Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
great film, but where is it, March 21, 2004
Do not be fooled that Amazon will actually can get this dvd. My order has been on hold for over three months and I doubt that I can ever get it from them.
Meanwhile, this movie is a historical document of what the Japanese did to the Chinese during the wane of WW2. "Atrocity" does not begin to describe the brutality of this film. When you hear the rats squeal for the second time in this film, even the strongest stomachs should use the fast forward feature. Unless you REALLY hate cats and applaud deliberate animal cruelty, for which the director was blacklisted. The horrible thing about this movie is that these "medical experiments" concerning frostbite, plague injections, ceramic bomb tests, death by pressure chamber, and various murders involving babies stomped into the snow, ACTUALLY HAPPENED. The live vivesection is also a popcorn treat. (through research I learned that the little boy dissected alive was sold to the director by Chinese peasants who were tricked into thinking that they were supporting the revolution.
For the gore-mongers among you, even you must beware of severe nausea. Thank God that Ishi did not document the"Rape of Nanking" also perpetrated by the sick Japanese of that time. In Nanking, live babies were thrown into the air and caught on bayonnets, among other delightful sport. Have fun if you dare, but do not expect more than excuses from Amazon.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reprehensible, gory, overtly tasteless, and historical????, March 12, 2004
By A Customer
Men Behind the Sun is the mostly true account of the "Bacterial and Experimental Unit 731." It depicts in unflinching detail the depths to which Japan went in the name of science and imperialism during WWII. Hyperbaric chambers, live unanaesthitised autopsies, flesh debridement, forced immersion in liquid nitrogen: it's all the stuff of horror, but it really happened and to countless numbers of people. The historical accuracy of T.F. Mous' film is impeccable. Every experiment in the film is portrayed with the utmost realism and shouldn't be taken lighheartedly. What's really distressing is the fact that the "test subjects" weren't soldiers or insurgents, they were chinese civilians, refugees, and Japanese defectors. All were innocent! This isn't a film with a nice glossy veneer covering the genocide and human rights abuses that are inherent in warfare. It gives us a front row seat to humanity in its rawest form. Either you can handle the movie and the fact that it happened or you can't. You be the judge. Sidenote: The war crimes that were commited by 731 were never cited under the Geneva Convention so all the physicians, scientists, and military personnel who participated in the atrocities got off with no punishment due to dubitable evidence (its kind of ironic considering that the Japanese goverment has video footage of the experiments that hasn't been releasaed to the public and also photographs which were released only 6 years after the war ended, go figure.)
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A celluloid nightmare, May 19, 2007
When discussing World War II, you'll hear a lot about German atrocities committed throughout Europe. You'll even hear about the Soviet Union taking upwards of 20 million casualties in that fight. What you won't hear much about, unfortunately, concerns the carnage inflicted upon China by the Japanese Imperial Army. Even to this day, Japan refuses to take full responsibility for the injuries wreaked upon their neighbors during that conflict. Once in awhile you might stumble over an article in the paper involving the Japanese government's activities in Korea. China is another matter altogether. Silence seems to reign about what happened on Mainland China between 1931 and the end of the war. Remember the North Korean nuclear test a few months back? Remember how the Japanese started talking about building their own nuclear arsenal as a counterbalance in the region? China went nuts when they heard that talk. If you don't understand the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s and the genocidal campaigns that occurred shortly thereafter, you won't understand why the communist regime threw a hissy fit about Japanese nukes. Welcome to the film "Men Behind the Sun," a movie that explains a lot about modern Asia's attitudes toward the Japanese.
When Japan conquered Manchuria in 1931, the created a puppet state called Manchukuo the following year. They used this area as a source for raw materials to fuel their war machine, and also as a staging ground for invading the rest of China. What followed was a nightmare for everyone involved. Arguably the worst atrocities centered on a place called Unit 731, a Japanese research facility that used mostly Chinese men and women (other nationalities died there too) as test subjects in order to develop various biological and chemical weapons. The scientists at the research facility often performed vivisections, without anesthesia, on prisoners of war and pregnant women. They messed around with amputation, sometimes to learn the effects of massive blood loss and sometimes to see what would happen if gangrene went unchecked. Other tests included using flamethrowers on innocent civilians and studying the killing and maiming capabilities of grenades. Worse, the laboratory dove head first into learning all they could about employing diseases as a weapon. They used ceramic containers filled with anthrax and cholera infected fleas as bombs in civilian areas, killing hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children. Unit 731 developed this program by first testing it on inmates at the facility.
I could go on and on about the atrocities committed by these monsters. You can read about them on dozens of Internet sites devoted to Imperial Army war crimes. You can also watch T.F. Mou's "Men Behind the Sun". I went into great detail about what went on in Unit 731 above because we see many of these events unfold in nightmarish detail in the film. We see the Japanese scientists' penchant for vivisection taken to nauseating extremes in a scene involving a small child. We see the monsters put a guy in a high-pressure chamber so they can find out what happens when they turn the dial up as high as it will go. Experiments conducted to find out what occurs when a human being's limbs are frozen and then suddenly thawed leave the viewer with a horrific vision that will stay with you long after the film ends. A central theme of the movie revolves around the base commander figuring out how to spread fleas riddled with diseases via ceramic containers. Then there's the racist tone of the film. The Japanese Army's most powerful weapon was racism. By dehumanizing the Chinese, it was easier for the personnel in this facility to perform the experiments.
"Men Behind the Sun" is a grim, grim movie. I called it an exploitation film above, but I'm not sure about the accuracy of that label. The atrocities depicted in the movie hew so closely to what actually occurred in Unit 731, as documented by numerous investigations conducted after the war, that to call Mou's vision an "exploitation" flick does a grave disservice to the victims of the Japanese Army. The director himself doesn't think "Men Behind the Sun" is an exploitation movie; he makes his true feelings abundantly clear in an interview included as an extra on the disc. His motivation for the film is to educate viewers about the atrocities committed during the invasion of China. Well, this motion picture certainly does that in spades. A few subplots in the film, including one showing a contingent of recently recruited Japanese soldiers playing ball with a Chinese boy, probably serves as an effort by the director to inject a bit of humanity into the proceedings. That the boy in question ends up on an operating table in the movie's most grotesque sequence only underscores what the movie tries to teach the viewer, mainly the destruction of real people under the heel of the Japanese invaders.
The DVD version of "Men Behind the Sun" isn't the best in technical terms. The picture quality lacks sharpness, and the audio is only adequate. I'm not sure I'd want to see a pristine version of this film, and you'll likely agree if you ever sit down with it. Even the paucity of extras (the aforementioned text interview and a trailer for the film) isn't worth complaining about. You're watching this film because you either want an education about what went on in China during the war or because you want to see sickening scenes of gore. If it's the latter, you're missing the point--although you'll see gore that, in a couple of scenes, apparently involved the use of real cadavers. Yeah, it's that bad. I really suggest you read up on Japanese atrocities in Asia before watching the film. If you remember what you're seeing, for the most part, actually happened, I think you'll come away from the movie with a different attitude about what constitutes exploitation filmmaking.
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