Men Behind The Sun (1987)
Here's a movie that straddles that uncomfortable line between being a film that documents a scuzzy chapter in Japanese history and being a scuzzy film that exploits a scuzzy time in Japanese history.
Unit 731 is a germ warfare research facility set up by the Japanese on mainland China during the second world war. As I watched, I was thinking that what went on at Unit 731 was so out there that it was cartoonish.
Who could ever believe that someone would be tied to post outside in the freezing cold and have water dumped on her hands over and over again so that severe frostbite would result? Then you've got Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731, forcing her to put her frozen hands into hot water and when she takes them out, he rips the skin off of them exposing the bones! It was a scene any gorehound would appreciate, except for the fact that this kind of sick crap actually happened!
When you realize that the events depicted in this film aren't imaginary, but really involved the Japanese military, medical establishment, and even their royalty (Prince Mikasa toured Unit 731 and Tojo gave the leader of it an award for his hard work in developing biological weapons) the movie takes on an importance beyond the exploitation that it frequently sinks in and out of.
The film is a catalog of perverse medical experiments that include the already mentioned frost bite project (this also included a rapid-freeze version that involved smashing a guys frozen figures off of his hand), the gassing of a mother and child, and of course the infamous scene in the high pressure chamber that resulted in one heck of a big stinky, intestinal mess for some poor guy to clean up.
Shiro turns out to be a psychotic workaholic. He tries to develop just about anything germ-related he could think of. He had an idea to infect a bunch of rats and fleas with some kind of plague and then let them loose on Japan's enemies. He worked on poison gas. He even invented some kind of low temperature pottery bomb that would be used to spread disease. He figured out that idea when he got a little too worked up with a geisha girl and she broke a dish spilling candy all over. Way to think outside the box, Shiro!
Even as all this testing continues, some of the prisoners are making plans to escape and get evidence out to the rest of the world of the heinous acts going on inside Unit 371. Things don't go well for them as they get themselves shot during an uprising and are periodically trotted out to a proving ground where they are tied to crosses and have plague dumped on them resulting in lots of gooey stumps and eyes.
Finally word reaches Unit 731 that the Americans have dropped Fat Man and Little Boy and that it is time for Unit 731 to be disbanded. Understandably, everyone involved hates to see such a great group of people scattered and their important medical discoveries lost forever.
Shiro first wants everyone to commit suicide, but then he becomes convinced it would be far better to destroy Unit 731 and let everyone live so that they can go back to society without remorse and become pillars of Japan's medical profession, all the while pretending that none of this ever happened. Shiro gives the order and they blow everything up and kill all the remaining prisoners.
It's difficult to say whether the film is entirely successful in transcending its obvious exploitation-level story telling skills to where it is actually making a statement against this sort of treatment instead of just profiting from it. The problem of course lies in the graphic nature of the torture as it's presented on screen. There is very little story going on here. No one exists in this movie except to either torture or be tortured and we just seem to run pell-mell from one awful scene to another.
There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why we're being shown any particular scene at a particular time and eventually, you just start making this list in your mind of all the unbelievably nauseating stuff you see (Burning rats? Check! Baby buried in snow? Check? Cat eaten by rats? Check!).
The flip side to this is that the film brings to light an ugly part of the World War II and Japan's role in it, that most don't know about. There is a crawl at the end of the film detailing the real life things that occurred after the camp shut down. (Once the Americans found out about the research, they cut a deal with these guys not to prosecute them in exchange for their data and findings so that they could have the upper hand against the Soviets.)
Despite the limitations of the film story-wise and the stigma it gives itself with its notorious gore scenes, those who can stomach such in-your-face violence will at least gain some knowledge of an ugly episode in history. Unit 731 and what passed for the humans that ran that hellhole should not be forgotten. If it takes a movie as nasty as this one to achieve that end, so be it.