Even though I swore to myself I would never lay eyes again on 'Men behind the Sun' or any of its sequels, I am now reviewing part 2. Go figure! I guess the call of the extremes just was too irresistible. At least now I clearly recall why I took this pledge
. These films are almost unbearable. The 'Men behind the Sun' franchise might as well be the most controversial and shocking series of films ever made (maybe a tie with the 'Guinea Pig' series, though) and handles about despicably explicit experiments performed on prisoners in a Japanese army base during WWII. These unfriendly Japs are developing germ-bombs to disable their enemies and a whole lot of other sick stuff involving nitroglycerine etc
There's an ultra-thin wraparound story about a young soldier who's sent to serve in the camp against his will but that's of minor importance. This second chapter is less repulsive than the original, but still contains more than enough sequences to make your stomach turn. Luckily the make-up effects are often cheesy and unquestionably fake. The acting is weak and the directing (by Hong Kong B-movie legend Ho) is atrocious. This is a film without any values. The only reason why it is made is because the DVD looks good in a cult-collection like mine.
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Coventry5 November 2004
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Watched the original Men Behind the Sun, and then this sequel. This was English dubbed though. Cantonese version may have been way better. Anyway, from the 1st 2 minutes I felt this is some awkward attempt to ride on the "success" of the first movie.
Story about Japanese biological weapons development with some off-topic (maybe I missed something?) autopsies. Some shots are clearly ripped from the first one, like the liquid nitrogen demonstrations and when the leader dude stands in front of the japan flag & his "army". If you haven't seen the original movie, you may like this, anyway I was so much disappointed I recommend watching "Men Behind the Sun" or even "Mermaid in a Manhole" instead, and skip this one. -
paulgeaf1 April 2010I liked this film. I have seen the first one too and unlike what others have said, I don't think it mattered that much, I still enjoyed both. The worst scenes are not as scary or shocking as I had expected, still, on a par with the first movie so you won't be disappointed! I didn't find the film slow at all, the story was actually quite interesting and filmed with such a macabre/melancholy atmosphere that it worked well. Pity the English dubbed version I watched would have taken away the atmosphere from hearing the original audio track and dialogue. Still, it managed to convey the feeling. I am now going to get the third one and I expect it to be worse than either of the first two as there are only so many ways of telling the same story right...?
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to_live7 February 2001"Man Behind the Sun 2" aka "Camp 731: Laboratory of the Devil" is one of the most worthless films I have ever had the displeasure of seeing. Godfrey Ho (who is incorrectly listed as being an alias for T.F. Mous) managed to take Mous' disturbingly realistic film (which was originally intended to be a documentary and ended up falling somewhere in between docudrama and exploitation stomach turner) and completely flush out every element that made "Man Behind the Sun" so hard to view.
What's worse is that Ho doesn't even make a weak attempt at a plot. Instead he literally copies Mous' work word for word only stopping to pump up the amount of blood, torn flesh, innards, and severed limbs. Ho never treats his victims with honor, rather he goes out of his way to completely exploit the unwatchable torture and mass executions these innocent prisoners of war endured.
Though, the most grueling ordeal is having to sit through a film that is based on real documentations of Camp 731, which was set up in Harbin, China by the Japanese during World War II. Inside Camp 731's Nazi-like interior
captured Chinese, Koreans, and Russians were subjected to inhuman biological warfare testing. In the end out of 3,000 men, women, children, and infant prisoners not one was left alive and some 200,000 more Chinese died from neighboring areas when the camp was imploded and the Black Plague (which was being experimented with) was unleashed.
Godfrey Ho should live in shame.
Zero Star Rating out of **** -
this movie looked interesting to me cuz i thought there would be a lot of gore. there wasn't. its about unit 731, who tortured a bunch of chinese people for experiments. its not that cool, the effects aren't that great. it has a cool story, and the plot is kinda nifty, but its slow. could have been a diamond in the ruff if they had made it better.
mat "drumladdy" (the hot carls) -
yuriwithyui5 March 2023Actually, I have nothing good to highlight about this film. The romantic story that shows us was very out of place. The experiments are for mere exploitation cinema.
The end? So, so, it could have been better (or directly, not even make this movie).
Image quality is average, taking into account the year of filming.
Compared to its predecessor, it left us many messages to reflect on biological warfare, which was largely omitted from the general story; and most importantly, without taking only one political side. A detail to keep in mind: this film is not by the first director (Mou Tun-fei), but by someone else. Of course, Dr. Ishii Shiro is much scarier than the previous installment.
I don't think it's worth watching, the third one is slightly better, opt to skip it. -
Both "Man Behind the Sun" and "Maruta 2" are feature films, instead of documentarys. "Man Behind the Sun" fits historical facts, but "Maruta 2" clearly not. It is a fictional war love tragedy. Historical facts are a serious matter. This kind of fictional story is not helpful to people's understanding of history. It will only encourage the hatred of Chinese nationalists, because they may not be able to distinguish between fact and fiction.
