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Remulak posted:The other day I remembered watching a presumably Japanese martial arts movie that has swastikas EVERYWHERE, on the uniforms (karate style) the temple floor and walls, everywhere. Yeah these were the good guys. I saw it on TV in the early 80’s. Ring a bell for anybody? Swastikas are a holy symbol in Buddhism, so, as Mantis42 mentioned, you find them in a ton of martial arts movies.
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Aug 7, 2021 08:11
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Yeah but Buddhist swastika goes in the opposite direction of Nazi ones.
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Aug 7, 2021 21:17
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https://twitter.com/kungfupete/status/1423835996110524417?s=21
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Aug 7, 2021 21:33
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Goddamn, I was extolling his brilliance just a few hours ago. 
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Aug 8, 2021 00:26
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Hey I'm kinda new to CineD and I was wondering if this is the place to post about those old lovely cut and paste IFD ninja movies where Godfrey Ho stole a bunch or Thai and Taiwanese movies and spliced white dudes dressed in comical pastel colored ninja costumes into them. Or is there another thread where that might be more appropriate?
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Aug 14, 2021 01:20
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 We don't discriminate against bad films here.
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Aug 14, 2021 10:14
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Thanks. Let's start with a short mini doc about who Godfrey Ho was and what he did. I don't know what this forum knows but I'm sure there are at least a few people here who saw some of these movies late at night in the late 90s and early 2000s. None of the people who make mini docs are funny so please try to ignore the hosts antics but this video gives a good background on all these "movies" and how they were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IVNBmXLCgQ&t=170s You can find a ton of these movies for free on youtube under the account "Wu-Tang Collection". Most of them are really bad but the white guy ninjas in pastel outfits parts are always full of unintentional comedy. The one that's probably the most famous is Ninja the Protector. If you have the time and want to laugh really hard I recommend checking it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEhsUOTodYg Yes that is IFD literally stealing Star Wars music at the beginning of their movie.
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Aug 14, 2021 16:27
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The Wu Tang Collection is a channel I've been subscribed to for a while and at least once a day I'll see one of their movies recommended to me on Youtube where both the title and the picture make it look awesome but I never find the energy to sit down and watch what's probably a sub VHS quality version of a below average Taiwanese martial arts movie. Though there are a few gems in there, like some Hwang Jang Lee movies.
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Aug 15, 2021 08:48
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Mantis42 posted:The Wu Tang Collection is a channel I've been subscribed to for a while and at least once a day I'll see one of their movies recommended to me on Youtube where both the title and the picture make it look awesome but I never find the energy to sit down and watch what's probably a sub VHS quality version of a below average Taiwanese martial arts movie. Though there are a few gems in there, like some Hwang Jang Lee movies. I hate the fake thumbnails they add to their videos. They're never representative of the movies at all and it's just basically clickbait. And yeah the overall quality of the videos isn't great but not all of them are like that and hey at least they're free.
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Aug 15, 2021 17:25
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Speaking of misleading advertising, I think the only Godfrey Ho film I've seen is Robo Vampire. Which I still resent for not featuring any actual robot vampires.
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Aug 15, 2021 21:21
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Ninja Terminator is an absolute classic for the Garfield phone scene, though knowing Ho, I wouldn't be surprised if it shows up in other movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfPw0g2nrdo
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Aug 15, 2021 21:31
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Why is that white man making the sais kiss?
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Aug 15, 2021 22:11
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Samuel Clemens posted:Speaking of misleading advertising, I think the only Godfrey Ho film I've seen is Robo Vampire. Which I still resent for not featuring any actual robot vampires. I just saw Robo Vampire for the first time last week and it was powerfully funny. I haven't laughed that hard at a movie in a long time. And the title is definitely misleading. It's supposed to be more like Robot vs Vampires or something. It was pretty common of those movies to have Western-ish names that were probably chosen by people whose English wasn't very good, kind of like NES era video game dialogue translation. I saw another movie a while back named American Commando Ninja which featured no Americans and no commandos.  Chas McGill posted:Ninja Terminator is an absolute classic for the Garfield phone scene, though knowing Ho, I wouldn't be surprised if it shows up in other movies. The Garfield phone is definitely used in more than one IFD movie.
