Men Behind the Sun (1988) Review

“Men Behind the Sun” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Camp 731
Director: T. F. Mou
Producer: Fu Chi, Hung Chu
Cast: Gang Wang, Hsu Gou, Tie Long Jin, Zhao Hua Mei, Zhe Quan, Run Sheng Wang
Running Time: 105 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Men Behind the Sun comes with the reputation of being one of the most controversial movies ever made, often mentioned in the same sentence as the likes of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, and Japan’s Guinea Pig series. The facts certainly indicate the same – it holds the distinction of being the first movie to be rated Category III in Hong Kong, has been released in very few territories uncut, was originally banned in Australia, and caused such an outcry in Japan that the director received death threats.

The man in the director’s chair is T.F. Mou, and while Men Behind the Sun is the title he’s most well-known for, prior to making it he directed such Shaw Brothers productions as the gritty crime thriller Lost Souls, and the dark kung fu flick A Deadly Secret. It was while directing the 1983 Mainland kung fu movie Young Heroes, that he learnt about the horrors of Japan’s wartime experimentation on Chinese and Russian human subjects, and became determined to make a movie to document the atrocities. It wasn’t an easy task though, at the time China wanted Japan as an economic ally, so the idea of such a production wasn’t met with much enthusiasm. On top of that, almost all research and evidence of the experiments had either been destroyed, or handed over to the Americans prior to the beginning of the Korean War.

As Mou’s wife was an American citizen, she helped to negotiate for Mou to have access to the rarely seen documentation, kept to this day under lock and key. U.S. Forces had come into possession of the data because General Ishii, the man behind Unit 731 where the experiments took place, was offered immunity from being trialled for war crimes if he did so. Agreeing to work with General McArthur (most recently played by Liam Neeson in the Korean movie Operation Chromite) and the American government, Ishii escaped trial up to the time of his death. Perhaps knowing that justice was never done, the Chinese government eventually gave Mou permission to make the movie, and production went ahead with a small budget of $200,000. Based on his struggles to convince the Chinese government to let him make Men Behind the Sun, the movie opens with the ironic onscreen text – ‘Friendship is friendship, history is history’.

One of Mou’s main goals was to achieve historical accuracy with his production, going to the extent of casting Chinese locals in many of the roles (a view of the cast list will reveal that for many, Men Behind the Sun is the only credit to their name), chosen based on Mou’s belief that they resembled Japanese people during the war. Most of the kids in the movie (the plot is framed from the viewpoint of newly recruited Youth Corp members) are actually Koreans that were living in China, again chosen as Mou felt that they looked more Japanese than the local Chinese kids did. Perhaps most interesting of all though is that the location used for the headquarters of Unit 731, was actually the real site, located in Harbin, Manchuria. At the time of filming it was being used as a school, and in an interview Mou remembered that the erecting of a Japanese flag outside the building didn’t sit well with many of the elderly locals, who were alive during the war.

The real controversy around Men Behind the Sun comes from Mou wanting to show the various horrific experiments, conducted on both humans and animals, which make up the bulk of the movies mid-section. I’ll cover these in more detail later, but I think it’s important to point out that, unlike so many other reviews on the internet, Men Behind the Sun is much more than just exploitation, an accusation frequently levelled at it. It’s not difficult to see why the exploitation label gets thrown at Men Behind the Sun, however it’s more a bi-product of Mou’s ambition to document everything he’d read in his research, rather than an intentional exercise in disgust.

The plot itself concerns a group of newly recruited Youth Corp members, who are assigned to the secretive Unit 731, and their gradual dehumanisation to everything they witness. Set during the final years of World War II, General Ishii, a formerly discharged military surgeon with a keen interest in bio-warfare, is assigned to run the Unit. Ishii, again the actual General who run the Unit in reality, is insistent that bio-chemicals are the way to win the war, and believes that the only way to achieve success is through using live subjects, in order to speed up the process. The newly recruited Youth Corp members are initially disgusted at what they witness, and in one particularly powerful scene, they are presented with a naked male subject dragged up in front of them. When the General asks what they’re looking at, one says “a man”, and is badly beaten, two more boys proceed to answer with “a Chinese man”, and “a bad Chinese man”, and receive the same treatment. Finally, the General explains that they’re looking at “a log for a fire, material for experiments.”

What stands Men Behind the Sun apart from many Chinese and Hong Kong productions, is that through the members of the Youth Corp, and also a disillusioned soldier, the Japanese are never stereotyped to all be completely evil. At the heart of the experiments is Ishii and his scientists, whose only desire is to figure out a way to effectively use bio-warfare for mass killings. How they do that really makes up the movies most shocking scenes. Mou was a resourceful director if nothing else, and with China having no special effects industry as such, there are several instances were real corpses or body parts are used, acquired by Mou through various means.

In one scene a woman is tied outside with her arms outstretched in the sub-zero temperatures, to test the effects of frostbite on the body. With her arms outstretched, a soldier douses them with water at regular intervals, causing more and more ice to form over the flesh. It’s a disturbing scene, made more disturbing by the fact that the actress playing the part, who was in fact Mou’s niece, is holding out a pair of real severed arms. In a case of art reflecting life, it was revealed that she almost contracted frostbite for real, due to the amount of time spent filming outside. In another scene, a child is chloroformed and then given an autopsy while unconscious. Mou had made an agreement with the local police to use a real body for the autopsy scene, and when a child was killed in an accident, with the parents agreement the autopsy was conducted with the coroners dressed in Japanese army clothing, the procedure filmed for the movie.

The two scenes that caused the most outrage though ironically don’t involve any corpses at all. One see’s a cat being thrown into a room infested with hundreds of frenzied rats, which proceed to eat it alive. There are varying stories of what actually took place during this scene, in a 2010 interview with Mou, he explained that the cat was soaked with water then covered with red dyed honey, and it’s this that the rats are eating, explaining that the cat was rewarded with a couple of fish once it wrapped. However in a 2008 blog post written by a behind the scenes crew member, it’s explained that the cat was killed in order to get the final shot of the unmoving body being swarmed by rats. The truth will likely never be known. In a latter scene, the same rats are burnt alive, and filmed running throughout the building while on fire. Equally cruel, however it was said that Mou found favour with many of the local farmers for performing such an act.

It would be a spoiler to detail the rest of the experiments, however despite the episodic nature in which they’re presented, the scenes in-between never feel as if they’re filler, which is what stops me from calling Men Behind the Sun a piece of pure exploitation. A group of the Youth Corp members relationship with a mute Chinese boy, who watches them from behind the barbed wire fences, is particularly well handled, reflecting their humanity when not forced to view all Chinese as nothing but material for experiments. Likewise, the solid acting performances from the cast, despite their lack of experience, adds an authentic feel to proceedings, making it a harrowing experience to watch even today almost 30 years later.

The reputation of Men Behind the Sun would further find it vilified by its cheap cash-in sequels, the Godfrey Ho directed Laboratory of the Devil in 1992, and Narrow Escape in 1994, although notably Mou would return to the same subject matter for 1995’s Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre. While other productions such as Russia’s 4-hour epic Philosophy of a Knife, from 2008, have looked to also tackle the atrocities of Unit 731, none have been able to match Men Behind the Sun in terms of pure visceral impact and shock factor. While today the term ‘torture porn’ is used to describe movies which present gruesome scenes of people being tortured, for little else than viewing pleasure, Mou has, as was his intention, made a movie that stands as a powerful document of what happened in Unit 731. While some of his filmmaking methods are arguably disagreeable, they shouldn’t take away from a movie which is, at its heart, a look at man’s cruelty against man.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8/10