Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Artur Machado Andrey Iskanov is a Russian film-maker that as made a name for himself with a few really graphic movies and this one is just over the top (or below the bottom, as your preferences go).This movie is a documentary about the true story of the Japanese Military Unit 731 that from 1930 to 1945 committed medical and scientific atrocities on human beings, very similar to the nazi experiments. But Iskanov, a sensationalist and shocker, gives us a movie that is more a gore festival than anything informative. I didn't like this; even being a fan of the horror genre, I had to skip/fast-forward many parts. Maybe I'm getting soft...For those interested in learning more about Unit 731, I'm pretty sure there are serious and true documentaries out there without having to suffer the torture of the analytical visualization of the atrocities. But if you want to be shocked and horrified, this is the movie.

droc-2 This piece of trash is the aborted fetus, the result of a pairing between Andy Warhols Empire having back alley sex with the Trustinus film Nightmare Asylum. If movies suffered from birth defects, this one would be suffering from Downs Syndrome and Quadriplegia.This movie tries to accomplish many things... it fails at all of them. The entire thing comes off as a first year film student project by a student who should have been taking special education classes instead of film making.It tries to be informative, proclaiming itself to be part documentary. But in the 4+ hours of running time, there is nothing you won't learn that you wouldn't get from spending 5 minutes on Wikipedia. The archival footage that is used is sparse, and the actual relevant bits of archival footage take up less than one minute of the 4 hours of running time. The "re-enactments" that make up the most "shocking" moments of the film are horribly acted, terribly shot, and ridiculously long paced. The "actors" used to portray the prisoners are all healthy and attractive looking Caucasians, all 7 of them. The movie (I refuse to call this a film) shows you all seven "prisoners" in the beginning, and as it it counts down each prisoners death we are often shown the others sitting in their cell, no looking frightened, or sickly, or even malnourished, but just plain bored. When the "experiment re-enactments" are shown, every actor involved looks like they are sleep walking through the scene... They put up no resistance, the lie there almost sedately as teeth are pulled, internal organs are ripped from their vagina's, they are burned alive, etc... The entire time they are being tortured these victims show all the emotion of a wooden plank ordering coffee.It also claims to be a horror film, but it fails that horribly as well. For horror to work, you have to have an emotional attachment, and there is none to be found here for anyone. You don't feel anything for the victims, who just sit around looking like they are waiting for a bus until they meet their fates. You don't feel any resentment towards the "doctors" who look just as bored with their work. The only person with any on-screen dialog is the old Russian guy, the only person interviewed in the movie, Anatoly Protasov. The movie claims he is a former doctor and a translator who lived within a stones throw of the camp. He comes off as a sympathizer to the doctors. And the it is claimed he was an eye-witness to the events, it becomes clear from his own interview that he witnessed nothing. In each interview he seems on the verge of jerking off when talking about Unit 731.What the movie tries to be more than anything else, is torture porn, of the most obvious and deliberate variety, but it can't even get that right. The effects are horrible, worse than any 90's 20 dollar "shot on a camcorder" film.The shots of people who have supposedly been skinned alive, the musculature under the flesh, looks like heaps of modeling clay.Regardless, the gore would have failed even if it were done by experts, as it is edited so horribly, that any effect it would have on you other than than boredom is lost. This movie is the equivalent of porn focused on nothing but long drawn out scenes of a semi flaccid penis going into spoiled grapefruit interspersed with 4 minutes scenes of falling snow. There is more to get excited over watching a 12 hour long bingo game where no one wins, than there is in this movie.There is nothing redeemable, nothing shocking, nothing entertaining, nothing informative, and nothing shocking about this movie... Anytime it comes close to having even a moment of those things, the horrible editing, abysmal pacing, and absolute lowest caliber of directing and acting ruin it completely. The only thing this movie accomplishes, is being the single most boring and self indulgent piece of trash I have ever watched.The only people who will find this movie worth watching are mentally handicapped reprobates, and I am positive the only reason it was filmed was to give the director something to masturbate to.Avoid unless you really want to waste your time in the most boring and tedious manner possible.

