected and has his heart and organs removed. Yes, Monica Belucci's rape scene in Irreversible is pretty fucking unwatchable from what I hear (I haven't actually seen Irreversible), but this is much worse. Not only can I not stand seeing children hurt and killed in films but the scene is hyper realistic due to the fact that they used a real cadaver for this sequence, a real child's cadaver no less that Mou was able to obtain from a Chinese family. I can only imagine what would have happened had Charlie Sheen seen this film instead of Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood. To make it all even more disturbing, before each experiment, text flashes up in the lefthand corner of the screen telling you the name and place of birth of the victims. Mou further solidifies himself as the Eastern heir to Jacopetti and Prosperi by killing real animals in his film. The film features a throughly unwatchable scene where a live cat is thrown into a room of very hungry rats and killed. I'm not 100% sure if this sequence is real or not (Mou refuses to discuss it in his interviews) as the cat doesn't seem to be in a huge amount of pain, but another scene following it,
where the rats are set on fire, is most definitely real. The fact of the matter is, Mou didn't have to use a real cadaver in this film or kill the cat and rats, both were done just solely for shock value. As with
Lost Souls, there is absolutely nothing subtle about this film, it literally bashes it's message over the head of the movie goer. That said, while I'm not sure if the Japanese stationed at Unit 731 ever tossed a cat into a room full of starving rats, they did do most of the atrocities depicted in the film. In fact, one of the former members of the youth corps saw this film and said the film, even down to the set design, was eerily reminescent of what he remembered of 731 and that they did things that were even worse than what was depicted onscreen.
Men Behind the Sun is overall something of a minor exploitation masterpiece, a shocking visit to Unit 731, a place most sane moviegoers would never want to visit in their wildest nightmares. Soon, however, they will be once again as Russian indie horror filmmaker Andrey Iskanov has just finished shooting his film
Philosophy of a Knife, though it will focus mainly on the Russian prisoners experimented on by the Japanese in 731 rather than the Chinese.
Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995)
Eight years after
Men Behind the Sun gained him notoriety in both the East and West, T.F. Mou returned to the subject of Japan's war crimes, this time focusing upon the infamous Rape of Nanking, in which the Japanese army marched into the Chinese capitol of Nanjing and slaughtered, raped, pillaged and terrorized the residents non-stop for months. T.F. Mou again depicts all the horror in as best a Mondo film manner as he can. As with
Men, the film straddles a very uncomfortable line between political statement and Grand Guignol exploitation. The film has even less of a story to it than
Men and plays even more like a catalogue of gruesome atrocities than it's predeessor. Though thankfully Mou
chose not to use real cadavers or butcher any animals in this film,
Black Sun is still pretty fucking unwatchable. The film features such sights as a pregnant woman who is bayonetted to death and has her unborn child ripped from her womb, numerous decapitations and machine gunning, a monk forced to have sex at gunpoint who is then castrated and so much more.
Black Sun almost has a Mel Gibson
Passion of the Christ like quality in terms of it's heavy handedness. The ending, however, ranges on brilliant, a juxtaposition of the Christmas carol "Silent Night" over a montage of the drunken Japanese soldiers holding a celebration, various death scenes from the film and actual B&W footage of the atrocities. For all it's heavy handedness and usual lack of subtly, the film is nothing compared to what actually happened. I recently read a newly unclassfied Chinese document on what actually happened that would give both
Dante and the Marquis DeSade nightmares. Sadly
Black Sun didn't do too well at the Hong Kong box office and Mou has apparently been unable to get financing to make the third film in his planned
Black Sun trilogy. However, Chinese filmmaker
Lu Chuan plans on making a film based on the Nanjing Massacre sometime in the near future, so Black Sun won't be the last film we'll be seeing about this tragic piece of history.
T.F. Mou has also directed three other films, his debut in 1977 was the episode "Gun" in the Shaw Brothers TV series
The Criminals (a spinoff of the 1976 movie of the same). He also directed the Danny Lee romantic comedy
Melody of Love and the children's kung fu film
Little Heroes. I haven't seen either, but I am very interested in seeing a romantic comedy from the director of
Men Behind the Sun. In the meantime, I'm going to go wash my eyes with some
LazyTown.