The plot of this movie is relatively empty, and the part describing Ida's personal story does not seem to occupy the main line. Hayashida's death was inexplicable. Bing is not exactly Aiko's savior. -
EVOL66618 October 2006LABORATORY OF THE DEVIL is basically just a re-hashed and more exploitative re-telling of the original MEN BEHIND THE SUN FILM - obviously created to cash-in on that films success while putting forth a minimum of originality. That's not to say that I hated the film - on the contrary, I found it relatively enjoyable, it's just nothing you haven't seen if you've seen the original.
In LABORATORY OF THE DEVIL, we get the same "historic" content of the Japanese using mainly Chinese, Koreans, and Russians as guinea-pigs for chemical warfare during WWII. The main difference between this film and MEN BEHIND THE SUN, is that it's told from the point-of-view of a soldier who is forced to work in the camps and we see his obvious guilt and disagreement with the atrocities portrayed. There's also a romantic side-plot regarding the fiancée he left at home during the war...
Those that hate this film are justified. The acting is often wooden, the English dubbing (as there's no subtitle option) is laughable, there are a few moments of "humor" injected into the film that are completely unnecessary, etc...As to the good points, though the film is every bit as exploitive as MBTS (if not moreso...), the general information on Unit 731 is still portrayed and is relatively accurate. For those interested in this one only for the gore/torture scenes - they're in this one as well. A couple of real autopsy scenes (one "live" one that looks suspectly authentic) and a few of the original tortures from MBTS are recreated in this film. Basically, LABORATORY OF THE DEVIL treads no new ground that wasn't already handled better in MEN, but if you enjoyed the first one and haven't seen it in a while, give this one a look and you may dig it. I definitely DO NOT recommend watching the original and then watching this one back-to-back - it's essentially much like watching the same film twice and I'm sure will be tedious to the viewer. But on it's own merits, LABORATORY is a relatively decent "historical-exploiter" that may be of interest to fans of the original film...7/10 -
hempgrindhead11 October 2002I honestly don't understand how someone could like Men Behind the Sun but not like this film. Although inferior in some ways, it is extremely devastating. We are treated to brutal extended autopsy, Arms being stripped of flesh,an autopsy on a living guy that looks suspiciously real(they remove his heart as it beats and when they cut him open it bleeds for real, exuding out of the fat and tissue layers)decapitation, dismemberment and more. I have read reviews for Guinea Pig:devils experiment wherein the reviewer states that he believed it to be real snuff, come on now.This flick has more realistic slaughter than the first Guinea Pig. This film uses real corpses for all the effects and the living autopsy scene is brutal. the only way i figure they did it without actually killing a guy is if they filmed a heart surgery or cleverly slaughtered a pig disguising it as a human. Don't believe the bad reviews. This movie is sick and deserves more credit.
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Rusty-6120 June 2001No no no no.
I foolishly rented this, thinking that...uh what was I thinking? I've seen Man Behind the Sun and while I can't exactly say I 'enjoyed' it, it was shocking, powerful, and deeply disturbing. I watched it once around 5 years ago, re-watched it recently to review it. For some reason I thought I'd read the sequel was much more disturbing. So, what do I do? Like a fool, out of morbid curiosity I have to check it out.
If you've seen the original, just quit while you're ahead. I cannot stress this strongly enough. I mean it. RUN! If you haven't seen any of the 'series' and feel the need to see any of them (whether or not that is a good idea for you to do is a whole different discussion) just see the first one. In the original, the plot centers on camp 731, where horribly inventive and vicious medical experiments are performed on prisoners under the guise of 'scientific research' for warfare. That one actually has a plot, and some characters you care about. The reason I'm going on at length about the first movie is that 90% of this movie "Laboratory of the Devil" is simply the first movie, re-staged, only done very badly.
The plot' goes something like this: a guy, who I think was supposed to have been at camp 731, goes to a house for a meeting, post WW2. A bunch of Japanese men sit stiffly around the table. Through This review contains some slight spoilers, but you'll be doing yourself a big favor if you read it before you decide to waste your money on this terrible sequel (if you can call it that). some very badly written dialogue (though to be fair, the movie is dubbed, so maybe the translation lost something) we find out that the main evil guy from the first movie wants to restart the medical experiments. Why he would want to is not that clear, other than out of sheer meanness. After more boring dialogue that I was tempted to fast forward through, the guy that came in says something to the effect of 'have you no honor? Don't you remember what happened before?' No, for some reason they don't, even though they were all there the first time. "Well let me tell you about it..."
We go into flashback mode and I optimistically figure it'll last maybe 5 minutes, summing up the first movie. Uh-oh, it seems to be going on longer. And the plot seems kind of familiar. OK, well, maybe they'll wrap it up in the next 15 minutes. After I realized the movie was half over, I resigned myself to the fact that the whole movie was going to be a re-hash of the first.
