Men behind the sun/Unit 731

[Energyguy]

I watched a chinese horror film recently called MEN BEHIND THE SUN/UNIT 731. Someone told me about it ages ago and its one of those films that has a notorious reputation and I believe its banned in many countries, Has anyone else seen it ?
Its based on true events that happened towards the end of 1945 when Japan occupied China. they set up a biological experiment camp called UNIT 731 and used Chinese & Russian POWs for horrific experiments and for target practice.
This movie is very difficult to watch and its filmed in documentary style which makes it even more realistic.. Some of the acting is rather lame at times and the special effects not always convincing.. The main reason the film is banned is due to a couple of scenes involving animaml cruelty which i personally found disgusting and totally unecessary for the films plot/storyline. Rats are burnt with flame throwers and in an earlier scene a real cat is thrown into a pit full of starving rats and is attacked/eaten. I found this totally sickening. I am surprised the director ( TF Mous) was not prosecuted for doing this... Its a shame as the movie stands up quite well as an "anti war" film but It tends to slide into "exploitation" terratory due to the extreme violence shown on screen. I doubt this film will ever get a proper release and some people would find it very upsetting. I doubt I will watch it again.

[JussiK]

Apart from a few festival screenings this distressingly well made film was rarely seen theatrically outside Hong Kong but was a big favourite of the "dare-you-watch-THIS?" phase many of us went thru during the vhs video explosion of the 80's. According to the interview of it's director, published a few years ago in leading British genre film publication Darkside, the crew of "Men Behind The Sun" actually obtained a corpse of a 10 year old boy from a morgue for the scene in which a heart is ripped out of a young victim. Also, acording to the director, the scene in which entrails shoot out of the rectum of a man placed in a decompression chamber utilised a real dead corpse. Whether this is true remains questionable - several other directors have claimed having employed or got accused of employing such tactics back during the heyday of exploitation filmmaking, now lamentably gone. Joe D'Amato aka Aristide Massaccesi's "Buio Omega" contained a cremation scene and some phoney torture footage that some took for real. The same director's "Antropophageous" got blamed for a "real" special effect involving a fetus, while the Japanese mock-snuff "Flower of Flesh and Blood" got the FBI worried for a few weeks. - As for the film in question...who knows, what you see during the operation room sequences could be fake - or it could be..gulp! real! As for the animal cruelty, the sad scenes pale in comparison with what the Italians presented during the 60's, 70's and early 80's in notorious films like "Africa Addio", "Ultimo Grida Della Savana" and other mondo epics, as well as in extremist horror/gore films like "Belve Feroci/Wild Beasts" and "Cannibal Holocaust".