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Aug 15, 2021 22:35
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Another Godfrey Ho movie worth (?) checking out is Undefeatable, which he directed under a pseudonym. It's not a movie-loaf like the ninja films but a semi-competent Cynthia Rothrock kickboxing/revenge joint. The villain Stingray is pretty memorable in a "needs therapy" sort of way. The end bit was immortalized as an early internet video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka3BQGgj4Qs Spoiler warning for Undefeatable - watch the movie instead! or don't!
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Aug 16, 2021 22:30
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Elephant Ambush posted:I hate the fake thumbnails they add to their videos. They're never representative of the movies at all and it's just basically clickbait. You could say it recreates the feeling of going to the video store and trying to find a movie to watch based off it's VHS cover art that may or may not be accurate.
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Aug 16, 2021 22:40
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Most of you probably read the Criterion or Physical Media thread as well, but just in case you missed it: https://twitter.com/Criterion/status/1427320025766055941
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Aug 16, 2021 22:42
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If anyone is in Chicago the Music Box is screening Boxer’s Omen tomorrow. https://musicboxtheatre.com/films/the-boxers-omen
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Aug 16, 2021 22:45
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That movie rules. Wish I lived in Chicago.
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Aug 16, 2021 22:58
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moller posted:Another Godfrey Ho movie worth (?) checking out is Undefeatable, which he directed under a pseudonym. It's not a movie-loaf like the ninja films but a semi-competent Cynthia Rothrock kickboxing/revenge joint. The villain Stingray is pretty memorable in a "needs therapy" sort of way. The end bit was immortalized as an early internet video Godfrey "Hall" is not exactly hiding his true identity lol And yeah Undefeatable is a decent movie. Cynthia Rothrock is always awesome. One big warning for that movie though: there is a really  sexual assault scene in there you probably want to skip past.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:01
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Elephant Ambush posted:Godfrey "Hall" is not exactly hiding his true identity lol Yeah I was going to go more into the psychopathology of Stingray in my post but I wasn’t sure how to do it without being icky. Okay, maybe don’t watch Undefeatable. Edit: Okay, maybe it was more Hitchcock's Vertigo than Oedipus. moller fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 23:13
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Another good Godfrey Ho joint is The Ninja Squad, available of course from the Wutang Collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gpACMv8hU4 An evil red ninja is wiping out the ninja masters one by one. Richard Harrison's character Ninja Master Gordon sends his student Billy home to the big city to avoid the bloodshed, but Billy finds problems in his old hood: gangsters have taken over! It helps that the base film (looks like a Filipino basher?) has decent fight scenes, including the climax at a shipyard junkyard. The inserted caucasian ninjas are suitably ridiculous and sprinkled liberally throughout, and the 2 plots fit together well enough, what with young Billy dealing with the gangsters and the angst of being a modern ninja, and his ninja master Gordon defeating the evil ninja who poses a threat to the future of all young ninjas. And it's got an awesome score which i assume is totally stolen from some other better films. A+ ninja all around!!! They also give the lead gangster a ridiculous Mexican accent like "eyyyyy Billy i didn't wan' any trouble from the neenja!" and everybody in general talks dumb and loud. When the gang shows up to threaten Billy's family one of them just loving screams "I'll burn your fuckin house down!" before anything's actually got rough. And Billy's family constantly dog him about getting a real job because he won't be able to make any money as a ninja and girls won't want to marry him! Some of the ninja cut'n'pastes are absolutely dire slogs though, it all depends on if the original film had anything salvageable and if Godfrey and Co. keep the goofy ninjas jumping in on cue. Sometimes you'll see somebody like Hwang Jang Lee slumming it up (in Ninja Terminator, with a terrible blonde wig) and they also did some supernatural/horror entries like the Robo Vampire series and Scorpion Thunderbolt. Richard Harrison claims he thought he was only shooting for one or two films and was upset at being spread out into at least a dozen ninja epics, but seriously gently caress that guy he sounds like a real piece of work if you read up on him behind the scenes.
