"From an academic perspective, ATROCITIES OF THE ORIENT is a prime example of the way the exploiteers re-cut, re-titled, and re-packaged their footage"

GEE-WHIZ!!! At the end of my last post (written about an hour ago!) I speculated whether the mishmash that the Americans made out of mixing the two 1953 Filipino war flicks BEAST OF THE EAST and OUTRAGES OF THE ORIENT into ATROCITIES OF THE ORIENT was available on DVD - and an hour later I incidentally discover that Something Weird Video ALSO has the latter for sale!! I definitely wanna get that one too if nothing else to see how well (or crappily) the cut & paste edit works. Most fans of Godfrey Ho's cut & paste HK films acknowledge that those films are pretty crappy - but they often keep coming back for more simply because once in a blue moon Godfrey Ho did actually hit the mark and create something completely entertaining. Not very often mind you. LOL.

PS: the headline is a quotation from SWV's info about the film and their DVD-R. I'll re-post it below or you can read it on their page.

From SOMETHING WEIRD VIDEO's website:

Now here’s a film that really lives up to its title: it’s from the Orient and it’s an atrocity.

What do you if you have two old Filipino World War II pictures originally released in the United States by producer RAY FRIEDGEN? Well, if you’re Social Service Pictures, you graft the best of Beasts of the East onto Outrages of the Orient and throw in additional footage of vicious soldiers ravaging semi-naked, nubile young women from God knows where. The result: Atrocities of the Orient, an Oriental exploitation atrocity epic that thrives on the post-war hatred of the Japanese while simultaneously making a buck on the violence and torture the film both condemns and wallows in. War is hell, kids, and so is the exploitation game….

One minute the happy Filipino people of a mountain village all gather for a carefree musical number, the next they’re being slaughtered by the Japanese in an orgy of screams and flames: “They don’t have any respect for women and children!” True! We see lecherous Japanese soldiers chase topless women out of their homes who then jump to their death over cliffs rather than submit to being raped by the Japs.

Amidst this, one guy goes crazy after seeing his wife roasted alive and wanders around searching for his dead son. And two brothers, Antonio and Carlos, fight each other over the death of a woman they both loved. In fact, their mother even shows up at the battlefront to try and referee a truce between them!

Things get worse when Carlos and his outfit are captured by the Japanese after refusing to surrender. The Evil Japs promptly kill the only American in the group, then behead a Filipino soldier and bayonet another simply for the fun of it. Antonio, meanwhile, runs smack into a sexy female guerilla fighter named Colonel Eve – first seen skinny dipping (!!?) in an obviously added insert – and together they team up with Captain Corregidor to fight off the insidious forces of the Japanese. That they also fall in love but can’t admit it to each other until it’s too late is considered poignant.

But the plot is less important than the violence, and Atrocities of the Orient is chuck full of wartime killing, punctuated by the Japanese torturing various prisoners, so as to not disappoint the grindhouse audiences that were lured inside. Yeah, it’s all barely coherent but, hey, there’s a war on, goddammit!

From an academic perspective, Atrocities of the Orient is a prime example of the way the exploiteers re-cut, re-titled, and re-packaged their footage. Something Weird also offers Beast of the East and Outrages of the Orient in their original U.S. release versions as a special double-feature for those who just can’t get enough.

And remember: “This story of the heroic peoples of barrios and mountains is based upon fact!” -- Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!



Product Details

SKU: 35931
Weight: 0.25 lbs
Format: DVD-R
Year: 1959
Color: B&W

Price: $10.00