Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Adam Venedam STAY AWAY FROM THIS FILM! What can I say, there are so many things wrong with it, for starters its 4.5 hours long, half of it maybe even more is completely pointless just boring shots of different angles with no talking Sound effects, I don't care what they use but my god THEY USED THE SAME SOUND EFFECT OVER AND OVER again for when bodies were flopped around and when people jumped and landed, it was the same sound over and over again and it was a sound that I used for cheap homemade films almost a decade ago, trust me this makes the experience feel so cheap.The narration, the narration was extremely annoying because about half of what the narrator was saying I couldn't understand or hear, either because the music background and repeated sound effects were too loud or his voice was just too low at times, the quality of the narration changes randomly too which also makes it even harder to hear.Im pretty sure that a lot of the torture they showed in this film wasn't true, like making the prisoners have sex with each other? or the cockroach thing that was retarded.The ONLY thing that makes this film good is the very convincing experiments they were well done and looked very real. But thats the problem Im not looking to watch disgusting things when everything else is pure garbage, I wanted to watch a good doc that explained very well the history of what happened, they might of explained it but still all the things that are wrong with this film make it to crappy and poor to even pay attention.

C-homecutler The small portions of this movie that have any merit, mostly the archival footage which is in some cases quite well applied, are over shadowed by a number of glaring flaws. The narrator blatantly overlooks other widespread abuses and atrocities committed by the whole of the Japanese military, instead claiming that any injustices were simply in response to pressures from the conflict with Russia. To try and whitewash Unit 731's role as a defencive measure is historically inaccurate, and since the Philosophy of a Knife claims to be a sober look at historical events, it fails on that level. I would say while there are few other movies that focus primarily on Imperial Japan's forays into chemical and biological warfare, this one does not ear points for filling a niche void.

Darkweasel A four hour pseudo documentary about the atrocities carried out at Japanese chemical and bacterial research facility Unit 731, based in China during World War II. Desperately uneven, it veers erratically from an interesting and informative documentary to a black and white art-house movie and then to a (still black and white) extreme gorefest. The recreations of the experiments carried out by Unit 731 are brutal and horrific but it's ultimately the real stock footage that has the most impact. You can recreate death as many times and as accurately as you like but it fades into insignificance when compared with reality.A major problem with the film is the acting of the victims. None of them struggle, scream, cry or show any emotion whatsoever as they are strapped onto operating tables and chairs, led out naked into the freezing snow or hooked up with electrodes and wires. In fact, the expression on one female victim, as her unborn baby is ripped piece by piece from her (all in the utmost graphic detail) seems to suggest that she's actually enjoying the experience. This happens a few times throughout the torture scenes and it completely undermines them.Another problem is the amount of time that you stay with each victim/experiment. There is far more shock value in watching somebody having three or four teeth removed without anaesthetic than twenty of them. This kind of real life horror is far more effective when described with words and occasional flashes of gore, rather than lingering on every drop of blood spilt in extreme close up. It's a gruelling experience and maybe that's what the director wanted - to have you sit through every uncomfortable, nauseating moment. But the problem there is every second you watch it is another second you realise it's just make-up effects and it lessens the very impact it's trying to make. Yet one thirty second sequence of real bodies piled up in a laboratory has a hundred times the desired effect.It also doesn't help that most of the victims portrayed are westerners. Although hundreds of westerners were killed for sure within the facility, the vast majority of Maruta (another word for prisoners, which translates as "logs") were Chinese. One can only assume the reason for this was a combination of the Japanese pretending the occupation of China and the human experiments carried out in Harbin never actually happened, and the Chinese not wanting any part in such an exploitative film, no matter how well it wrapped itself up in it's documentary style, humanitarian message. Therefore most of the actors are Russian, and again, more impact is taken away.As I've previously mentioned, every torture scene would have been more effective with less gore. However, of the experiments on display, the most noteworthy were the frostbite experiment (a man walked out naked into the snow, tied to a post and doused with boiling hot and then freezing cold water), the decompression chamber, radiation torture (watching someone's face slowly burn), phosphorous being placed on a man's face and ignited, burning, exploding and re-igniting constantly, the aforementioned foetus extraction (it may be badly acted but it's still brutal as hell) and plague infection (watching someone bleeding their liquefied internal organs from their rectum is never pretty). Also, the scene where an infected cockroach is forced inside a woman's (actual) vagina in close-up is highly uncomfortable viewing.At absolutely no point can this film ever be called entertaining, although bizarrely, there is one scene near the end which is almost beautiful in it's execution. It still ends in an explosion of blood and brains but in a totally different way than anything before it. It's actually quite moving in it's own violent way.This film, in my opinion anyway, should only be viewed how I went about it - as an educational aid on the history of war, death and inhumanity. There is no casual amusement to be had here. It is not fun. It is not entertainment, and it is not for the weak of stomach.

mikerlz Pretty terrible film. 4 hours, wow. I had to stop it 45 minutes in, but from what I saw, this work is amateur at best. This isn't even a documentary really. It's a bunch of horribly-filmed fake footage spliced together with the worst sound effects of all time.If you want to see a documentary of Unit 731, don't watch this film. There are much much better videos out there that serve that purpose. This film isn't even good for the "shock" aspect either, it's laughably fake and corny.Amateur work, don't touch it with a 10 foot pole. Maybe if that pole has adhesive at the end, and it used to move the DVD into the trash can, then okay.