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Aug 17, 2021 00:19
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Jetto Jagga posted:Another good Godfrey Ho joint is The Ninja Squad, available of course from the Wutang Collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gpACMv8hU4 That's literally the movie they review in the video I posted above. And yes it's hilarious and terrible and I love it. Also yeah Richard Harrison is in a shitload of IFD movies. You can literally see him age and gain weight and lose weight. I can totally understand his perspective of being embarrassed about these movies but he's straight up lying when he says he only worked for IFD for a few days and shot a few movies. Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 04:54
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Elephant Ambush posted:That's literally the movie they review in the video I posted above. Haha sorry for not watching the video and shooting from the hip. It's a great film! Also on a random cult film site I remember there's the saga of his exwife talking about what an abusive piece of poo poo he was and how he tried to hide his film income from her after beating the poo poo out of her
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Aug 17, 2021 05:06
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I think my favorite Godfrey Ho to introduce people to his work is Ninja Terminator. Elephant Ambush posted:I just saw Robo Vampire for the first time last week and it was powerfully funny. I haven't laughed that hard at a movie in a long time. If you dig Robo Vampire it's part of a loose trilogy!!!!! Part 2 IIRC usually has Devil's Dynamite somewhere in the title. The third one is called Counter Destroyer. That is something notable about the Harrison/Ho flicks. There actually is a line of continuity in the ninja parts of him beating Ivan the Red and getting his weapon, assembling the Golden Ninja Warrior statue, etc. that's consistent from flick to flick until Gordon is killed at the end of Power of Ninjitsu. So for those six movies or so I could actually see how he might have thought he was filming one or two flicks worth of stuff that got used in way more movies. But obviously he didn't give a poo poo since he was in plenty of one-off stuff with Godfrey Ho after like Scorpion Thunderbolt/etc. for years, and the guy is clearly a full of poo poo terrible person. I think my favorite thing about Godfrey Ho is that he was a good director, but he just was in for the quick $$$. But you can see in Ninja Terminator and Ninja: American Warrior that like, the way they're edited together and how the plots of the original movies+ninja stuff is mashed up wouldn't be fun to watch if the director was actually bad. Like Ninja: American Warrior has some great effort as they have a character from the new footage put on a mask and then cut to the old movie where the person in the next scenes is meant to be that woman in disguise as the character from the old movie, and when they're unmasked you can tell they sort of duplicated a set just for a quick shot of that happening (or maybe just filmed it in the same living room hehee). Then later in the movie there's a part in the original flick where someone who is hospitalized is reading a letter. In the new footage they have someone approach a nurse outside of a hospital room and hand them a letter from one film to another, it fuckin' rules. Also all the Godfrey Ho flicks have baller music thanks to him stealing from Genesis / A-Ha / Tangerine Dream / etc.  When some Pink Flloyd is blasting during the training montages, or like when Gordon's ally dies in Ninja Terminator that Vangelis-esque part of Jean Michael Jarre's Ethnicolor cuts in  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCikDc_sAVM Like look at how much the music elevates Godfey Ho stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxCAPMzPZ-Q
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Aug 17, 2021 14:32
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nabkzVmamo The back of chips being crushed for the neck snapping sounds  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWh7JIAzGjU Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 14:34
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It makes me so happy you folks are willing to embrace Godfrey Ho.
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Aug 17, 2021 15:55
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I looked him up and he appears to be lecturing now, so hopefully there'll be more Ninja Terminator inspired movies out of Hong Kong one day.
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Aug 17, 2021 15:56
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One of my favorite things about Godfrey Ho is that he directed ~80 films and ~40 of them have the word ninja in the title. It's not one of his ninja flicks, but he directed a sort of remake of The Killer (with some scenes inspired by certain other action films too hehee) called Lethal Panther where the three leads are played by women. Good cast including Sibelle Hu and Alex Fong, and, like, there's a couple of goofy sex scenes early on, and from then on there's a pretty decent shoot out or fight scene, like, every 10 minutes to the end like the movie does not stop. There was a sequel too that stars Yukari Oshima! It's a category III rated action flick from 1990 though so there is a seen where someone is sexually assaulted about 2/3 in, so you know.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g_ycRrf_g4 Chas McGill posted:I looked him up and he appears to be lecturing now, so hopefully there'll be more Ninja Terminator inspired movies out of Hong Kong one day. I forget which site had it (maybe Hong Kong Cinemagic?) but there's an awesome long interview with him about his career and stuff. EDIT: Here it is: http://www.hkcinemagic.com/en/page.asp?aid=230 Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 16:12
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That's a fantastic interview. Love the section where he evaluates all the actors. Shame Harris isn't the gentleman Ho thought he was  .
