| Cover Art |
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| Credits |
Director: Godfrey
Ho
Starring: Gong Chu,
Yuen-Ching Leung, Wan Ying Ying, Aldrew Yu
Country: Hong Kong
AKA: Men Behind the
Sun 2; Hei tai yang 731 xu ji zhi sha ren gong
chang
|
On November 17, 2000, a diminutive, unassuming
man in a nondescript suit took the stand in Tokyo's
District Court 103. For the next two hours he
held a stunned courtroom rapt with details of
atrocities that made the Nuremberg testimonies
pale in comparison. In the days between the Sino-Japanese
war and World War II, this man, Yoshio Shinozuka,
was a member of 731 Squadron (the Japanese chemical
and biological warfare division headquartered
in a Japanese-occupied section of northern China)
Junior Youth Corps. Until then, many had doubted
the authenticity of director T. F. Mous' Man
Behind the Sun, a documentary style picture
based upon the actions of 731 Squadron denouncing
it as a sick, sadistic fantasy. However, what
transpired reveals that the director had actually
kept the vilest atrocities from the screen. Some
time ago in another review, I noted that despite
the mayhem and utter depravity on display in films
such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and Bloodsucking Freaks, they
were so ineptly made as to lack any real power
to shock. The Chinese made Man Behind
the Sun on the other hand proved a shattering,
powerful document and a seminal film within Far
Eastern cinema.
Set circa WW II, Man Behind the Sun revolved around the headquarters of the infamous
731 Squadron: a Japanese experimentation facility
- the Nippon equal to Dachau, Auswitz and Buchenwald
concentrating upon test, study and development
of chemical and bacteriological weapons, as well
as a training / proving ground for a burgeoning
Japanese military youth movement - the Japanese
equivalent to the Third Reich's Hitler Youth.
Its key function though was to study the effectiveness
of biological weapons that the land of the rising
sun had hoped to develop and use to turn the tide
of WW II. The inmates and prisoners, many of whom
are named during the movie's course are
primarily Chinese and Malay, with a smattering
of other prisoners (including Russians) and are
known to their captors as Maruta - apparently
meaning a log for the fire, or in this case logs
for the ongoing terrible experiments, designed
both to develop deadly bacterial-plagues and discover
the limits to human endurance and when the body
can be subjected to, all of which, as with the
Ilsa pics are seemingly driven by the insanity
of one commander, the committedly sadistic supremo
of 731 Shiro Ishii - a patriotic psychotic with
a compulsion for humiliation and a hatred for
his charges who had actually been demoted for
corruption in 1943. The story is balanced and
given some humanity by the incorporated tales
of Ishiguro, one of the youth corps, conflicted;
simultaneously a rabid nationalist who takes to
the concept of the Maruta as inhuman experimental
fodder and yet befriends a young mute local boy,
who later meets a horrific fate and a subplot
involving the youth corps growing disillusionment
with the savagery of their commander. This plot
convergence strengthens the film as a whole, since
the negativity without the humanistic element
wouldn't be as devastating. A landmark picture,
Man Behind the Sun was made by ex-pat Japanese
in Hong Kong and its conception formed something
of a catharsis for those behind the project. Genuinely
shocking and memorable, it is an authentic gaze
into the mouth of Hades and such scenes as a live
cat being thrown into a room full of very large
rats "mondo movie" fashion and the joys
of "the frostbite experiment" are not
easily dismissed from the mind. When taken with
the fact that the film forms an admittance of
the deeds portrayed, something the Japanese have
been highly reticent to do thus far it is a picture
of considerable note.
The sequels however are a different story, exploitative,
boring in equal measure, and clearly made as a
"cash in" they manage that least forgivable
[in Japanese eyes] sin of dishonouring that original
with their throwaway plotting and phoney piousness. Laboratory of the Devil is a
major offender.
Framed by a negligible wraparound having something
to do with a reunion supposedly at the behest
of some Western female character who (I think)
wants to restart the experiments, this apallingly
made waste of time and effort purports to tell
pretty much the same tale as Ho's original,
only it does it in far less successful fashion.
Words such as inept, incompetent comical –
an effect largely brought about by the hysterical
dubbing and the surreal effect of these Japanese
performers apparently uttering American slang
in Midwestern accents - and lamentable come to
the forefront of one's mind when sitting
through this pile of unadulterated garbage. It
really is one of the most abysmal pictures this
reviewer has ever sat through.
The films violence is largely muted and less
extreme than its predecessors, though still none
too pleasant if largely dissipated by the phoney
nature of the effects. The whole thing looks desperately
fake, indeed the efx throughout suggest that it
was amateur hour on this front. Bloodless cheap
shocks will ensure that this witless farrago fails
to even appeal to the stupid narrow-minded denizens
of the braindead gorehound fraternity. The overwrought
acting on view tends is truly atrocious, the scripting
is abysmal and the direction incompetent. |
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