Men Behind the Sun

I aint really interested in this one either not really because of the violence since I have a pretty strong stomach but most exploitation movies just bore Me and IMO are the cheapest form of movie entertainment dont get Me wrong it can work in some cases but 9 out of 10 just suck IMHO.

Definitely with you there. In spite of being able to sit through animal-unfriendly scenes, I'm definitely against them as a whole. As I said, I'm a vegetarian, which I chose to be because I am against animal cruelty, so the whole concept of killing animals off for the sake of making a movie is a pretty wrong one if you ask me. What's worst in most cases though is the fact that all these scenes of cruelty do not add ANYTHING to the movies theirselves. They're purely a cheap way of shoving in more gore: purely exploitational. For instance, Cannibal Ferox. It has the most unneccesary scenes of animal violence one could possibly imagine. I'm not going into detail, but trust me, it's just wrong. Basically every other movie in the Cannibal genre has this too, and, another movie, Ebola Syndrome, the HK-slasher/horror/gore-flick. Once again, completely unnecessary.

Which is what's wrong with MBTS as well. I'd had watched the movie immediately if the movie-makers had been dedicated and creative enough to create a real-looking prop body and prop-cat. I remember reading about a movie by, if I recall correctly, Büttgereit, about a decomposing corpse. A prop corpse. Yeah baby. It's not like it's impossible, it'd just cost too much for the makers of crap movies such as this one.

As for the remark on killing animals/snuff, I'd been thinking the exact same thing. And I totally agree.

Just thought I'd pick up on an earlier statement in this thread (probably made about two years ago ... sorry) about the film 'Men Behind the Sun,' which is a serious and thoroughly depressing film about the atrocities committed by the Japanese towards Chinese POWs in WWII. The scene mentioned, featuring a cat and some hungry rats, is a fake. I can't necessarily prove this, but having seen it on DVD quality it doesn't look even remotely real. Thank the God of fluffy little pussy cats. What is real in this film is a scene where some scientists perform a post-mortem on a young boy (note, no, I'm not saying that the body belongs to the kid who was walking and talking a few frames earlier). This was done with parental consent but, you know, it's still a few guys slicing up a body. If, like me, you find yourself drawn to gory films because you're actually very sqeamish and can only look at this sort of thing because you know it's not real, you may have to look away.

I didnt much like this film either. When i watched it i saw it with a few friends and they all thought i was some kind of sicko, i tried to tell them that i'd never seen the movie before, they weren't having it tho! The cat scene is quite grim, also the scene where they take the womans skin off her arms and the gas chamber scene!
eeeeugh!!

Agreed. The rodents involved seem to be having by far the worst time in the encounter, and the close-ups show them not to be biting the cat but rather licking the red liquid off it. The liquid may well be blood - but if it is it's probably blood from the rodents which were previously killed, not blood from the cat.

I say 'rodents' as opposed to 'rats' because the animals involved are almost certainly not rats, at least not any rat I've managed to find illustration of (I also have one as a pet!). The shape of the head is too rounded and short, as is the length of the tail which also seems to be fur-covered unlike a rat's.

NB - Not intended as a defence of the scene!

Yep. Also, the rats' 'attacks' are shown in closeup in rapid edits, making them appear far more aggressive than they are. No actual cat gore is seen - just a little (fake) blood on the coat. If the scene were real, then I think that Mous would be more than happy to show the meat of the attack, if you pardon the phrasing, and the bloody aftermath. He certainly doesn't shy away from this sort of material in the autopsy scene.

For those who don't know, the controversy around this scene seems to have arisen when nth generation bootlegs were seen in the West, and the grainy footage looked far more alarming. The director was then asked in an interview whether the scene was real and refused to answer either way. Rather than an admission of guilt, I think that Mous was cannily, if irresponsibly, attracting more attention to his film.

Not that there is no cruelty in the scene, though. Both cat and rodents seem kind of traumatised and it has been suggested that the cat must be heavily sedated to keep it as still as it is. Hardly up there with Kim Ki-Duk's 'The Isle' in the torture stakes, though. There's a film whose treatment of animals is truly unforgiveable.

I'd like in a way to re-watch the cat scene, as like I said in my post initially, I only ever saw it on a really poor quality bootleg, and then I can't even remember it being completely convincing.

Cruelty to animals is inexcusable in movie making, and it's always nice to find out that these scenes aren't actually real. The monkey brains in Faces of Death had me completely convinced, and that was faked, which I was very happy to discover.