Arirang2009 As i am a gore hound, i almost died when i heard about this movie - and i was thinking; "Yes, finally something unusual to be showed", after being a bit tired of all these 2000's so called "splatter/gore" movies, with men in slaughter masks and a poor, women, screaming for help...First of all to start with; this movie was suppose to be a documentary. To be a documentary-movie, i feel it has to follow some certain rules, in order to be a documentary. If it was the purpose for this movie to be a documentary, it did fail, A LOT. I've read a lot about Unit 731, and i think mostly folks, who did the same can agree that it was more Chinese/Koreans and crime, and locals who became victims for Unit 731, and only a few percentages of other none-Asian folks, like Russians, Americans and Europeans. In this movie we saw only Russians or western folks being killed. Secondly, it was also children, small as age of 3 years old kids where reported, but it maybe had been too much to show how-to-torture-a-kid, but the fact that the Unit 731 flick "Men Behind The Sun", directed by Tun Fei Mou, actually did showed us at least two kids being killed in his movie. If this movie, Philosophy of a Knife, where suppose to be a documentary, they should have shown some kids as well, because of that matter it actually happened.3th. I don't know what about all these girls who where killed in this movie; but it just felt strange - they looked like being taken from nearest Play-Boy center. After seeing real pictures from the incident, i can sure you, that the victims of Unit 731, was far away so "perfect" as these actress where. But as a experienced gore-movie fan, i can say; "to make a gore-movie more brutal, they often uses women in their flicks." 4th. It was just too much blood and guts. Whatever they did in this movie, the blood was just flushing out from the body; and if it didn't, they tried to make up for it by showing us how to boil a decapitated head or cut some dead bodies up in the crematorium. I know most of what happened inside these walls was very bloody, but even they knew about the risk for contamination or being infected by the test subject. It's hardly to believe that they let blood flushing out on the whole room, when their subject have been injected with various of very deadly germs... 5th. The music was pretty OK, not those bomb-explosions to sound effect, but the rest was just... crap. Many folks compare this to Men Behind The Sun, and they have not obviously read anything about Unit 731, Tun Fei Mou succeeded to get more realistic in his movie, even tho that movie was more a movie rater than a documentary. In that movie, everything was correct "balanced" between gore, actually happenings and the amount of foreign folks being killed. 6th. Impressions. Here's what this movie really fails. When i saw a mother, with her kid and desperately trying to cover her boy's mouth in order to keep him alive and seeing her fear in her eyes, being killed by poisoned gas (Men Behind The Sun), i felt very compassion with the character, and i got the feeling how terrible it must to became a test subject without any worth. A very similar thing was also brought into Philosophy of a Knife, however, as for all other scenes, blood and flesh just poring out from his face.7th. Comparison. While Philosophy of a Knife just out for blood, women (oh well, some few boys as well), and gore, this was just a four hour long freak show in how-to-mess-up-a-human-body, included with falling snow that almost made you snow-blind, and with some very strange sexual contents between all these gore. The scene in the pressure chamber was just too ridiculous. Men Behind The Sun is a raw footage of what really did happened inside Unit 731's walls. Tun Fei Mou dare to show how folks (actress) really looked like when they where brought into the Buildings Of death. Even if that movie maybe not had so much gore, it had a more meaningful story, plot and a point that director Tun wanted to show us. 8th. Last words. As a gore movie it worked pretty good however, but saying that these was actually happenings it's maybe too much. Being a documentary, i can say that this was some kind of Russian propaganda, due to the numbers of Russians being killed in this flick. Plot-holes, since much of the torture scene completely missing it's point (why do you skin a young womens face off, and then putting a new one on her for a photography?) Very bad documentary, pretty OK gore-movie, if you can stand with four hours of amateur effects and snow falling.

frequency-2 This epic is 4 hours long. Much of that 4 hours is the exterior of a building which may or may not be the one in question. In a prologue the director and I think one of the producers tell us, among other things, that they "did not research" a lot of the facts.But they say their work is based on facts and that the movie is supposed to be about death and war....There is a fair amount of interesting stuff in the movie, enough for maybe 90 minutes. But not 4 hours. I think they wanted to give the viewer some sense of ennui by showing the building the falling snow from this angle, from that angle, from another angle...all with no narration over and over. It seemed like about 2 minutes of story and 5 minutes of exterior of building in the falling snow for 4 hours.I may be exaggerating, but not much. As for the story....Those who know about Unit 731 may be offended by this film as an effort to cash in on a grisly reputation. Others may be offended by it's portrayal of one American and several Russians as the victims of Unit 731. I am pretty sure the majority of victims were a very diverse group consisting of P.O.W.s from all who fought against Japan, Chinese locals and even Japanese criminals. Pregnant women as well as children were also prey to the heinous Japanese "doctors" of Unit 731.Regardless, the whole thing to me comes off as lame bondage/torture-porn. That you MIGHT get some idea of a story out of if you take notes when they are actually speaking. Even if you are looking for Bondage/toture-porn keep the remote handy, you have a lot of the building in the falling snow from this angle, from that angle, from another angle...all with no narration over and over to fast forward through.