Philosophy of a Knife (2008)

Director: Andrey Iskanov

Writer: Andrey Iskanov

Composer: Alexander Shevchenko

Starring: Anatoly Protasov, Stephen Tipton, Tetsuro Sakagami, Tomoya Okamoto, Yukari Fujimoto, Manoush, Yumiko Fujiwara, Masaki Kitagava, Reiko Niakawa, Elena Romanova, Tatyana Kopeykina, Veronika Leonova, Irina Nikitina

More info: IMDb

Tagline: God created heaven, man created hell

Plot: The true history of Japanese Unit 731, from its beginnings in the 1930s to its demise in 1945, and the subsequent trials in Khabarovsk, USSR, of many of the Japanese doctors from Unit 731. The facts are told, and previously unknown evidence is revealed by an eyewitness to these events, former doctor and military translator, Anatoly Protasov. Part documentary and part feature, the story is shown from the perspective of a young Japanese nurse who witnessed many of horrors, and a young Japanese officer who is torn between his sincere convictions that he is serving the greater purpose, and the deep sympathy he feels for an imprisoned Russian girl. His life is a living hell as he's compelled to carry out atrocious experiments on the other prisoners, using them as guinea pigs in this shocking tale of mankind's barbarity.

My rating: 4.5/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

OK, so I'm settled in to my comfy couch, I pop in the DVD looking for some foreign horror knowing nothing about this except it has something to do with the infamous Unit 731, one of several Japanese centers for human experimentation (just like what the Nazis did) from 1930 until 1945.   The movie starts.  It's fullscreen and B&W.  A prisoner is in the middle of two Japanese soldiers treading through thigh-high snow.  The soldier in front is carrying a Samurai sword so you figure this is going to play a role somehow.  It does.  They stop and the prisoner is beheaded.  That's all that happens for probably 7 minutes.  Then the opening credits roll, looking and sounding very much inspired by the opening credits and music to SEVEN (1995).  So far this is the first 13 minutes of the picture and that's all that's happened.

This gal and the guy below are the two Japanese we see a lot of

and they mostly do what you're seeing here.

What follows is part documentary (I watched the English dub version and the narration is mixed too low with the music and sound effects too high, making it difficult to hear at times), part interview with a Russian interpreter, Anatoly Protasov, who lived in the neighboring town as a med student, and part docu-drama, taking us inside Unit 731 as if we're watching the experiments.  The documentary part is OK but the narration volume was an issue.  The interview with Protasov was the best part.  The problem I have with this is almost entirely with the "recreations".  Remember how stylized the opening credits in SEVEN were?  Put that in B&W and you get an idea of how the editing of these scenes are.  Writer/director Iskanov gets really involved with these scenes (and there are A LOT of them) with the editing, visuals and sound.  It might be neat for the first torture scene but this technique is used extensively over the next four and a half hours.  That's right, it's two minutes shy of 4.5 hours!  I discovered that when I hit the remote button and I was only an hour in and I saw the remaining time left.  I thought it was a mistake.  It was not.

I finished it but I cheated a little by fast forwarding through the torture scenes, stopping frequently to see if there was anything worth watching that I hadn't seen already.  The torture scenes might be the reason a lot of people seek this film out.  I was hoping for some good gore but I was left disappointed.  They're OK but there's a lot left to be desired.  It's in B&W which hides a lot of the effects when they're sloppy or poor (part of the reason I think this is shown in B&W), the editing is fast and cuts quick enough that you don't get a good look at much (which also shows the lack of talent that would normally go into making something look real), and it's all been processed to make it look like old footage when you know darn well it's not and the dirty look just adds to the list of things that don't work well enough in this picture.  There are other little things like the prisoners don't resist AT ALL until the knife enters them or they're in serious pain.  The female prisoners also wear makeup.  Really.

Maybe the Japanese issued eye liner to their female guests.  The most unusual I-haven't-seen-that-before scene is when a prisoner is force-fed disease-laced cockroaches into her vagina (and, yes, they show it).  That was different but I couldn't help but think of how cutting edge the prisoner's pubic styling was and it was so smooth around the landing strip.  Again, maybe pre-1945 Japanese were that progressive with their prisoners.  I'd always heard different.  Hmmm.  The more you know.  Anyway, between the documentary bits, the interview bits and the recreation bits, it's the interview I found most interesting.  The visual 'horror' is so over produced that it adds to the already phony looking gore.  Maybe these scenes are over produced to hide the lack of good gore and horror that should've been there. 

It's an ambitious film (IMDb says it was four years in the making and I believe it) and I might've given this a little higher score if it hadn't been sooooooo long but the pacing (especially that first 13 minutes where almost nothing happens, and nothing that's pertinent to the story) drags this 4.5 hour flick into endurance test territory.  It's a curiosity and i think that people who focus on the gory aspects of films might dig this a lot more but only if you don't mind the quick edits of stylized torture.  I dug the droning music.  I think it fit the film well considering the extreme length of the picture.  I watched the Unearthed 2-DVD Limited Edition set.  The first film has one extra and that's a several minute long intro from the director and two other people (the director sat in the middle and said very little).  Disc 2 has a making of documentary (45 min), A Glimpse of Hell featurette (13 min) which is a longer scene (but in color) from the film that is made to look like vintage documentary footage of nude dead bodies piled on cots in a small room, 3 deleted scenes (3 minutes), an interview with actress Manoush (13 min), an interview with Iskanov (this feature didn't work for some reason), music videos for Dead Before Born and Forgive Me, the soundtrack, photo galleries for production, map of Unit 73, Khabarovsk from 1900 to present day, trial documents and finally trailers for 7 films but not for this one.