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Extreme: Oxen Split Torturing |
| Oxen Split Torturing was produced in Japan in 1969 by Yuji Makiguchi and released by Japan Shock Video. Its price is around the thirty quid mark, and what do you get for that? Well...
The opening credit sequence shows a montage of photos displaying people being shot by soldiers, or, already having been shot, lying dead. This is accompanied by quite a nice tune, which sounds like a synthesiser based Rage Against The Machine - themselves quite fond of military death montages in their videos. The comparison ends there, however. What we get at the end of this is a shot of some Chinese parchment with traditional writing on it, translated as "the weak become the victim of the strong", which we're also told is "a rule of mankind". Just to reinforce this, the subtitles also tell us that "cruelties have been inflicted everywhere since time began". I'm guessing that, at seeing this, we're supposed to think "oh, cruelties have always happened. And they're an entirely natural part of human nature! Please, Mr Video, show me some of this cruelty so I can learn about humanity from it!" Hmmm... The credits sequence also shows what is apparently the full title of the film, "The Joy of Torture 2: Oxen Split Torturing", which sums up the film a lot better than its cod ancient philosophy parchment. The idea is to get as much enjoyment from the sight of people being tortured as the characters in the film get from doing the actual torturing. The narrative is something of a reversal on Oxen's Western counterpart, the witchfinder film. Instead of a Christian authority capturing and torturing deviants within their society, here it's the Christians who are being persecuted by the authorities. The odd thing though is that, whereas there's always some sub-plot in witchfinder films about the local villagers uprising to confront the church-sanctioned sadist in their midst or a small group of the persecuted being able to get through to the witchfinder and end his bloody rule, in Oxen Split Torturing there's no such storyline. Maybe Makiguchi thought it would get in the way of the torture or maybe it's the film's historical 'authenticity'... The storyline is about as thin as it possibly could be to string along it numerous scenes of bloody carnage. Not that it's non-stop torture for the whole of its running time - far from it. Much of the film just drags on and on; for something that's purportedly about "the joy of torture", it's quite a task getting through a lot of it. The violence itself takes various forms and, just as in Western counterparts, the worst of it is enacted upon women. We see women thrown into big vats of snakes, raped and, as in the title, ripped apart by oxen who each have a rope attached to one of the woman's limbs, tearing her apart when they run away from her. When the film got to this bit, I thought that the film was indeed over, but no! Following this is an apparently unrelated section where a man, unable to pay his bill to a brothel, instead is enrolled into working for them. During this part we see various prostitutes being abused and humiliated, until the man tries to escape with one of the prostitutes, gets caught by a detective and placed in stocks. I did get some brief amusement from the scene following this where a drunk wanders over to him, picks up a saw (you really shouldn't leave those things lying around) and proceeds to saw off the guy's head, although part of this came from knowing that when he died, the film surely had to end, which it thankfully did. Director Makiguchi has indeed made a very leathery film with Oxen Split Torturing. It's generally boring, occasionally offensive, and overall to be avoided. Phil |
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