Sandakan No. 8 (1974)
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Snehmoy (Rahul Bose) and Miyage (Chigusa Takaku) are pen friends who exchange wedding vows through letters. Fifteen years pass but they never meet. Yet the bond of marriage is strong between them. This unusual relationship comes under a cloud when a young widow, Sandhya (Raima Sen), comes to stay with Snehmoy along with her eight-year-old son Poltu. Snehmoy and the little boy bond and the arithmetic teacher discovers the joy of palpable bonds and fatherhood. There develops an inexplicable thread of understanding with Sandhya too. But Snehmoy remained loyal to his unseen Japanese wife. When Miyage was ill from cancer, he took a long leave from his school and tried his best to find a cure for the illness. Meanwhile, malaria took a toll on him and he died. Coming of Miyage in a white sari to Sunderbans after his departure was really touching.
Sex Madness (1938) is an exploitation film directed by Dwain Esper, along the lines of Reefer Madness, supposedly to warn teenagers and young adults of the dangers of venereal diseases, specifically syphilis. Wild parties, lesbianism, and premarital sex are some of the forms of madness portrayed. The educational aspect of the film allowed it to portray a taboo subject which was otherwise forbidden by the Production Code of 1930, and its stricter version imposed by Hollywood studios in July 1934.
Harry Kilmer returns to Japan after several years in order to rescue his friend George's kidnapped daughter - and ends up on the wrong side of the Yakuza, the notorious Japanese mafia...
At the traditional Muslim funeral service for his father Fikret Varupa, sixteen year old boy from Sarajevo, learns that his father owes money to Hamid, a man he does not even know. The debt is considerable and Hamid does not want it to go to the grave with the body, so the debt automatically passes from the father to the son. Since in Bosnia this way of collecting debts, at a funeral, is considered to be utterly humiliating, it is never, ever applied. Fikret and his entire family become subjects of ridicule. Fikret, who is practically still a child, is decisive to "redeem his father's soul". Wishing to repay his father's debt and to secure the forgiveness, Fikret wanders into the real world of Sarajevo, the world that is ruled by post-war chaos, misery and poverty and becomes an ideal target for two corrupted policemen who wish to "help" him: they plant the kidnapped girl on him.
The story of young English boy who lives with his parents in Shanghai during World War II. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese occupy the Shanghai International Settlement, and in the following chaos Jim becomes separated from his parents.
Against the background of an Australian desert landscape, so much space and so few people, Sandy, a geologist, and Hiromitsu, a Japanese businessman, play out a story of human inconsequence in the face of the blistering universe. The end of the journey leaves no-one capable of going back to where they started from.
In 1942 British soldier Jack Celliers comes to a japanese prison camp. The camp is run by Yonoi, who has a firm belief in discipline, honour and glory. In his view, the allied prisoners are cowards when they chose to surrender instead of commiting suicide. One of the prisoners, interpreter John Lawrence, tries to explain the japanese way of thinking, but is considered a traitor.
Oliver Fellows, a failed city banker, is pursuing fulfillment on an old farm in Southern Portugal. He and his neighbor, Manel, face unprincipled enemies in a highly amusing quest to save their valley from exploitation.
Don't be fooled by the title. Christmas Holiday is a far, far cry from It's a Wonderful Life. Told in flashback, the story begins as Abigail Martin marries Southern aristocrat Robert Monette. Unfortunately, Robert has inherited his family's streak of violence and instability, and soon drags Abigail into a life of misery.
As the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, Gen. Fellers is tasked with deciding if Emperor Hirohito will be hanged as a war criminal. Influencing his ruling is his quest to find Aya, an exchange student he met years earlier in the U.S.
1948 hygiene/pregnancy roadshow exploiter.
When a schoolteacher is sacked, he projects his bad mood at his troubled teenage son. The son, in turn, buys a CD player from a pawnshop with counterfeit money. This starts a chain reaction of misery as every victim projects his problems on to another person.