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Aug 17, 2021 17:40
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Chas McGill posted:That's a fantastic interview. Love the section where he evaluates all the actors. Shame Harris isn't the gentleman Ho thought he was it doesn't surprise me honestly, like I'm sure he was GREAT to Ho since Ho was the director and Harrison's biggest claim to fame was "the guy who turned down A Fistful of Dollars but suggested Clint Eastwood for it" I think there was a similar situation with Bill Cosby where like, Phylicia Rashad was a co-star and on equal footing which is why she seemed dismissive of his accusers a couple of years ago and made that unfortunate tweet when he got out. People lack perspective and don't realize, like "I worked with this person for years and am a huge part of their financial success so maybe they act a little differently around me compared to how they treat everyone else." Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 17:47
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Neo Rasa posted:One of my favorite things about Godfrey Ho is that he directed ~80 films and ~40 of them have the word ninja in the title. Lethal Panther is a very cool movie with an unfortunate amount of sexual assault in it. If you skip those scenes it's a really good time. It's a shame how many of those old Hong Kong movies had that kind of stuff in it. Thanks for posting that interview. I'm going to read it today.
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Aug 17, 2021 20:14
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Elephant Ambush posted:It's a shame how many of those old Hong Kong movies had that kind of stuff in it. Speaking of which I saw this one recently called Devil Cat which stars Yukari Oshima as an immortal cat spirit who pops up in modern times to kick the poo poo out of another more evil spirit so the opening is quite goofy and fun so of course she's barely in the movie and the entire middle act is a completely unrelated story about a woman who gets a hostess club gig to pay the bills while her husband is hospitalized but then gets assaulted for way too much screen time by her boss after which she commits suicide because she "failed" her husband which causes her husband to attempt to kill the guy but he fails and gets run over by the guy. But another random woman witnesses this so the guy+his gang try repeatedly to kill her but she's the girlfriend of the guy who happened to adopt Yukari Oshima's character (as like a regular housecat he doesn't know) and that's how she kinda sorta gets involved in the plot again. 
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Aug 17, 2021 20:41
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A fighting cat!?!
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Aug 17, 2021 20:46
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Samuel Clemens posted:A fighting cat!?! kinda  violence and gorehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30PqOaewBgI the cat noise foley is hilarious Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 20:58
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Samuel Clemens posted:A fighting cat!?! That's only 1 of 2 supernatural fighting cat movies from HK: https://youtu.be/z6-XLwq9rwI A.K.A. The 1000th Year Cat. The Galactic Cat. Conflict of Space. Nine Lives. quote:From the Director of Ricky Oh(Story of Ricky) & The Seventh Curse, It's John Carpenter's The Thing meets John Woo's The Killer. Relevant to the thread, one of the film's highlights is the kung fu battle between the alien cat and a hapless dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqUFEhknuwg
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Aug 18, 2021 00:23
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And yet people claim cats aren't good actors. 
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Aug 18, 2021 01:06
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The Cat was also a Wisely movie like The Seventh Curse, starring some pulp adventurer scholar character that I don't really get at all having watched two Wisely movies. Apparently had a bunch of novels starting in the 60s.
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Aug 18, 2021 07:13
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I really want to find a copy of The Cat for this year’s challenge. I’ve shown The Seventh Curse to something like a dozen people since I first watched it.
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Aug 18, 2021 12:55
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moller posted:The Cat was also a Wisely movie like The Seventh Curse, starring some pulp adventurer scholar character that I don't really get at all having watched two Wisely movies. Apparently had a bunch of novels starting in the 60s. There's a Seventh Curse novel? :O Is it available in English? Lumbermouth posted:I really want to find a copy of The Cat for this year’s challenge. I’ve shown The Seventh Curse to something like a dozen people since I first watched it. Rarelust has a good transfer of it. Neo Rasa fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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Aug 18, 2021 15:30
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https://twitter.com/tedgeoghegan/status/1428348087999860742
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Aug 19, 2021 15:06
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