Men Behind the Sun (1988) Starring Hsu Gou, Tie Long Jin & Zhaohua Mei Written by Mei Liu, Wen Yuan Mou & Dun Jing Teng Directed by Tun Fei Mou

Now we live in a world where a Dodge commercial featuring a funny chimp is considered animal abuse. Let me just say, I don't want to live in a world without funny monkeys. "Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp?" That shit was hilarious!

You know another thing that isn't supposed to be funny? War atrocities. Except for this joke:

"Men Behind the Sun" isn't a comedy, not even an unintentional one. It's a relatively serious attempt to tell the story of Unit 731, the World War Two Japanese Army unit that performed a series of inhuman experiments on prisoners and civilians in occupied Manchuria. These experiments were similar in scope and awfulness to those conducted by the Nazis in the concentration camps in Europe. The Japanese were pursuing development of biological and chemical weapons and in addition to testing these weapons on live subjects, they unleashed them on the Chinese population. They also used live subjects to test grenades, flamethrowers, and the effects of cold or pressure on the human body. They were evil, evil men.

"Men Behind the Sun" was produced in Hong Kong in 1988. I watched a dubbed version, so I don't know if this affected the overall presentation; my reaction to it in general was that it was a serious, if dramatically flawed movie. Some critics have accused it of exploiting the horrors of Unit 731, but I don't think I agree. For the most part, anyway.

You get all kinds of terrible scenes in this movie: a woman having the skin ripped off her frostbitten arms, a man exploded in a high pressure chamber, and rows of prisoners tied to crucifixes in a field being blown to pieces. The most infamous scene in the movie allegedly shows the actual autopsy of a young boy. Based on the way it's edited, I think it is a clever fake, but it's also possible that it might actually be the real thing.

But for me, the scene that really turned my stomach did not involve the abuse of prisoners. It didn't even involve human beings.

In the movie, the Japanese have a room filled with hundreds of rats; one of the programs Unit 731 pursued was the use of rats carrying fleas infected with super plague to spread germs. For no real reason, at one point the Japanese commander tosses a cat into this churning mass of rodents. A white cat. What ensues is several minutes of stomach churning, actual footage of a cat being eaten by rats.

As you might have guessed by my prior comments, I'm no animal rights whacko. But this scene really grossed me out. I think anyone other than a budding serial killer would be seriously grossed out by watching a cat being eaten alive by rats. Even a cat hater might have a hard time watching this scene.

The fact that scene goes on for so long and the camera lingers on it without cutting away, really isn't very defensible. Anyone accusing the filmmakers of exploiting a real life horror should point to this scene as argument number one. And it's this scene alone that carries "Men Behind the Sun" into the finals of The Sickest Fucking Film Ever.

However, the filmmakers do turn the tables on the rats later in the movie. As the Japanese are retreating from the advancing Allies, they blow up the camp. Dozens of burning rats comes scurrying out of the flames. Not CGI burning rats, actual flaming rats. Maybe I'm hypocrite for not being as grossed out by that as I was by the fuzzy kitty being gnawed on, but they were guilty of war crimes.

What made this a hard call was my opinion that overall the movie is a straightforward depiction of a historical outrage that needed to be told. The Japanese in China during World War Two actually did many other awful things, rivaling and perhaps even surpassing the Nazis. If you wanted to spend an afternoon contemplating the depths to which humans can fall, I would recommend watching "Men Behind the Sun" followed by the Russian masterpiece "Come and See" which details the crimes of the SS on the Eastern Front.

But if you ARE a budding serial killer, by all means enjoy this movie for all the wrong reasons. It will be a nice addition to your collection of squish videos, I'm sure.