Simran drowns her misery in booze. Her one friend in Seoul, is Aakash, a singer in an Indian restaurant. One night, Simran tells Aakash of her past and the reasons for her loneliness. Originally a bar dancer in Mumbai, Simran is the girlfriend of a notorious gangster, Daya, who is a headhunter for hire. After hearing her story Aakash is determined to save Simran from the gangster's world.
After housewife Ellen is raped by the janitor she kills him and hits the road. She travels to the Big City where she is repeatedly used and abused. And when she finally finds a safe place to live her landlady's son turns out to be a detective, which threatens her newly found identity and peace of mind.
Tribute to Naples, where director De Sica spent his first years, this is a collection of 6 Napolitean episodes : a clown exploited by a gangster ; an inconstant pizza seller (Sofia) loosing her husband's ring ; the funeral of a dead child ; the gambler Count Prospero B. defeated by a kid ; the unexpected and unusual wedding of Teresa, a prostitute ; the "professor" Ersilio Micci, a "wisdom seller".
A story of two teenagers trapped in the world of illegal underground boxing. One is fighting to save his fathers life and using the money pay off gambling debts accumulated by his father. The second is fighting for the money to get out of the ghettos. While being exploited by a boxing promoter the two teens become friends. An explosive ending puts the two friends in the ring against each other.
When a western Pennsylvania auto plant is acquired by a Japanese company, brokering auto worker Hunt Stevenson faces the tricky challenge of mediating the assimilation of two clashing corporate cultures. At one end is the Japanese plant manager and the sycophant who is angling for his position. At the other, a number of disgruntled long-time union members struggle with the new exigencies of Japanese quality control.
Abandoned by his prostitute mother in 1920, Douzi was raised by a theater troupe. There he meets Shitou and over the following years the two develop an act entitled, "Farewell My Concubine," that brings them fame and fortune. When Shitou marries Juxian, Doutzi becomes jealous, the beginnings of the acting duo's explosive breakup and tragic fall take root.
One of the earliest exploitation films from South Africa, directed and produced by independant film maker Pierre D. Botha. This is a classic example of a ârestless youthâ film. The action takes place in Johannesburg (The Godless city of the title) and focuses on the youth sub culture of the âDucktailsâ (âa white youth gang subculture which emerged within post Second World War South Africa. Rebellious, hedonistic, apolitical and showing little respect for the law, education or workâ).
The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.
A group of men and women travel to a Carribean resort to discover themselves sexually but unfortunately one of them has also discovered that they like to murder people too.
The final film in Rossellini's war film trilogy (the first two being Rome, Open City and Paisà ). Germany Year Zero takes place in post-war Germany, unlike the others, which take place in German-occupied Rome and post-war Italy, respectively. The story follows a twelve-year-old boy, Edmund Kohler, who is mainly left to his own devices in order to survive and to help his family do the same.
The young Harold lives in his own world of suicide-attempts and funeral visits to avoid the misery of his current family and home environment. Harold meets an 80-year-old woman named Maude who also lives in her own world yet one in which she is having the time of her life. When the two opposites meet they realize that their differences donât matter and they become best friends and love each other.
A group of Californians experience loss, despair and desperation over the course of seven days before Christmas. A boxing underdog must face the truth about his uncertain future, a blocked novelist struggles to create a new work admist a suspicious movie proposal, and an engineer with a secret must sell his business plans before it puts his marriage and career in serious jeopardy. With a self-imposed, mounting pressure, their actions and decisions push them deeper into a void of self-doubt and misery leading to one last hope to start fresh again.
Based on the internationally acclaimed novel by Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha is a sweeping romantic epic set in a mysterious and exotic world that still casts a potent spell today. The story begins in the years before WWII when a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
Scott Jacoby, as a boy with an unhealthy and pathological attachment to his divorced mother, becomes increasingly jealous of the new man in his mother's life (Robert Klein). After his mother remarries, his rage and misery overwhelm him and he plots to kill his stepfather.
