Hyena (Gerard Johnson)

[McCrutchy]

Regarding the instance of optical censorship: This occurs during a sex scene in the film, where lower nudity of both a male and female character has been blurred for a few seconds. Unfortunately, this is terribly distracting, because it happens to be a highly tense moment where a

[Show spoiler]major female character has been sold into sex slavery and, while drugged on a bed, is about to be raped by the man who bought her

. The optical censorship stops once the actual sex occurs.

This was my first time watching the film, and I found this optical masking very, very distracting, and it has ruined a great Blu-ray presentation for me. It isn't, of course, that I wanted to see what was under the masking, but rather that I wanted to see the film as the filmmakers intended, not with some foreign nanny-state censoring applied. This film has the highest age classification in Japan (R18+) and if it had been released by the Japanese arm of a US major, it would probably have been untouched on video.

I respect the right of the Japanese to optically censor nudity for their television broadcasts, and if they want to optically censor their own films, that should be their choice, too. But if they are releasing a Western film on video for sale, at the highest Japanese age classification, I wish they would stop censoring full frontal nudity during simulated sex. I get that the Japanese are probably used to it, but if you have seen this film, you know which scene has been censored, and you know that suddenly seeing two blurred crotches on screen would be a distraction.

The A/V quality of the Japanese BD is great, and it's region free and has burned-in English subtitles for the non-English dialogue, so compared to the French BD, it's the better choice, but you'll want to see the film in another edition first, at least.

Very disappointing from Shochiku.