for his documentaries, took the first two entries of Toho's Kazuo Koike-derived Lone Wolf and Cub series: Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx and combined them into one film, creating Shogun Assassin, a dubbed piece of psychedelia consisting of most of Baby Cart at the River Styx with a few scenes from Sword of Vengeance added as exposition. The film follows one Ogami Ito, once the shogun's official executioner, now a masterless ronin who is disgraced and has his wife murdered by the evil Yagyu clan and now on the run from the Yagyu's ninja with his son Daigoro. In this film, he must battle a group of ninja women as well as the Hidari Brothers (aka the Masters of Death), a trio of vicious martial arts masters. Baby Cart at the River Styx is an absolutely incredible film, feeling more like a bloody Shaw Brothers flick directed by Chang Cheh than the samurai films
directed by Kurosawa that Lone Wolf and Cub's production company, Toho, is so much more famous for. Kenji Misumi's direction is brilliant and the film utilizes several genuinely cool cinematic techniques that at times bring Sergio Leone to mind. The film is incredibly violent and is one of the most inventive bloodletting films ever made. No, the fountains of gushing blood in the House of Blue Leaves sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1 were not Quentin Tarantino's own idea, he got it all from these Kazuo Koike exploitation chambara films like Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood. What I love about the Lone Wolf and Cub films, particularly Baby Cart at the River Styx is the way Kazuo Koike and director Kenji Misumi seem to think of inventive ways to kill people. Daigoro's Baby Cart is like something out of a medieval James Bond flick and contains everything from blades that come out of the
wheels that are activated by Daigoro to a built in Gatling-like gun (though that is not unvieled until film three), not to mention that the Masters of Death are the coolest motherfuckers on the planet, each fighting with a different weapon that they use to gruesomely mutilate their opponents. The film also features everything from heads split in half to breasts slashed open (a shot trimmed in the Shogun Assassin version of the film) to blood actually spurting out and getting on the motherfucking camera lens! Now onto Shogun Assassin. Shogun Assassin, is, undoubtedly, the best example of an Americanization of a Japanese cult film in history and is perhaps the only dubbed foreign film I'm willing to watch these days. After years of being available only on various bootlegs, now, likely thanks to renewed interest in the film due to Tarantino's use of it in Kill Bill Vol. 2, the film comes to Region 1 DVD in a legit, remastered, reconstructed version courtesy of our friends at AnimEigo.
Americanizations of Japanese source material, is that everything is actually done with extreme care and love for the material. Sure, the plot is somewhat simplified. Apparently Houston thought Americans wouldn't be able to fully comprehend the idea of the shady Yagyu clan secretely manipulating the shogunate, so he chose to make the films' villain, the sort of Emperor Palpatine of the Lone Wolf and Cub world, Yagyu Retsudo, the shogun himself. The dub job, however, is no doubt the finest dub ever contributed to a Japanese film. It's actually done well and for perhaps one of the few times ever in film history, the talent employed is actually real "talent", including Lamont Johnson, 
best known for voicing Tarzan on the radio during the 50s as Ogami Ito, then comedienne Sandra Bernhard providing the vocals for Kayo Matsuo and the young Gibran Evans providing Daigoro's incredible narration track. Shogun Assassin is such an excellent Americanization that it actually bests Baby Cart at the River Styx in several respects. Exhibit A is Daigoro's narration track, which adds a whole new level to the movie. Aside from the opening narration, which I have memorized completely and love to recite in falsetto at open mikes as people scratch their heads, most famously sampled in both Liquid Swords and Kill Bill Vol. 2, which is the coolest opening narration in any film, another truly awesome moment occurs when Daigoro talks about how keeps count of how many people his father kills so he can know just how many
souls to pray for. At the beginning of the scene, the count stands at 342, however, after Ogami Ito kills a trio of ninja women, he ups the number to 345. The film's new music track is also actually, in my opinion, an improvement on the original, sounding a bit like if Goblin, the Italian electronic group most notable for scoring many of Dario Argento's films (most notably Suspiria) and George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, were to attempt music with an Asian motif. It also brings the infamous German-made soundtrack to Jimmy Wang Yu's indie kung fu masterpiece Master of the Flying Guillotine to mind as well. All in all, while Baby Cart at the River Styx is of course superior from a cinematic standpoint, Shogun Assassin is easily the more entertaining cut of the movie. AnimEigo's DVD is probably the closest you'll get to the honor of seeing Shogun Assassin projected in glorious 35mm, I have just one sole grip with the DVD, that the film's title cards are not the original title cards but computer recreations and look as such. Apparently the original negative to Shogun Assassin is toast or something as all the scenes here are taken from the masters of the Japanese versions of the Lone Wolf and Cub films. Still, it's awesome to finally see Shogun Assassin looking pristine on R1 DVD. Now just give me an MGM release of Message From Space and have Toho decide to unban Prophecies of Nostradamus and put it on DVD and my Japanese cult cinema fanboy life will be complete.