Sadly, the turtle scene in Cannibal Holocaust is not faked, and those are 4-5 minutes of my life that I really wish I could erase from my memory. The defence given for the animal atrocities in these cannibal movies is that all the animals killed on screen were subsequently used as food by the crew - that they would have been killed anyway, but it's certainly no excuse to show their deaths as entertainment, and thankfully this era of film makers getting away with this kind of thing is long over.

More disturbing to me in MBTS, is the scenes featuring real corpses. When I watched the film the first time, I had no idea of that fact and I remember thinking that the special effects were very realistic. Again like I have said in an earlier post, I think that it would have been excusable because it would have bought a higher level of realism to the film IF it had been a serious movie, like Schindler's List, but it isn't - I still can't quite decide whether it was supposed to be or not, but it certainly didn't work out as one, so it comes off as exploitative.

The scene with the compression chamber is truly disgusting, and is the main scene that sticks in my memory of the film.

The animal killings in all those Cannibal films were indeed rather awkward - I have Cannibal Ferox on DVD and it has six, seven scenes wherein we see animals being slaughtered or slaughtering eachother. Good thing about Cannibal Holocaust though: the film company filmed the animal killings later on and added them in - Deodato did not quite agree with this. So the original cut was supposed to be animal cruelty free.

And indeed, the 'food' excuse is the lamest excuse ever.

Or not. Of course, there was the squid eating in Oldboy recently. Far more shocking and upsetting is, as I alluded to earlier in this thread, another recent Korean film, The Isle, directed by Kim Ki-Duk. In the most heinous example of animal cruelty I have ever seen in a film, a man and woman on a floating hut catch a fish, partially skin it, cut off a fillet for sashimi (which they then eat), before tossing the fish back into the water. It is alive during the whole ordeal, and swims off at the end.

I haven't really heard anything about the Isle containing animal cruelty before, so can't really comment on that, but I can say that the octopus eating in Oldboy doesn't offend me in anyway as it is a food that is eaten in Asia. I remember vividly watching a TV programme called Travel Sick, where the presenter ate a live octopus in Hong Kong. This was screened on TV with no fuss whatsoever.

Sorry if this is too off topic now.

It may be a little off topic but, meh. I saw that on TV, too. I only mentioned Oldboy because that scene attracted so much press attention and it was a source of controversy when it was passed uncut.

Alex, I agree with you. Although I consider myself a staunch defender of free speech and am not an advocate of censorship, I support the stance the BBFC takes in relation to what is unacceptable during the making of films ie. undue animal cruelty and exposing child actors to situations that may disturb them. Such things are never necessary, and for skilled film-makers there are always ways around them - see the dog fights in 'Amores Perros' or the scene in Todd Solondz's 'Happiness' where a father explains his paedophilia to his young son. In reality, the young actor had no idea what he was being asked to react to.

Indeed. Ebola Syndrome has animal cruelty as well. Not a lot, but it's there. There's a scene where Anthony Wong cuts up living frogs (messy stuff), and one where three chickens are beheaded - two with a knife, one gets the head bitten off. That was actually the first time I witnessed animal cruelty in a movie, pretty much upset me. Of course, I hadn't seen a Cannibal movie yet by then.

Is that the excuse he's giving these days? Sad to say, he was completely behind the animal slaughter in the film, but he was pretty pissed off when it attracted outrage and has created a multitude of excuses since then. They include 'it was all the natives who killed them' and 'the animals were killed in the way the natives killed them' and 'the remains went to the natives so it was all for food'. He states in a recent book on his career:

"Perhaps we over-did it a bit with the turtle."

He was quite obviously present, and makes no mention of any studio deception. Deodato sees himself as the innocent victim of philistines and censorious barbarians, so take his protestations with a pinch of salt.

Aha, thanks for informing me. I think it was in an interview on a recent DVD release of Cannibal Holocaust, that Deodato said that the animal violence was inserted only later. See how misleading it is - if you got the guts to add in scenes like these, stand up and say you did so, too. Don't start and get even more hypocritical.

Thanks again!

The most bizarre case of animal cruelty in films, and the most shocking to me is when you see a chicken get beheaded in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory - in the bit where they go through a psychedelic tunnel on a boat.

*shivers* I cringe at the mention of this title...disgusting, stupid, and well...just wrong...it's sad when somebody takes such a sad situation and makes what is, despite what they might claim, so obviously just an exploitation flick

Are you sure you're not thinking of Marilyn Manson's music video for Dope Hat, which also takes place on a boat in a psychedelic tunnel. It's a parody on Willy Wonka.