After
leaving the Shaw Brothers, Mou’s next film was
the children’s kung fu flick Little Heroes,
produced in mainland China. After that project, T.F.
Mou began to hear about the horrific experiments performed
on the Chinese people during WWII in one Unit 731,
a facility in Harbin run by the Japanese Imperial
Army. He decided to try and get a film made about
it, originally intending to create a documentary,
but he soon realized that the Japanese had destroyed
the vast majority of the evidence so he opted for
a staged recreation of it instead. The film that resulted,
Black Sun 731 or Men Behind the Sun, was the film
Mou would most be known for: a grotesque masterpiece
and intense cinematic endurance test loved and reviled
by fans of extreme cinema the world over, and would
join the dubious annals of such shock films as The
Last House on the Left, Salo, Cannibal Holocaust and
the Japanese Guinea Pig series as one of the most
hardcore flicks out there. Many people have begged
the question, is Men Behind the Sun an important film
about the nature of war or is it, like Mou’s
earlier Lost Souls, a twisted exploitation film and
a Grand Guignol festival of gore and death? One film
I think Men Behind the Sun is not at all dissimilar
to is Jacopetti and Prosperi’s slavery epic
Addio Zio Tom (or Goodbye Uncle Tom). Both films depict,
in a historically accurate manner, the sick perversities
visited on one group by another and both have been
defended by their makers as important political statements
and yet use exploitation elements to get their points
across.
Men
Behind the Sun opens with the arrival of one Dr. Shiro
Ishii, a doctor who is put back in charge of Unit
731 and immediately orders that the facility step
up its experiments. Referring to the captives of 731
as “maruta” or “wood”, the
Japanese experiment on men, women and even children.
Finally, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bombed, Dr.
Ishii orders a pullout. The experiment sequences in
this film are at times unwatchable. One particularly
upsetting scene has a Chinese woman (played by Mou’s
own niece), who, after having her baby sadistically
buried in the snow, has ice cold water dumped on her
arms until they freeze. Her arms are then dipped in
boiling water, with gruesome results. Another highly
disturbing sequence features a man put into a pressure
chamber, where he experiences several minutes of agonizing
pain before his intestines explode from his anus (in
reality, however, the results of such experiments
were even worse). Later, a Russian woman and her daughter
are gassed. The film also focuses on the 731 Youth
Corps, a group of teenagers similar to the Hitler
Youth who were made to witness and even participate
in some of the experiments. They end up befriending
a young Chinese boy who ends up being vivisected in
the film’s most disturbing sequence. It’s
perhaps the most disturbing thing ever burned onto
celluloid made all the worse by the fact that T.F.
Mou used a real cadaver for this sequence, a real
young boy’s cadaver no less that he was able
to obtain from a Chinese family. The film also features
an allegedly real and thoroughly tasteless sequence
in which a live cat is thrown into a pit full of starved
rats, who proceed to devour the cat alive.
Those tasteless sequences aside, Men Behind the Sun
is still a highly powerful film about the horrors
of war, a shocking visit to Unit 731, a real life
hellhouse more terrifying than anything a fictional
horror film could depict that no sane moviegoer would
ever want to visit in their wildest nightmares. They
soon will be once again, however, as Russian filmmaker
Andrey Iskanov has just finished shooting his film
Philosophy of a Knife, another grotesque and highly
disturbing film based on the historical horrors of
731. It couldn’t come at a better time.
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Men
Behind The Sun / Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre |
After
Men Behind the Sun, Mou would not direct anything
for a while. He next co-directed the hardcore pornographic
film Trilogy of Lust with HK erotic actress Julie
Lee. Yes, that’s right, after making a graphic
expose of Japan’s war crimes, T.F. Mou directed
porn. That same year, he created his follow up to
Men Behind the Sun, Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre;
taking you further back in time to the winter of 1937-38,
when the Japanese Imperial Army seized the Chinese
capitol of Nanjing (or Nanking) and raped, slaughtered,
tortured, pillaged and generally terrorized it’s
civilians, eventually killing around 300,000. Black
Sun: The Nanking Massacre, while a little more tastefully
done, very nearly as gut wrenching as it’s predecessor.
There’s one big difference between Men Behind
the Sun and Black Sun. Whereas it took about 30 minutes
in both Lost Souls and Men Behind the Sun for the
nightmare to really kick in, Black Sun goes straight
for the throat from frame one with people being massacred
in the very first sequence. Around the fifteen minute
mark, a pregnant woman is bayoneted alive and has
her fetus ripped from body in a sequence that is best
described as a cinematic Ipecac. While, save for the
above, Mou spares us from the absolute worst atrocities,
he still barrages the viewer with a surprising amount
of horrific imagery, babies thrown in boiling pots
of rice, monks forced to have sex and then castrated,
beheadings and machine gunnings a plenty, etc. It’s
a relentlessly depressing piece of cinema and is as
usual for Mou thoroughly heavy handed and as subtle
as a kick to the scrotum.
The film is depicted in a very documentary-like fashion
with real footage of the events mixed in with the
recreations. It’s an effective, highly unsettling
touch that brings Night and Fog to mind. The ending,
as well, ranges on brilliant, a juxtaposition of the
Christmas carol "Silent Night" over a montage
of the drunken Japanese soldiers holding a celebration,
various death scenes from the film and more actual
black and white footage of the atrocities. If there’s
any problem I have with the film, it’s that
the film plays far too much like a simple catalogue
of grotesquery and I‘d have liked to have seen
a bit more of some of the heroism that took place
in the city among the atrocities, such as John Rabe‘s
efforts to save the Chinese from the slaughter (Rabe
does appear in the film, but only briefly). That said,
for all Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre’s heavy
handedness and usual Mou-esque lack of subtly, the
film is nothing compared to what actually happened.
Sadly Black Sun didn't do too well at the Hong Kong
box office and Mou has apparently been unable to get
financing to make the third film in his planned Black
Sun trilogy, which is a shame, as we need T.F. Mou’s
unique talents and eye for the grotesque more than
ever now.
J.L.
Carrozza
12/17/2006
