Lost Souls

TF Mous' unique style of exploitation kicked off with this grim gem which centres around the unfortunate travails of a group of Chinese boat people who arrive in Hong Kong by stealth and are immediately targeted by low-level people traders.

The director of the superb MEN BEHIND THE SUN and the equally downbeat BLACK SUN has a knack for legitimizing his sex and violence with politically and culturally sensitive subject matter.

This Shaw Brothers production, produced in 1980, bears the admirable hallmarks of Mous' later work. The action is well staged, the set-ups are creatively photographed, and the pacing is brisk. There is a solidity and sharpness present in the work of this fine director that places him in the top ten per cent of exploitation masters. He has more in common with Japanese pinku directors such as Teruo Ishii than his Hong Kong contemporaries such as King Hu, Chang Cheh and Jimmy Wang Yu. His art is gruesome, extreme and almost fetishistic in its intensity.

The "lost souls" of this cinematic bad dream are a ragged group of male and female refugees who find themselves shackled in a makeshift prison run by a bisexual warden and his rape-loving cohorts. The women, in particular, are subjected to a Marquis de Sade-approved catalog of abuse and torture. The male of the species doesn't get off lightly, either; one character is graphically sodomized with an intensity that is rare for any Hong Kong film, let alone one greenlit by Run-Run Shaw (bless his adventurous hide!).

There is a surplus of lurid nudity (I'm not complaining, mind you) and much bloodshed and general nastiness. Everything is lovingly lensed in appropriately grotty locations and Mous never gets shy about his more extreme depictions or the sexualization of the abuse. In fact, it's quite clear that Mous revels in the sadistic excesses of this less-than-cheerful exercise and I, for one, respect him for it.

Mous' cinema is a cinema of transgression masquerading shamelessly as social comment. One can only admire such audaciousness.

Some immigrants from Mainland China are human trafficked into Hong Kong to be tortured like pigs. With the exception of bestiality and necrophilia, Lost Souls has practically every style of sexual depravity know to man. From fruity booty lovin' to flinging naked women around like rag dolls and even ring-around-the-rosey rape. Now one would ask "Does the movie even have a plot?" I don't know. I was laughing so hard uncomfortably over the insane amount of beatings, tortures and naked people that I hardly noticed. I mean there is a lot of it and it just kept getting more absurd as the film progressed that I just shook my head and said with an discomforting chuckle "this is f···ed up". The fruity booty rape scene, however, was hilarious because of the "bow-chika-wow-wow" music that lead up to the... Uh... well you get the point. It is very controversial and takes risks beyond all measures but.... I'm not a fan of exploitation prison/rape movies so I'm going have to pass.

Lost Souls sees director T.F. Mou treating the subject of illegal immigration from China to Hong Kong with the same level of tact and sensitivity that he gave the prisoners of Japanese experiment camp Unit 731 in his notorious shocker Man Behind the Sun (1988). In other words, virtually none - any pretense of social commentary is quickly abandoned in favour of pure sensationalism.

The film opens as three illegal immigrants arrive in Hong Kong, having swum from mainland China, with the hope of making it to Diamond Hill, a place of unimaginable prosperity. Unfortunately, the trio are quickly captured by criminals, who make money by holding people for ransom, or by selling women to brothels. What follows is a catalogue of degradation, humiliation, physical and sexual abuse, and death, the three new arrivals thrown into a barn with other unfortunates, stripped naked and beaten until they give up their relative's telephone numbers, which the villains need to extract ransom money.

Virtually plotless for most of its running time, the film careens from one act of brutality to another, with an excess of full frontal nudity from both sexes in the process. There's a gang rape scene that culminates in the victim being swung wildly around the barn, still attached to her attacker at the groin, before being thrown across the barn like a rag doll; a woman is covered in petrol and burnt alive; and in the film's most eye-watering scene, the gang's chief gets the vaseline out to sodomise one of the young men (who is bound to a chair, ass up).

To be honest, the lack of storyline and continuous deviancy eventually results in tedium, and a much needed change of pace is more than welcome when the prisoners finally revolt (not that they weren't already revolting, having smeared themselves in cow dung to try and avoid being raped!): the poor guy who was buggered gets revenge, killing his attacker by biting him on the neck (but is beaten to death thereafter by the boss's henchmen), and it's not long before the rest of the prisoners decide enough is enough. Turning the tables on their tormenters, the immigrants clothe themselves and head for the city in a mini-van, but, in a scene reminiscent of The Great Escape, are rumbled by police at a road-block when one of them makes a faux pas (by saying "Thank you, comrade").

The fittingly downbeat ending sees the only immigrant that evaded capture finally making it to Diamond Hill, only to discover that it is a slum. Bummer!

6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.