American and Japanese soldiers, stranded on a tiny Pacific island during World War II, must make a temporary truce and cooperate to survive various tribulations. Told through the eyes of the American and Japanese unit commanders, who must deal with an atmosphere of growing distrust and tension between their men.
Ilsa, now a vicious warden, runs a mental-hospital for young women.
A submissive hooker goes about her trade, suffering abuse at the hands of Japanese salarymen and Yakuza types. She's unhappy about her work, and is apparently trying to find some sort of appeasement for the fact that her lover has married.
A ruthless rancher, and his gang, use extremely long range rifles to kill the men who kidnapped his infidel wife.
During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the New Year?
During World War II a secret agent (Tang Wei) must seduce, then assassinate an official (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai. Her mission becomes clouded when she finds herself falling in love with the man she is assigned to kill.
Linda Blair plays Carol, a young woman who must serve 18 months in prison after drink driving and killing a man. The prison turns out to be brimming with decadence, corruption and sleaze, where the other female inmates are sadistic crack-selling lesbian rapists and the guards and warden are no better.
After the mob hits a guy with a list, one of the hoods keeps the list for himself to blackmail the people on it. When the mobsters find out he's a double-crosser, they off him, which angers his busty girlfriend. She goes after them using the only two weapons she has.
The lives of a disparate group of contestants intertwine in an inhumanely gruelling dance marathon.
Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) is given a special assignment by the Army to get the inside story on Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), a former GI who has formed a gang of fellow servicemen and Japanese locals. They use their muscle to take over Tokyo's pachinko racket and commit a series of train robberies, targeting deliveries of military ammunition.
In Bodeen, Texas, Land Of The Dragon, an indie-rock loving misfit finds a way of dealing with her small-town misery after she discovers a roller derby league in nearby Austin.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Jennie is a twelve-year-old girl living with her parents in extremely rural mountain country. Her schoolteacher, Miss Carol, though a mountain girl herself, has gone off to be educated and returned in hopes of stopping the tradition of child marriage which permeates the culture. Jennie's father Ira is a good man who tries to protect Miss Carol from the men who threaten her if she doesn't call off her crusade. One of these men, Jake Bolby, has his eye on little Jennie and plots to make her his bride.
Harriet Craig, whose obsession with material possessions and immaculate neatness results in misery for all concerned. Harriet's husband remains blind to his wife's selfishness-until his eyes are opened when he is implicated in a double murder...
Japan sinks! Proving once again that Japan will never cease to find inventive ways to destroy itself on screen, this summer's blockbuster Sinking of Japan brings apocalypse through tectonics. Based on Sakyo Komatsu's best-selling novel, Sinking of Japan was first put on the big screen in Moritani Shiro's 1973 classic. In 2006, director Higuchi Shinji remakes the disaster movie, taking the story to
Injured scientist Eric Godfrey asks his protege to give him a fatal dose of opiates to end his misery. When he dies the doctor is accused of murder.
In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words use by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.
A ring passes between a lot of different people, giving the bearer or someone close a new meaning to life. Actors, embezzlers, old ladies and cheated husbands all seem to gain temporary hope from misery and disillusionment.
Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, also called Men Behind the Sun 4, is a 1994 Hong Kong film directed by Mou Tun Fei and is in many ways considered to be a follow up to the 1987 shockumentary film, Men Behind the Sun. The movie depicts the events behind the Nanking Massacre committed by the Imperial Japanese army against Chinese citizens and refugees during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Like Men Behind the Sun, the film was both criticized and praised for its brutal portrayal of the Japanese atrocities, such as the notorious contest to kill 100 people using a sword, during the early and late stages of World War II, but at the same time was questioned over historical accuracy and violence which gave the film a more exploitation feel to it.
A no-budget tribute to 60s exploitation queen Doris Wishman and filmed in sordid black and white and searing colour, "Lesbo-A-Go-Go" follows the once-innocent Sugar on a wild psycho-sexual downhill spiral into degradation, drug addiction, delirium and ultimately damnation.
