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发帖数: 54598 | 1 One of those movies that you definitely only need to see once., 9 May 2001
Author: Rusty-61 from Trader Vic's
There's only a handful of movies I can say that about- Threads and Funny
Games are the other ones I can
think of off the top of my head. If you've seen a lot of disturbing movies,
you know exactly what I'm talking
about. You'll get the idea after one viewing, and you won't be able to wipe
some of the images out of your
head, or still have nightmares about them, even years later anyway.
I heard about this movie in the 80's, when I went out of my way to see every
movie or video I could that
was supposed to be shocking, disturbing, or really sick. Actually, I still
do that, though these days I do try
to read about it first, to make sure it is worth spending my money on. So
that probably means I need some
sort of therapy, but that's beside the point. Many of my favorite horror
authors had brought up the movie
when asked about the most upsetting movies they'd seen, and someone I talked
to who had seen it just
shook their head grimly when I asked them about it. I looked everywhere for
this movie but couldn't find it.
Years after I'd given up I found a bootleg copy from the laser-disc. This
was after I'd seen Peter Jackson's
"Braindead" uncut at a film festival, and pretty much decided I'd seen it
all and couldn't be shocked
anymore.
This movie is evidently based on real-life events during WWII, about a
medical camp referred only to as
"Camp 731" where the Japanese perform really nasty and unusually creative
medical experiments on the
Chinese prisoners. This includes women, children, and, in the one scene you
couldn't pay me enough to
watch because it was rumored to be real and I didn't want to even see a fake
depiction of it, a cat. I'd heard
that it made Ilsa's SS Camp look like a day at the beach. Well, I don't know
about that, but this is definitely
one of the most disturbing and depressing movies I've ever seen- as the guy
I bought it from said,
"Guaranteed to ruin your day". Fortunately, my day was already pretty much
ruined, as I was home sick with
the flu and feeling wretched the day I watched it. I probably would have
been able to fall asleep way earlier
if I hadn't watched it, though.
This is definitely not an enjoyable movie, or fun to sit through. Any
Italian cannibal movie I can think of is
more upbeat than this. Even if you were one of the people who thought the un
-cut Ilsa was 'campy' and
'fun', I don't think you'll be too cheerful during this.
I'd actually heard about what were supposed to be the most upsetting scenes,
like the poor man in the
decompression experiment that sort of implodes in a horrible way that I
think is safe to say has never been
filmed before or since, when all the air is sucked out of the room, and the
very graphic autopsy of the one
character in the movie that the filmmakers go out of their way to make sure
you care about. Man, that was
cold-blooded, but I was expecting that. There's one experiment, though, I
think it was called the "frostbite
experiment" (most of the experiments are preceded by a title card, which
gives the movie an even more
cold-blooded, documentary feel) that caught me totally off-guard. I don't
want to "spoil" it if you're really
into getting caught off guard, but it was one of the rare times I was so
shocked when watching a movie I
actually gasped and cursed out loud when I was watching something by myself.
It takes a lot to shock me,
but whenever I'm talking with someone about scenes in movies that really
disturbed us, this is one of the
first ones I think of. It's been over 5 years since I saw that scene but I
still remember it waaay too vividly.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) some of the
newer DVDs I've seen for sale
give it away in the cover art, so don't look too closely at the box before
you watch it (unless you want to
know what you're getting yourself into before you rent it). I've got to hand
it to whoever thought up that
one, because I did NOT see it coming.
If you're into non-stop over-the-top gore, then you might get bored during
parts of this. The filmmakers
spend some time making you feel sorry for the characters in other ways. This
film is well-made, well-acted,
has very realistic (way too realistic) gore, and nothing is ever played for
laughs - it's not a low-budget
splatter movie.The entire movie is just completely depressing, downbeat, and
disturbing to the very last
frame, and I really only recommend it to people I know who are pretty jaded
and don't mind really
disturbing, upsetting movies, or those (like me, I hate to admit) that want
to say they've seen it all. You also
might want to recommend it to any smug people you know that brag about how
nothing makes them sick. | s*****n
发帖数: 114 | |
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