One of the most powerful and violent films to be shown at the Venice Film Festival this year, Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto's "Nobi" ("Fires on the Plain"), delivers a stinging anti-war message bathed in blood.
A remake of a 1959 classic, the film, shown late on Monday and in competition for the main festival prize, sticks to the plot of Kon Ichikawa's earlier film about defeated Japanese troops in the Philippines in World War II.
The version by Tsukamoto, whose past horror-and-fantasy-tinged films have earned him a reputation as an auteur of the strange, pumps up the volume in terms of severed body parts, bloody stumps of arms, maggot-ridden corpses and starving soldiers descending into cannibalism.
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