Hong
Kong director Mou Tun Fei (better known as T.F. Mou
or T.F. Mous) is something of an obscure maverick.
The man’s directed everything from romantic
comedies to kung fu to hardcore pornography. He will
forever be known, however, for being the man behind
Men Behind the Sun, an absolutely grotesque, completely
over the top piece of shock cinema revolving around
the horrific experiments performed by the Japanese
Imperial Army on Chinese civilians and POWs while
stationed in Manchuria. Like such films as Salo and
Cannibal Holocaust, it is loved and reviled by gorehounds
the world over for its gruesome, extremely difficult
to watch experiment sequences, its use of real cadavers
and its allegedly real animal cruelty. T.F. Mou has
far more in common with Italian mondo masters Gualtiero
Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi than with Chang Cheh,
Lau Kar Leung or John Woo. Sadly not a whole lot of
information is available on the man himself. Apparently
he was born in Taiwan, with his father; ironically,
fighting as a guerilla solider against the Japanese.
After graduating from a film school that was so poor
they couldn’t even supply an 8mm camera for
their students to make films on, he was an assistant
director on several propaganda movies and then directed
numerous films in Taiwan (over 100 according to some
sources) before moving to Hong Kong and joining the
Shaw Brothers.
T.F. Mou’s very first project with the Shaw
Brothers, also his first project to bear some exploitation
elements was Gun, a segment in The Criminals 5: A
Teenager’s Nightmare, an installment in the
five film Shaw Brothers true crime series The Criminals,
involving two young men who discover a bag containing
a machine gun, ammo and a grenade, with their lives
soon going downhill from there. It’s an interesting
little short piece needless to say, but is somewhat
overshadowed by the titular second segment of the
film, directed by the Shaws‘ other resident
pervert, Kuei Chih Hung (Bamboo House of Dolls, The
Killer Snakes), involving a sunglasses wearing sicko
who goes around raping teenage girls. In many ways,
with a heavy level of perversion and exploitation,
it actually feels more like a T.F. Mou film than T.F.
Mou’s own segment.
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Deadly
Secret / Haunted Tales |
After
directing Melody of Love, a romantic comedy and Bank
Busters, an actioner, T.F. Mou helmed A Deadly Secret,
a martial arts film based on a novel by Chin Yung.
While it isn’t exactly “pure Mou”,
it is still surprisingly gruesome, sadistic, bizarre
and downbeat for a SB kung fu flick. The plot involves
a man named Ting Dien (Jason Pai Piao) who is kept
in prison by a sadistic magistrate (Yueh Hua, Intimate
Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, Clan of Amazons)
and frequently tortured. Why? He knows the titular
deadly secret, a secret location he was told of by
a kung fu master that harbors untold riches. Once
the magistrate finds out that his daughter Seung Wa
(played by lovely Taiwanese beauty Shih Szu, best
known for her role in Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires),
also knows the secret, he buries her alive. Mou’s
direction in this film is quite fluent and energetic,
with lots of camera movement and the film’s
color scheme is even a bit on the brownish and muted
side. It’s overall a very entertaining kung
fu flick and while not even as violent as most of
Chang Cheh’s films, it still has moments of
Mou-esque grotesquery. You don’t see many kung
fu films where a character is tortured with a device
designed to rip his rectum apart, do you?
1980
was a very prolific year for Mou. The same year he
would dabble in kung fu with A Deadly Secret and create
one of the most outrageous exploitation flicks around
with Lost Souls, Mou would helm a story in this two
part horror anthology. The first installment of Haunted
Tales is directed by Chor Yuen (Intimate Confessions
of a Chinese Courtesan, The Magic Blade) and begins
with a pair of newlyweds moving into their dream home.
The wife (played by Ching Li), however, starts to
have some very strange, frightening visions. The second
story is where Mou takes center stage and begins to
display his penchant for exploitation. The segment
involves a pathetic loser (played by Shaw Brothers
villain actor Chan Shen, who is best known as the
bald henchmen in Five Fingers of Death and would work
with Mou again in Lost Souls) who lives a miserable
life in a tenement. His life changes completely when
he wins the lottery using what is essentially a Chinese-style
Ouija board. However, his greed soon gets the best
of him and he meets a gruesome end. The interesting
thing about this film is that Chor and Mou’s
entries are really like ying and yang to each other.
Chor Yuen’s segment is beautifully photographed
and slowly builds up tension whereas T.F. Mou’s
entry goes straight for the jugular vein from the
start and feels more like a sleazy Japanese pinku
eiga than a Hong Kong horror flick. As with Lost Souls,
Mou absolutely revels in the lowbrow with a brilliant
use of exploitative camera angles, most evident in
a sequence which Chan Shen hires a prostitute and
sticks money all over her naked body. Mou’s
work would only descend to even deeper levels of exploitation
from here.
Mou’s
next film at Shaw Brothers would also be his first
to really set Hong Kong audiences up for what was
to come from him. Like Men Behind the Sun, Lost Souls
is a grim, incredibly heavy handed piece of disturbing
exploitation cinema with a political subtext and is
easily the most outrageous thing to come out of the
Shaw Studios. The film follows a group of illegal
immigrants from mainland China who, trying to escape
the evil of communism, attempt to illegally enter
Hong Kong. They are raided by the police and only
three escape. However, they soon run into a group
of vicious human smugglers led by Hok (Chan Shen),
who imprison them along with a bunch of other poor
mainlanders and put them through a regiment of torture
and sexual abuse that would make the Marquis De Sade
blush to try and get the phone numbers of their relatives
in Hong Kong. The film features everything from a
young woman having candle wax dripped all over her
naked body to a woman being raped while spun around;
to Hok haggling with a grotesquely obese pimp as he
tries to sell the women to him, writing his prices
on the girls’ asses, to a homosexual sodomy/birthday
sequence involving Hok, who rubs lube on his poor
victim before reaming him up the ass in a sequence
that makes Deliverance look tame. Finally, the poor
rapee gets sick of this treatment and kills Hok. As
the remaining smugglers are wondering who should replace
Hok, the refugees decide to rise up and take on the
smugglers.
A
few have compared this film to Pasolini’s Salo
or the 120 Days of Sodom, but for a film about a bunch
of teenagers being sexually abused and made to eat
shit for days on end, Salo is filmed in a surprisingly
restrained manner, with most of the horrors never
shown in close up. Mou’s direction in Lost Souls,
on the other hand, is full of insane energy and his
use of camera angles is highly voyeuristic. The various
horrors are all lovingly lensed in some of the most
graphic, sadistic detail I have ever seen in a film,
with POV shots a plenty. It makes the direction in
his later films Men Behind the Sun and Black Sun:
The Nanking Massacre look almost flat. In those films,
the camera is mostly static, in Lost Souls, however,
it’s moving much of the time and the film is
full of POV shots that really fling you into the unpleasantness,
especially in the case of say, the “spinning
rape scene”. In the end, it’s really hard
to believe that this came from the same studio which
produced so many beloved wuxia and kung fu films and
best of all, after Mou left Shaw Brothers, it only
got worse.
PART
2: Click HERE to Continue
J.L.
Carrozza
12/17/2006
