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Men Behind The Sun
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List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $40.00
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Cav Distribution
Starring: Gang Wang, Hsu Gou, Zhe Quan, Runsheng Wang, Dai Yao Wu
Directed By: Tun Fei Mou
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0639518608622
Format: Color
Label: Cav Distribution
Manufacturer: Cav Distribution
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Cav Distribution
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2003-12-02
Running Time: 95
Studio: Cav Distribution
Theatrical Release Date: 1989
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Yee Gads!
Comment: O.k. finally pulled the trigger and bought this one. Curiosity got the best of me. Love war movies and history, and am a self confessed gore hound. However a softy at heart. With the Philosophy that a movie and reality is a completely different deal, at least in my mind. I don't like violence for violence sake per se. If you say my DvD collection you would maybe consider me hypocritical. I saw the dubbed version, saw later it was offered in Chinese (Cantonese, Manderian). The English version gave it a Jerry Lewis hilarity that later becomes very ironic. An important Movie that i'm glad someone had the freedom to make. But a couple scenes are profoundly disturbing. It's not just the gore, altough there is that. Most of the gore is very digestible if not primitive, however when the context is provided it is really hard to watch. Maybe because we actually care about a character or two and I give the director credit for that. I should tell the potential buyers that there is retribution for some of the crimes which possibly makes us feel a little better about what we just saw. I did some soul searching after the one viewing and asked myself why I bought this film, and what makes me motivated to see this particular carnage. I gave it a high rating because I suppose I got my moneys worth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I am rating this on a shock factor....
Comment: Although there isn't much I haven't seen by watching Cannibal Holocaust, Faces of Death, or Salo, I ran across this film on youtube, the full length feature. Although what I saw was not in english and there were no subtitles, I got the point of the film just the same. Never before have I felt so sickened over one scene then in this movie. There is a scene where a mother and child are taken into the cold. The child which is only an infant is thrown into the ice then stomped to death. The mother which is being held down has pots of ice cold water poured onto her hands and arms, and they let it freeze. After I'm assuming a few hours the ice is knocked away from her hands and arms, which are now black due to frost bite. They bring her inside and instruct her to stick her hands into a bowling pot of water, which she does, but it doesn't phase her because she can't feel anything any longer. After a few minutes she takes her hands/arms out of the water and a scientist cuts the skin around her elbows then rips the skin and meat away leaving noting but bone as the woman is left screaming with strands of skin and meat hanging from her fingers. This scene my dear friends repulsed me more so then the cat being thrown to the pit of rats.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Vile,disgusting, I need to take shower now.
Comment: This movie has been called the "Cannibal Holocaust" of the 80's and for good reasons, while its not AS gory as "CH" its pretty damn close. This is a true story about how the Japanese treated their prisoners during WW2.The various tortures in this movie range from "oh, thats not that bad" to "WTF did I just see?" and also include a(real)filmed autopsy. If you seek out "the most disgusting movies ever made" (like me) this one should be on the top of your list.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A celluloid nightmare
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I really cannot decide about this film.
Comment: On one hand, the film depicts a truly foul evil committed by the Imperial Japanese Empire that should and must be told. On the other hand, the director tortured animals on screen(rats and cats) and purchased a corpse for an onscreen autopsy---seemingly learning nothing from his subject. He also apparently believes the Communist lie that the United Nation used biological warfare during the Korean War. The film is also wildly graphic and violent in a way that teeters terribly close to pornography. So on one hand, he depicts a great evil------while embracing evil of another stripe. Unfortunate that victims of Unit 751 cannot have their story told in a film with a more certain integrity......but this is all we have at the moment.
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