“Banned for decades! The most notorious Japanese Horror film EVER made!” shouts the cover of Teruo Ishii’s Horrors Of Malformed Men, and fans of extreme Japanese cinema could be excused for expecting something that could test the limits of even their not-delicate sensibilities. But the truth is actually much more interesting: The film was banned because back in 1969 the Japanese were still rather sensitive about how handicapped and “malformed” people were portrayed in film in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly when the characters are shown to be mentally unbalanced because of their deformities. While
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