Exploitation steeped in reality: Is ‘Men Behind The Sun’ the most disturbing movie of all time?
Filmmakers mounting deliberately provocative productions is nothing new and hardly out of the ordinary, with countless movies seemingly being made for no other reason than to shock, disgust, and tell horrific tales laced with depravity and violence destined to generate a visceral reaction. Men Behind the Sun ticks all of those boxes, but it’s even more disturbing because it was ripped straight from real life.
Part historical drama and a whole lot exploitation horror, director T.F. Mou sought to depict the atrocities committed during World War II by the Japanese army’s infamous Unit 731. A covert subsection of the armed forces tasked with the research and development of chemical and biological weapons, the unit is estimated to have killed at least 200,000 people through its experiments, and that’s conservative.
Prisoners were dehumanised to the point of being referred to as nothing more than ‘logs’ while they were subjected to a litany of war crimes, including being injected with diseases, having their hydration levels controlled and manipulated, organ harvesting, amputation, and weapons testing.
Men, women, pregnant women, and children born from sexual abuse committed within the grounds of Unit 731’s compound were fair game in the eyes of those in charge, and none of them survived. Some may have lived through their ordeals, but at the end of World War II, every single prisoner was killed to bury the evidence of what was going on behind closed doors.
The subject matter is troubling, to say the least, but Mou opted to view Unit 731 through the prism of a horror film. It’s entirely apt and accurate given what transpired, but the end result was an unfiltered, horrific, and gruesomely graphic 105 minutes that’s difficult enough to watch as it is but positively sickening in the realisation the filmmaker didn’t stage, choreograph, or shoot anything he wasn’t convinced hadn’t happened for real.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese filmmaker was accused of anti-Japanese propaganda, while even local bodies believed pushing the envelope so far had ruined any educational or emotional value Men Behind the Sun may have had. Make no mistake about it, though, Mou had no intentions of holding back.
Stomach-churning sequences include – but aren’t even close to being limited to – bubonic plague-infected fleas eating prisoners alive, freezing a person’s arms and then degloving them both, trapping a man in a pressure chamber to forcibly remove his innards, and the reprehensible use of genuine footage from the autopsy of a child. Mou apparently drew the line at cats after he sought to clarify that he didn’t really slather a feline in honey so it could be devoured by a swarm of rats, which is something, at least.
Ever since it first made waves in 1988, sentiment has been firmly split into two camps. There are those who view Men Behind the Sun as an important movie because it shines a light on one of history’s most despicable moments, and there are others who deem it to be nothing more than exploitative torture porn made for no other reason than to bombard its audience with nightmarish imagery. In the strictest sense, it’s both, and it certainly isn’t for everyone.
There’s no real narrative to speak of, with Men Behind the Sun presenting itself as a nigh-on uninterrupted montage of barbarity, with no let-up or breathing room between as it constantly moves from one hideous sequence to the next. Of course, that was the entire point Mou was trying to make, but even the most seasoned exploitation and horror aficionados will struggle to make it all the way through without taking at least one short break, or stopping for a moment of reflection to consider how they ended up walking such a dark path at this point in their lives as a cinephile.
There are plenty of movies to have laid claim to the title of the single most disturbing ever made, but by being entirely derived from horrendous things that happened to innocent people and then recreated in the most realistic and grotesque fashion imaginable, Men Behind the Sun‘s queasy layer of authenticity makes it the strongest contender out there.
