Watch Red Angel For Free

Please don't spend money on this.

Admirable film.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

An estimated twenty million Chinese and two million Japanese soldiers were killed in the second Sino-Japanese War that lasted from 1937-1945. If anyone thought for one moment that there was a glorious aspect to this war or any other, Yasuzo Masamura's Red Angel will dispel that forever. Written by Ryozo Kasahara and based on a novel by Yoriyoshi Arima, Red Angel is a powerful anti-war drama in which scenes of rape, dismemberment, drug withdrawal, disease, and suicide are graphically shown by Masamura, who spares nothing except the erotic details of lovemaking. Set in Manchuria in the early days of the conflict, the "red angel" in the film is Nurse Sakura Nishi played by Masamura regular Ayako Wakao.Nurse Nishi is stationed on the battlefield as a care giver but most patients, racked by loneliness and fear of impending death, see her as a sexually available woman. On her first night while making the rounds, Nishi is gang raped and held down by the group while she is sexually assaulted by Pvt. Sakamoto (Jotaro Senba). After reporting the incident to the head nurse, Nishi learns sadly that this is something she should have expected. Transferred to the front, Nishi is stationed at an army field hospital where she assists Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida), the only available surgeon in performing amputations.With few drugs and not enough blood available for transfusions, Okabe is forced to amputate arms and legs in hopes of saving the young men but is torn by feelings of guilt and remorse. He believes that most of the amputees would be better off dead since he knows that the Army will not let them go home because they would symbolize the idea that Japan is losing the war. Nishi pleads with Okabe to give a blood transfusion to Sakamoto, the man who had raped her during her first assignment and Okabe agrees but on the condition that Nishi comes to visit him at night. Discovering that Okabe is a man of compassion, Nishi sympathizes with his plight and begins to fall in love with him, though it cannot be expressed because the doctor is a morphine addict and is impotent.In one of the most heart-wrenching sequences, Nurse Nishi takes pity on Pvt. Orihara (Yusuke Kawazu) who has lost both of his arms. After pleading with the young nurse to relieve him of his sexual frustration, she takes him to a hotel where he expresses his pent-up passion but the evening proves too much for him to handle. In the final and most moving segment, a cholera attack has decimated the remaining soldiers who are surrounded by Chinese troops and as death becomes closer, Nishi and Okabe vow to make every effort to preserve their humanity even through Nishi's attempt to end Okabe's morphine addiction.Although there is romance in Red Angel, Masamura makes it quite evident that a normal relationship is impossible under conditions of war. His vision of war is one of hell where there is no honor or glory, only physical and emotional degradation and killing in the name of patriotism. Although Red Angel is lurid and has moments of melodrama, it is a brutally honest film that shows war without sentimentality, perhaps a reason for it remaining unreleased until Fantoma Films resurrected it on a widescreen DVD in 2006.

Extremely tough little b/w gem from director, Masumura. It's 1939 and the Japanese are fighting in China, to not very much effect. We follow the efforts of those in field hospitals desperately trying to pick up the pieces when each load of war injured is raced back from the front line. Limbs are sawn off and bullets removed, all without aesthetic but plenty of blood and screams. Amid it all our heroine struggles to recover from her early rape by patients and the requests of the desperate and dying. This movie is so well put together that it is only afterwards you wonder just how that scene where she allows the handless man to feel her with his feet or make her senior a 'man again', without it seeming incongruous within this tale of death and destruction. With the blatant misogynism, nudity, explicit surgery, bondage, drug taking and even cross dressing, not to mention the inherent criticism of the Japanese stance, it is a wonder this film got made, distributed and survived. Important and enthralling film.

Yasuzo Masumura's "Red Angel" is one of the most extraordinary and subtly erotic (yes, erotic!) war dramas ever made, and manages to be both a deeply intimate portrait of purest love and a moving statement on the idiocy of military conflict. The late Masumura, who directed the amazing "Hanzo 2: The Snare", "Blind Beast" and "Manji", brought such intelligence and depth to every film he directed, and this is perhaps his finest work. Ayako Wakao is a revelation as Nurse Sakura Nishi, a young woman in possession of enormous humanity, who ministers to the war wounded in the most intimate of ways and falls deeply in love with Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida), a disconnected surgeon whose only escape from his blood-soaked work is a nightly armful of morphine. Although the structure is simple and the tone is unrelentingly grim, the messages are powerful and heartfelt. Nurse Nishi's short relationship with an amputee soldier is one of cinema's finest passages. The scene in which she allows the solider to "make love" to her is a textbook example of adroit direction and is devastatingly emotional. Because the film is incredibly graphic at times (especially for 1966) and stark in its depictions of war atrocities, the black and white serves to keep the bloodshed from overwhelming the drama. I can not praise this shattering achievement highly enough. It is a masterpiece of humanity.

'Akai tenshi' is one of those films you see and you suddenly realise where so many strands of modern cinema have their roots. The images on the screen morph into that latest multiplex blockbuster, art-house cult or imported favourite. Here is the ancestor of the recent Japanese horror boom. There is a 'war is hell'/'madness of war' theme of a distinctly Vientnamesque cast. There's drug dependency, gang rape and there's more than a flavour of Tarantino. And this was made in 1966.The start is where the grotesquerie starts. This is a field hospital in a bloody war. A charnel house with en suite morgue. The doctors struggle to keep up. Buckets fill with amputated limbs, often chopped off with out anaesthetic. Worse still the sounds of a surgical knife going through a thigh followed by a bone saw through femur. And concordant with the obscenities of mass butchery, the emotional detachment of the doctors, nurses, orderlies and soldiers staffing the hospital. This is hell. It's not just the gore either. There is body horror. Multiple amputees struggle to cope with their new status. Bandaged stumps are waggled and examined by their owners. The camera doesn't flinch though the audience might.The only women at the hospital are the nurses and they are surrounded by large numbers of traumatised, men who've recently been trying to kill other men. Order is poorly maintained, the social structures within the hospital are on the edge of collapse. It seems gang rape of the nurses is the rule rather than the exception, something that the protagonist experience very early on in the film. Rarely is this side of men's nature put on film. Recently I can only think of '28 Days Later'. It is an important question to ask. Will groups of men always act like this? Why? Are all men are rapists, or do all women fear that they are? Unfortunately the film doesn't answer this, but is content to add in as another level of hell that Nurse Nishi must endure. She endures it rather too stoically.Underlying all of the horror and gore there is a strong undercurrent of sexuality. And the films seems to wear its maleness on it sleeve in this department. There are all sorts of fantasies from dark to pitch black. Cross-dressing, bondage, submission, sex with amputees, gang-rape. There is a rather richer fantasy of the woman bringing a man back to potency purely with the power of her sexuality. Nurse Nishi is a strongly sexual character and largely in charge of her own desires, except in the rape scenes. Ultimately this is an exploitation picture, but a very classy one.The best part of this film is just how little is shown for the impact that you get. There are one or two gratuitous shots of gore and under lifted skirts. Mostly though the horror and erotic content is implied or shot well. There is no nudity, Nurse Nishi is viewed naked in shadow or through mosquito nets. Most of the horror is in the sound, the writing of the victims on the surgical table, the struggles of a single nurse against large groups of men, or simply the word: 'cholera'. This is a disturbingly erotic and exploitative tale of sex, madness, war that will haunt you in many ways.