A harrowing experience

Today's film comes with a warning. If you are easily offended, upset, or shocked, please skip today's entry. Try coming back tomorrow. Because we are covering this film. I will keep the pictures as clean as possible but this film is a beast.

It's the notorious film from T.F. Mous, MEN BEHIND THE SUN.

There it is on YouTube. But be warned. I'll explain why below.

This film documents the atrocities committed by the Japanese at the secret war camp, Unit 731 during World War II. The camp was the site of numerous experiments on mostly Chinese prisoners in an attempt to develop biological weapons, study the effects of various forms of trauma, and honestly, just to torture their enemies.

Because of the nature of their acts, it's very hard to find pictures for this movie that don't outright display those horrors. But here is a sampling of the experiments and scenes you can expect to see.

A man inside a decompression chamber has his intestines shoot out of his anus.
Prisoners wired to crosses in a field are subjected to bomb drops.
A boy is vivisected and his organs removed. This scene was actually done with a real cadaver of a young boy.
A woman is left outside in the snow and ice and water is poured over her arms, freezing them solid. Then they bring her inside, dip her arms in hot water, and then the flesh is easily stripped from her bones.

But in my opinion, the worst scene involves a cat in a room where the floor is alive with hungry rats. I think you get the point there. It also looks very realistic and it is possible that it is.

The guy in charge of these atrocities is General Shiro Ishii. He treats all of the prisoners as simple logs for the fire, calling them "marutos", which means just that. They treat them as subhuman objects.

I can keep going with descriptions of this film but I don't think I need to. I will say that this film is widely regarded as one of the most extreme films in existence and therefore I feel the need to state again that this film is not for everybody. It's a realistic drama that documents historical facts. Unit 731 was Hell on Earth and the film actually glosses over some of the nastier events that happened within the walls of the camp.

When I first saw this film over ten years ago, it floored me. It took me four days to shake it off. Most extreme films fade from my immediate mind within hours but this one was a real downer that stayed with me. As the years have past, it has lost some of its power over me but I must warn newbies. This is some fucked up shit. Be warned.