TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

ahoodwink A horrible waste of time. I'm all for non-linear narratives, but this made no sense and never paid off. Characters have beards or an eye patch in one scene, then not in the next. You can't tell which characters actually exist, or who they are to each other. There's no coherent visual style, or rhythm, or any logic whatsoever. The Butoh dancers are probably supposed to be "artsy" or intense, but they just come off as silly, capering about with great commitment and no discernible purpose.While there's some resemblance to the Dr. Moreau story, this movie is too goofy to be shocking, and too disorganized to ever build up any fear or potency.What you do get: a random, unintelligible story, bad special effect violence, and a fair number of bare tits. (That actually makes it sound better than it is.)

christopher-underwood Well, where to begin? This notorious Japanese horror has finally surfaced and our first concern is what was so terrible that kept it banned for so long? Made just over 20 years after the atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima, some of this film looks as if some of the short-lived survivors might have made it to the set. Both the way the deformity issue is enthused over here and the clear connection with the bomb attack, make this a true horror. We begin with vivid scenes inside a mental institution but then the film settles down into a creepy mystery before cracking open about half an hour in, whence we find ourselves in the Mexican, Jodorowsky territory, and then worse. This film is not particularly well written and is uneven and occasionally rather silly but nevertheless this is still a work of some considerable power. A one off and a must see for those not easily shocked.

BA_Harrison The mere fact that it was banned in Japan was enough to make me want to seek out Horrors of Malformed Men. After all, it was made in the country that gave the world the Guinea Pig movies, pinku eiga, bukkake, hentai, and umpteen other acts of perversion that I don't even know the name for. If this film was considered unsuitable for viewing by its own people, what deviant treats could it possibly hold?Well, not much really. Whilst there is plenty of nudity, a touch of blood, and a smattering of sex (non-explicit), there is nothing that could be really be described as particularly 'shocking', particularly by today's standards. My guess is that the film's central theme of physical deformity and dis-figuration touched a very sensitive nerve in a country that was still suffering from the effects of a nuclear attack, which resulted in its suppression.Still, even without any extreme depravity on display, director Teruo Ishii's trippy flick is worth a watch if bizarre cinema is your cup of tea. Dreamlike, creepy and just downright weird, Horrors of Malformed Men contains plenty of startling imagery and a crazy narrative that is difficult to describe. But I'll give it a go...Hirosuke (Teruo Yoshida) , a medical student with almost no recollection of his past, is trapped in an asylum, despite being perfectly sane. After escaping from the loony bin, and being framed for the murder of a circus girl, he spots the photo of a recently deceased man, Genzaburo Komoda, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. By pretending to have been resurrected, Hirosuke assumes the dead man's identity, fooling everyone, including Komoda's widow and mistress (both of whom he gets jiggy with).Whilst at the Komoda household, Hirosuke recalls memories that convince him to travel to a nearby island, home of Jogoro, the web-fingered father of Genzaburo (who we first see making awkward movements amongst some rocks, and then performing a freakishly slow walk towards the camera, which eerily reminded me of Sadako from Ringu).Whilst on the island, Hirosuke not only discovers Jogoro's plans to build his 'ideal community' (by transforming perfectly normal humans into hideous freaks), but also the awful truth behind his own identity.Throw in a pair of Siamese twins (consisting of both sexes), some gold-painted dancers performing a hilarious routine, a perverted transvestite who plots with Genzaburo's mistress to inherit the Komoda fortune, an undercover detective, a woman who is forced to eat crabs off the rotting body of her lover, some accidental incest, and a finalé featuring a firework display that scatters body parts through the air, and you have one hell of a strange film.6.5, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.

Chung Mo Postwar Japan gave birth to probably one of the most consistently weird dance forms, Butoh. It rather hard to describe except that the processions of anguished clay caked naked bodies and rag covered transvestites makes me think of a nuclear holocaust. Since Japan is the only country with any experience with the horrors of a nuclear holocaust, it isn't surprising.We open with a dazed man in the middle of a cage of naked crazy women in a mental institution. We soon learn that he's an inmate as well. He is haunted by an odd children's lullaby. That night a strange bald man tries to kill him but instead our hero kills the bald man and escapes. Our hero hears the unusual lullaby and finds a circus performer who seems to come from the same remote place on the coast. He makes his way to the coast and finds out that a rich man who looks exactly like him has just died. He digs up the body and switches clothing becoming the dead man mistakenly buried too soon. Our hero then attempts to discover the strange secrets of the dead man's family while trying to imitate the deceased.After watching this production I am very interested in why this film has been banned in Japan for so long. There are plenty of films that are WAY MORE DISTURBING, disgusting or horrifying from Japan, some made the same year! The most likely part is the second half of the film when the Butoh dancers are given plenty of screen time but much of it is mystifying to me rather then disturbing. The couple of torture scenes are rough but not worse then anything I've seen from any pinku film.Anyway the film is quite good for the first half and starts to fall apart during the second half. It seems the the director and his camera person really didn't know what to do with the Butoh dancers. We get a number of very striking Butoh scenarios, poorly filmed (compared to the excellent filming in the rest of the film), that go by with the main characters just gazing on in disbelief. No real connection to the plot.An interesting experiment.