There are plenty of '90s 抗日sploitation films—Comfort Women Unit 74 慰安妇七十四分队 (1994) and Doomsday Killer 末日杀手 (1993) among them—but Den of the Milkers 人奶魔巢 (1990) might be the least serious, revolving around a plot about the Japanese farming women for their milk.
The breast milk is being used for some sort of serum to strengthen Japanese men. It could be an interesting concept, like an allegory for depraved imperialist masculinity or whatever... And put in some milking scenes! There's a lot of sadistic torture, but little milking.
Of course, eventually, the agents infiltrate and then launch an all-out assault, turning everyone to hamburger with machine guns. Pretty impressive blending of Hong Kong exploitation esthetic and patriotic anti-Japanese cinema, here.
They machine gun all the milk, if you were wondering what was going to happen there. I think '88-'89 have to be the loosest years for filmmakers. This couldn't have been made before or after, I don't think. It's not even that gratuitous—but just not very good.
This ends with a trope people would know—and I think Guerillas on the Plains 平原游击队 (1955) is the earliest example I can name—of the fighters wasting the commander before he can kill himself. I left the final thank you credits in the clip, too, because they're interesting...
It seems amateurish and the concept is silly, but it's not close to as bad as films of the era could get. It has a plot that's easy to follow and it delivers on girls with machine guns. You can watch it for yourself:

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More from @dylanleviking

29 May
The methaqualone claim is not exactly true, or, like with fentanyl, a sliver of the larger story. But it starts with the idea that China was using heroin to fight American imperialism in Indochina, covered in books like Red Cocaine, which suggests Zhou Enlai was running things.
The idea of heroin coming from Red China has less truth than the methaqualone story. But through the 1950s and '60s, anticommunism was a reliable way for Harry J. Anslinger to sell war on drugs—and, then, for the China lobby to sell their war on communism.
British customs agents reported no seizures of heroin from Red China after 1949, for example, and it didn't appear that they were just missing shipments. ("Bureaucratic Cold Warrior: Harry J. Anslinger and Illicit Narcotics Traffic"). The story kept going, though.
Read 7 tweets
26 May
I'd never heard of the claim that China was flooding America with methaqualone in the '80s, pushed by Reagan friend and drug warrior Paula Hawkins. Her later claims to have demanded to Deng Xiaoping's face that he stop selling dope helped Bob Graham defeat her in 1986. Image
By 1986, Qualuudes had been taken off the market and methaqualone was rescheduled to make it completely illegal. The market for bootleg pills was evaporating. Paula Hawkins here describes the "yellow trail of methaqualone": c-span.org/video/?150709-…. Might be true. I don't know.
By 1990, when Larouche publication Executive Intelligence Review raised the specter of "Communist Quaaludes for America," I don't know if you could still find fake Quaaludes. Maybe you could. The idea of Kissinger facilitating Deng's narco-state is fun, though. ImageImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets
27 Nov 20
Yi-hung Liu has a paper—"The World Comes to Iowa in the Cold War: International Writing Program and the Translation of Mao Zedong"—on another part of the American project of shaping Chinese literature. The International Writing Program was started by Paul Engle and his wife... Image
...Hualing Nieh Engle 聂华苓, two members of the Iowa crew that included Richard M. McCarthy, HK USIS head. The CIA had funded Engle's Writers' Workshop, and the IWP was a scheme to bring in writers from outside the free world to hear the gospel of American freedom. ImageImageImageImage
Writers from unfree states were granted a chance at liberation—a "left-liberal ideal of international integration." Like in HK and TW, the emphasis was not on anticommunism, but on individualism, becoming a global citizen (in a world governed by the United States). ImageImageImageImage
Read 12 tweets
27 Nov 20
Richard M. McCarthy was Eileen Chang's handler, planning her anticommunist output, and the shadowy figure that ran the ideological fight against communist influence in Chinese-language literature. An important figure in modern Chinese literary history, he's rarely acknowledged. ImageImage
An Iowa boy with a degree in American literature, he was given a job at the US Information Service China while working at the Beijing consulate. It's interesting that work actually continued in the PRC—at least for a short time, until the reds booted them out. ImageImageImageImage
He wound up in Hong Kong. This 1988 interview by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project is a bit vague. "We discovered Eileen Chang," he says, but forgets the second anticommunist novel she produced for USIS (it was Naked Earth). ImageImageImageImage
Read 9 tweets
27 Nov 20
Mei-hsiang Wang 王梅香 explains that the Cultural Cold War being waged by the "U.S. aid literary institution" 美援文艺体制 against red ideology was about more than a few magazines, and about more than just Taiwan and Hong Kong, extending out to greater East Asia and the diaspora. ImageImageImageImage
Translation and popularization of American works in HK-TW were crucial, but maybe just as important was selling the diaspora on the idea that Free China was the source of authentic Chinese culture. Part of that was Eileen Chang's anticommunist efforts, funded and planned by USIS.
Those books were also shipped off to shore up the propaganda effort in Japan, where there was quite a bit of sympathetic interest in Red China. (From "Reporting on 'China' in a 'Novel' Way," also by Mei-hsiang Wang, all about USIS-Tokyo translations of Chinese literature.) ImageImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets
26 Nov 20
When talking about Taiwanese literature, it's usually imagined as a more ideologically free space, compared to Mainland literature. That impression and the literature written during the Cold War were the result of the US Information Service's own ideological project in East Asia.
The concept of a "U.S. aid literary institution" 美援文艺体制 comes from Chien-Chung Chen 陈建忠, who contrasted it with the national arts and culture institution 国家文艺体制—both pushed an anticommunist message, but the American institution was a soft system 软性体制...
...developing Taiwanese literature in a direction that would allow it to match up with the world view and esthetic point of view of the United States, breaking the author's connection to society, turning it into pure esthetics.
Read 8 tweets

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