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 It is 1945 and Morishima joins the Japanese military and ends up at Unit 731.
He is "shocked by the tortuous experiments inflicted upon living human beings"
at the Manchuria base. The box claims that his fiancee is looking for him and
gets herself taken prisoner in an effort to meet him. She actually is trying
to locate her father, but I can't really blame whoever wrote the copy on the
back of the DVD box for not watching this one.
1990, 91 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
After I got done watching the gross-out Japanese prison camp epic, Men Behind The Sun, I sat there wistfully recalling all the good times that movie
brought us. There was the autopsies on little kids, the tearing of flesh from
bone while the victim was still alive, there was the gassing of a mother and
child, there were germ experiments, a cat eaten up by a bunch of rats, and
everyone's favorite scene involving a pressure chamber and some guy whose
innards came right out of his butt in front of our eyes. Those were some
mighty good times and most of us were disappointed when that roller coaster ride
of high entertainment finally had to end. Just like the farewell kiss of a
lover, this one lingered on our lips, bittersweet in its simultaneous pleasure
and regret. If only we could experience it all again for the first time. If
only someone could find a way to rehash all the icky scenes in a brand new
movie. If only we could revisit all the evil doctors and soldiers at Unit 731
that we've come to know just like members of our own family (if our family were
psychotic war criminals that is). Well put on your hazmat suit, secure your
goggles, and hitch up your gas mask, because we're all heading back to Unit 731
to perform more experiments in the service of our most exalted emperor! Men Behind The Sun 2: Laboratory Of The Devil obviously has a way cool name, pretty slick cover (It's nice that they
recognize that the trademark of these Men Behind The Sun movies is bloody
skeletal hands.) and apparently subscribes to the theory "if people weren't
sufficiently repulsed by the last movie, then why change anything in the next
one" because I sat through this one wondering if someone just didn't decide to
remake the first movie instead of doing a sequel to it.  This is one of those movies that stars nameless people you think you might have
seen in other movies (maybe the first Men Behind The Sun?) but you really don't have any idea who they are. You never manage to catch
their names, but that doesn't matter, because you're just waiting for them to
squirt their lungs out through their colons and who needs a name for that,
right? The movie starts with some strangely colored black and yellow footage
of the war and a narrator informs us that Japan lost the war (Really? Glad
they set that up for me.) and we go to some house in Japan where people are
gathering for a meeting. It turns out to be the Unit 731 Class of '45 reunion!
I wonder how much weight Commandant Kenji has put on? There's a guy with a
Hitler mustache for our main character and he doesn't seem too thrilled to
be at the reunion. I'll bet his wife dragged him along or something. Now all
these guys are sitting around a table and then some American woman walks in.
It's actually more of a toss-up as to whether she's a woman rather than whether
she's an American. See, she's one of those things that looks like the WWF's
former circus freak, Chyna. I would also advise these women that look like
real ugly men to have a professional show them how to apply their
make-up. So often, a hideously nasty face is made all the worse by the
application of too much
rouge, lipstick, eyeliner, and foundation (see Aenigma for another example of this situation). She's one of these take charge types
who starts blabbering about how Japan needs to restart Unit 731. Everyone
seems to be okay with that except the guy with the Hitler mustache. He doesn't
want any part of it. He tells everyone that before deciding to get the band
back together again, they should all remember the story of Morishima (all names
taken from the back of the DVD box, not memory). I thought he might spend
about ten of
fifteen seconds saying something about Morishima pulling some sort of prank
with Unit 731's mascot (probably a pickled fetus) or something, but once his
story started, we didn't get
back to him and the reunion for another fifty minutes.  The story of Morishima goes like this: he joins the army and gets assigned to
Unit 731. While there he sees and does unspeakable atrocities. Let's talk
about those unspeakable things he participated in. It's pretty much the usual
stuff - freezing people, shooting people, injecting people with plague, and
incinerating corpses. Morishima becomes friends with his roommate and the only
thing this gets his roommate is a severe face-slapping from their superior
officer, when it is discovered that he tried to mail some love letters for
Morishima. Yes, they try to give us some type of human interest angle with
Morishima pining away for his love, the strangely named Chikida (Isn't that
Japanese for banana?). Chikida and Morishima are engaged, but this doesn't
stop some other guy from pursuing her and he apparently has some power in the
government, because he gets her father transferred to a military hospital and
everyone pretends like they don't know what happened to him. He does this
after the father tells him to keep it in his pants because his daughter has
eyes only for Morishima and no one is buying his story that Morishima has died
in battle. Since Unit 731 is a top-secret torture installation, the soldiers
there aren't allowed any contact with the outside world, so no one has heard
anything from Morishima since he left. And what of Morishima? How is he
adjusting to life in the military? Well, he spends a lot of time playing drama
queen about having to watch people getting chopped up and carting the bodies
off to be burned. He also does some judo on his roommate when the roommate
compares his girlfriend to sweet and sour pork. She hates sweet and sour
anything! Morishima tells him to "never use that metaphor again!" This is the
kind of character development that director Godfrey Ho probably thinks sets
this film apart from its predecessor. It doesn't of course, because you're
too busy wondering why you're having to watch some of the same experiments as
you saw in the first movie. You're also curious as to what this flashback has
to do with the big reunion that is going on without us. 