Adapted from James Hadley Chaseâs novel, plot finds Robert Mabillon Gelin as a struggling artist who saves Eric Freminger (van Eyck) from a drunken suicide attempt, and promptly gets offered employment as a chauffer by way of gratitude. Once back at the Freminger residence, Robert finds Eric is a severely depressed man with a host of problems. And then Helene Freminger (Morgan) arrives on the scene, hostile, suspicious but ever so sultry, itâs the kick-start of events that can only lead to misery â or worse â for all involved.
Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story.
Grier and Haig are thieving mercenaries who engineer a prison break from the outside.
Mouchette is a young teenager living in the tough country. Her mother is about to die, and her father does not take care of her. Mouchette remains silent in the face of the humiliations she undergoes. One night in the woods, she meets Arsene, a poacher. He thinks he has just killed Mathieu, the rural policeman, and attempts to use Mouchette to build an alibi.
A tough gang of teenage girls are looking for love and fighting for turf on the mean streets of the city! Bad girls to the core, these impossibly outrageous high school hoodlums go where they want ... and create mayhem wherever they go!
This historical film by Hynek BoÄan touches upon the indecisiveness of the Czech nation, ready to bend the backbone in face of foreign rule. Situating the story at the close of the Thirty Year War enabled the depiction of the misery of the people that affects even an impoverished aristocratic milieu. Rudolf HruÅ¡Ãnský appears here in the role of an indecisive knight, persuaded for a long time and in vain to join the anti-Habsburg movement. The story does not only captivate through the depiction of manifold human characters, intrigues and sycophancy, but also through the circumstances ruling over the devastated farmstead, sunk in mud and crudeness. One of the best films with an updating tendency has come into being here, rightly being named along the such greats as Kladivo na ÄarodÄjnice (Witches' Hammer).
An obsessive-compulsive Japanese librarian living in Bangkok spends most of his days contemplating suicide in his lifeless apartment. His life changes when he witnesses the death of Nid, seconds before he was about to jump off a bridge. This brings him in contact with Nid's elder sister Noi - these two lost and lonely souls help each other find the meaning to their meaningless existences.
An alcoholic doctor on a Polynesian island, disgusted by white exploitation of the natives, finds himself marooned on a pristinely beautiful island.
There are breakpoints in the history, the result of a single event may change the whole course. In 1909, an assassination attempt of a Japanese governor fails. Now, in 2009, Korea is just another state of Japan's Empire & Seoul has become a major city. A Korean resistance group fights for liberty, independence & the restoration of true history. Two cops, Japanese & Korean, investigate the group.
The Wind Rises is the 11th animated theatrical film directed by Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli. Based on Miyazakiâs own manga and the 1937 short novel of the same name by Tatsuo Hori, this is the story of JirÅ Horikoshi, the aircraft engineer most remembered for his design work on the Mitsubishi A6M Reisen âZeroâ, Japanâs famous World War II fighter aircraft. During the WWII years, the Miyazaki family business manufactured aircraft parts, including the windshields and rudders used on the Zero.
Black and white unite and are confronted with hatred in two color-line-busting classics from the classic years of exploitation.
Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare -- in this lush epic set in the 1870s, which finds Algren learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.
A serious Swiss melodrama/documentary about abortion, marketed as a sexy exploitation movie in the US. The film contains real medical footage.
In 1944, the American military lands on the shores of Saipan. Refusing to commit suicide with his superiors or be forced into camps for prisoners of war, Captain Oba Sakae leads a group of his men and other similarly minded local residents into the mountains. Even after hearing reports of the Japanese military's surrender, Oba dismisses the reports as propaganda and continues to launch guerilla attacks against the American soldiers, earning him the nickname "The Fox". Soon, even the American commander who's charged with the task of capturing Oba comes to admire his persistent enemy.
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