The Untold Story: Human Roast Pork Buns
When I was watching this film and reading the assigned articles, I was struggling to form a clear stance on how I felt about censorship in films. I have always felt very passionately that it is important to not censor different types of media because sometimes, I think, seeing or reading things that are very taboo or uncomfortable/disturbing are the only ways we can really come to grips with them and understand them. However, when watching this film, I felt very much the opposite. For example, the extremely long and graphic depiction of rape was so uncalled for. This film had no intention at all of making it seem like what was happening was extremely heavy, intense, and horrifying (again, because of the strange comedic aspects that seemed to be so intertwined with the terrible murder scenes). I feel like some films use ultraviolence to allow (or somewhat force) audiences to see how truly awful the events that took place were, but I feel like Human Roast Pork Buns really just glorifies what is happening with the extremely casual scenes between the horrible, awful, and hard to watch ones.
I specifically picked this film because it seemed to be the most censorship worthy film that I have seen recently. I thought this would be a good film to consider the question of censorship because of its extreme violence. It is worth noting that this film did not have that same reception when it was released in Asia and the main actor was even nominated for Hong Kong's version of an Oscar for his portrayal in this film. Many people will watch this film and see no redeeming value in it though. I wish that we would have had more time to talk about the comedic aspects of horror and its relationship to a terror response. This film uses comedy kind of clumsily but many films used some aspect of comedy, which seems like the antithesis of horror. However, like terror or arousal all are aspects of body genres.
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