The film is a cavalcade of bad taste: footage from a real-life autopsy is included, the skin and muscle of a woman’s arms are peeled off down to the bone, and a real cat is fed to a swarm of hungry rats. Released in 88, the film portrayed, in graphic detail, the actions of Unit 731, the notorious covert research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that performed lethal human experiments during the Second Sino-Japanese War. While certain films helped push the drive towards strict classification – John Woo’s seminal A Better Tomorrow, from 1984, received criticism for making heroes of gangsters – it was the infamous Men Behind the Sun that proved to be the true catalyst. Before the establishment of proper film classifications, there was just a set of loose guidelines that decreed, for instance, that criminals could not be shown to get away with their crimes. There was a government censorship body prior to 1988, but it had no legal power to censor films. The classification was created in 1988 with the passing of Hong Kong’s film censorship law. In strict legal terms, a Category III film is one forbidden to any viewer under the age of 18.
Reader, say hello to The Untold Story, part of the wonderful world of Hong Kong’s Category III films, home to the worst excesses of our city’s cinematic offerings. How are the corpses hidden? Why, they’re diced up and served to hungry workers in tasty char siu bao.
Two have their throats slit, one is visibly decapitated – a curtain of gore cascading down as her head rolls off the table – and the last is mercifully dispatched offscreen. The killer then turns his attention to the couple’s four young daughters. Her husband goes next, a blade puncturing his neck. The mother is dispatched by several intestinal-shredding knife wounds.
0 kommentar(er)