Don't get too excited about the reunion. It turns out that this is just the
framing device used to tell the story of Morishima. This is a bit dumb as his
story is basically the same, but less interesting one that was told in the
first movie. You're hoping that they're using his story to set up something
new with Unit 731, but that's simply not the case. In fact, the movie would
have worked (or not worked depending on your perspective) just as well without
all these
people sitting around their dining room table reminiscing about the good old
days back at their secret camp. There also doesn't seem to be any kind of
story going on at the camp. It's a series of gross out scenes and they seem
intent on showing the breadth of Unit 731's depravity rather than on doing any
type of linear story. So you meander from one experiment to another, you get
people being slapped for various infractions, you have prisoners being shot,
you even have soldiers dropping clay pots full of plague on people, which
echoes the infamous low temperature pottery bomb they invented in the first
movie. Since you've seen it all before, none of it really captures you're
attention. They deviate from the first movie when the soldiers are given a one
hour and forty-five minute pass (It's not how long your vacation is, it's how
you use the time you have, I guess.) and Morishima immediately
runs off to find someone to try and send his love letters again. His roommate
walks
around in the woods with another soldier and they get attacked by
sword-wielding locals. This unfortunately results in some badly staged kung
fu, but finally the roommate gets his throat slashed, just as Morishima
appears from his latest letter-mailing escapade. Morishima is very upset that
his roommate died, but I think we all know that deep down he was jacked that he
apparently finally got those letters mailed. He is obviously new to this love
biz, otherwise he knows that when a woman tells you she'll never forget you and
that she will be always be with you no matter what, that those promises are
pretty much up there with the ones you get from elected officials, business
executives, and probationers. And this guy thinks being in Unit 731 is hell?
Just wait until your old lady gets bored with you. No time to fret over roomie's surprising demise since Chikida is running around
looking for her dad. He's been arrested as a traitor, the result of his
refusing to participate in some heinous experiment or because of that guy that
was after his daughter, I was never too sure. Whatever the reason, he gets
transferred to Unit 731 and his daughter with the help of a friendly pickpocket
(What?) figures out that he is being held there, so they get themselves
captured and taken to Unit 731 as prisoners. This sounds exactly like the kind
of un-plan that a gal named Chikida and a good-hearted pickpocket would come up
with. At the camp, her dad recognizes his daughter walking around in the
"yard" and is so surprised he spills a bunch of plague on himself. Morishima
finds
out that his future father-in-law is at the camp, goes and sees him, gets the
info that his
fiancee is also on the grounds and goes off to find her. They have a touching
reunion and then lead a revolt of the prisoners. They all end up getting shot
and killed and we finally get back to the present where the guy with the Hitler
mustache ends his story, leaves the house and gets shot and killed himself.
There's no further explanation of any of these events, and if you cared you
might wonder why we were ever at the reunion, but you don't - you're just
wondering if Men Behind The Sun 3: A Narrow Escape is also a rehash with dumb love story grafted on as well. That'll have to
wait, since it'll be awhile until I'm hankering for another limb-sawing,
skin-ripping, plague-injecting, Japanese prison camp movie. This one came off
like a less extreme version of the first one, without any of attempt to give us
the historical context that they tried to do in the original. Unit 731 really
existed and the first movie noted that fact, giving us some text at the end of
things to let us in on some basic facts. It made you feel a little better
about sitting through such an pervasively gross and joyless film - like an
afterschool special with effects by Tom Savini or Sergio Stivaletti or
something. The sequel though, never bothered with anything like that, content
to merely regurgitate some of the camp's more notorious experiments and plug in
the ill-fitting junk about Morishima's girlfriend and father (It took lots of
luck and coincidences to get them all together into a secret Japanese camp in
China, huh?). Notable only for it's over-the-top gore effects, it's hard to
really recommend it for that simply because you could get the same, only more
and better in the first movie. Blatant cash-in attempt that never makes any
pretense of trying anything new.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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