I don’t want to write anything about the abhorrent Men Behind the Sun, other than a most basic warning. I consider this to be a community service.

Life as a Low Down staff writer isn’t all fun and games. Sometimes you come across a film like Vulgar that offends with its unique mixture of bad acting, bad directing, and clown-based anal rape fantasies. Then you have this propagandistic horror film dressed up with lots of condescending anti-war preaching.

Men Behind the Sun is truly evil, sickening dreck designed to “educate” the viewer about Japanese experiments on Chinese POWs during World War II. We have nothing but scene after scene of debasement, torture, gratuitous violence and human suffering. There isn’t even the thinnest attempt at a story because there’s none to be found. See prisoners die horrifically, see tears and blood, see the evil Japs try to destroy all evidence. There is no hiding heinous guilt from the Red Chinese! The special effects makeup is at a sub-Story of Ricky level, so hack director T.F. Mous must edit actual footage of a child’s autopsy into a pointless operation scene, otherwise made up of unconvincing stock footage.

Why, oh why, do so many “anti-war” films end up as nothing more than geek shows? Men Behind the Sun is the worst of the lot; even the rampant gore fetishism of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and We Were Soldiers looks tame compared to some of the truly awful occurrences in this awful flick. It is not fun, funny, or remotely competent; its imagery is guaranteed to give you awful memories that no amount of internal repression can hold back. Some horror fans, such as those weaned on Faces of Death, might love it.

For those of you strong-willed folks out there, I’d offer one bit of advice: Go to fucking medical school if you want to see kids being surgically dissected. Okay, two bits of advice: Stop watching shitty movies like this one.

There is nothing more to be said. This film is truly appalling.

Joyless and tedious, Clerks 2 is an unsuccessful and pitifully desperate attempt to match the absurdity and satire of its sire, Clerks. The stagy, poorly acted quality of this film arises from the fact that as far as I can tell, Kevin Smith has never worked a day in a fast food joint, and has no understanding of lunch or dinner rushes. But no matter, let’s not let the customers get in the way of his comedy set pieces and touching heart to heart chats that would cause an indigestion worse than any Big Mac.

And therein lies the failure of this piece. The success of Clerks was the job and the customers: the absurdity of ringing customers day in and day out, getting paid next to nothing at a meaningless job shoveling forth worthless products like candy bars, cigarettes, and porno mags. Clerks somehow hit upon the existentialist nature of it all, capturing the zeitgeist of twenty somethings with nothing to show for their cheap labor but a mound of trivial knowledge.

But now it’s 2006, and the whole heap stinks to high heaven. Smith concocts a cockamamie story of a rich, beautiful woman who wants to run away with a loser who has a nothing but a convenience store and a fast food joint on his resume, and said loser realizing he is in love with his manager after they banged one out on the prep table. If that isn’t a misogynistic premise, then fuck it man, I’m going to start punching women and dragging them home by their ponytails.

The only real scene with any sort of honesty involves a man having sex with a mule, and was the only time I actually cracked a smile at this turgid mess. Thank God for Quicksilver…I would have hated myself had I actually paid a dime for this dreary exercise in self-indulgence.

The mockumentary was an unfortunate byproduct of the Neorealist movement, using a genre associated with “truth” to portray a fictional story, either to fool the viewer or add a layer of verisimilitude to something that’s inherently false. Redacted is an abhorrent story, atrociously acted and filmed in a deliberately amateurish fashion with cheap prosumer cameras. Are we supposed to be impressed that Brian De Palma is conducting a masturbatory exercise in “cinema verite” to deliver the old saw about war making monsters of decent men? He already made that point, badly, in Casualties of War, only this time the events take place in Iraq and aren’t exactingly framed and choreographed. Was it really necessary to repackage the same message for the YouTube generation?

Okay, so anyone with a decent Internet connection has access to any number of filmed atrocities, anyone who subscribes to a newspaper has an ever changing gallery of horrors for their reading pleasure. In the future, the level of detail and breadth of information can only increase. The thesis of Redacted seems to be “this is what you’re not seeing”, as would be suggested by the title. Yet the film doesn’t tell us anything of worth, pretending that the fact of collateral damage is in itself worthy of magnifying and rubbing in the audience’s face. Most insultingly, De Palma must cheat to convey information that the mockumentary framework is too weak to support; reverse angles and mysterious POV shots indicate that this “realism” is really just the same obsessively choreographed procession of ugliness found in umpteen Serious War Dramas.

What of the “villains”, who might as well paint their camo helmets black and twirl their mustaches? High school caliber acting aside, their characters have no motivations or humanity under their husks of personae. The hero seems to have ESP and keeps his camera running constantly, never needing to change batteries, rest or deal with technical problems. This was easy to oversee in Cloverfield, but here the story is so drawn out, obvious, and unpleasant that one’s mind invariably wanders. Is there even a reward for sitting through 90 minutes of one-dimensional “drama”, self-righteous arguing in favor of something to which no one is opposed, shakycam, and choreographed “reality”? Sure, there’s some shots of mutilated corpses, charred corpses, bleeding men and women who’ll soon be corpses, ad naus.

Anyone who’d exploit real deaths to further his own agenda does not deserve to be called an artist, anyone who’d stoop so low deserves to have his directing privileges revoked for life. The awful coda of Waltz with Bashir committed a similar sin, but Ari Folman was actually present at said scene and the preceding 90 minutes were endlessly inventive. Brian De Palma is a fucking hack who’d be damned if he ever would set foot in an actual war zone, so he did the next best thing and damned himself by making this atrocity.