Now that's bad and lazy enough, but not only do they just blunderingly re-stage the first movie, they manage to completely f-*$% it up in every way possible. To try to add pathos, there's a lame romantic subplot. The experiments that are restaged are the most boring ones, and they only include one from the first movie that was a real shocker, but since most of us have SEEN the first movie, it's not shocking. The first movie was well paced, but in this case, it seems like the screenwriters just wrote down all the scenes from the original on index cards, put them all in a hat, and picked them out at random and filmed them in no particular order, making sure to leave out the most powerful ones and substituting incredibly stupid ones in their place. There's an autopsy at the beginning on a corpse that goes on way too long and is obviously intercut with actual autopsy footage. Not only is this lazy, but if I wanted to sit there watching endless scenes of autopsies, I would have, well, rented a video that consisted of actual autopsies
instead (yes, you can rent those now). I didn't think a movie could be disgusting and boring at the same time, but LOTD manages.
But wait! There's more. They also figured that maybe the first movie wasn't humorous enough (yeah, you really need humor in a movie about POW torture), so they stuck in some really, really unfunny "comic relief". Here is an exact quote, to give you an idea. Two guards are walking out of the lab after a frostbite experiment. Guy #1:"...they found out that women have a greater resistance to cold than men." Guy #2-"Yeah well, I guess that explains why my wife is frigid!" (rim shot) They roar with laughter. HAHAHAHAHA!
Stop, you guys, I'm laughing so hard it hurts! Whooo-hooo! I'm still holding my sides! (I was kidding about the rim shot, but there might as well have been one, it would have been an improvement).
There is, however, some unintentional humor (though NOT worth watching the movie for-if the forthcoming description of the unintentional humor amuses you at all , just LEAVE IT AT THAT. Count your blessings. I'm making it sound much more entertaining than sitting through the movie is) For instance, the English dubbing is so laughably bad it sounds like a parody of bad dubbing in an Asian film (Your Kung Fu is lousy!) It sounds like they have maybe 2, 3 guys tops doing all the characters. In one scene a bunch of scientists or commanders or whatever they're supposed to be are wearing surgical masks. One sounds completely normal while the other guy sounds like he's yelling into his cupped hands or through a saltine box. Also, the characters, both heroes and bad guys, are amazingly stupid. At one point, the hero (I think he was the hero, anyway) helps with one 'test' that consists of prisoners being lined up and shot. Why they need to research what happens when they do this, I don't know, but anyway, the hero reluctantly fires at the commander's order, naturally killing them, then looks shocked and horrified at the results. What did he think was going to happen? Oh, and this is after he watches the same thing being done 3 times in a row before this with no expression at all on his face.
In another scene, the bad guys inject a slice of watermelon with what I assume is some sort of toxic substance. Then we see a guy being dragged, struggling, into frame by the other bad guys,: "No! No! You can't make me eat it!" "You WILL eat this!!" They force feed it to him, though it looks more like they just rubbed it into his teeth, he foams at the mouth a little, and dies. Was that supposed to scare me or disturb me? Why the hell didn't they just give it to him to eat and not tell him what it was? In the first movie, during several scenes prisoners are tricked into the experiments, which is much more believable and has much more powerful and disturbing results. In the first movie, it had the effect of making you hate the villains even more. Here, you just think they're badly organized morons. Speaking of that, there's another scene where the prisoners are all in one room with huge numbers on their uniforms so large that the digits would be visible from another planet, and when they need them for experiments, a guard just walks in with a clipboard and calls out their numbers, and they call out "here!" like it's roll call in a class or something. For some reason that struck me as funny. Maybe I was just so bored I was trying to entertain myself by finding anything I could to jeer at.
Not enough reasons to skip this? OK, here's more. The makeup effects (other than the real autopsy footage) are really, really cheesy and unrealistic. Several workers are beaten and slapped for disobeying. I've seen more realistic punches thrown in Dolemite movies-seriously, we're talking the hand visibly not coming within six inches of the person's face and the person reacting like they were hit. Terrible continuity, too-in one scene, a guy bites into a small corner of a guards earlobe while fighting, then we cut (they always cut away instead of going to the trouble of showing any sort of effect) to a shot of the guy with a huge chunk of flesh in his mouth. Oh, and every once in a while, they stick in some stock war footage that is so grainy you can barely tell what's going on (I *think* that was a shot of something being blown up there...)
The characters look so much alike (I'm not saying this in a racist way -in the first movie, I had no problem, but here the screenwriting is so sloppy I didn't know who was who. OK, is that guy upset because they just killed....uh...his father?his brother? Was that his roommate? Who knows? The only positive things about this wretched excuse for an exploitation movie are that it leaves out the suspiciously realistic, unnecessary scenes of animal cruelty included in the first one, and that it has the guts to have a downbeat ending (though again, it's just a really inept rip-off of the first movie). SPOILER AHEAD:
any movie that ends with the hero suddenly being decapitated should get a tiny iota of credit, I guess. The first movie was so disturbing it made me lose sleep, this one just put me to sleep. I repeat, do NOT waste your time with this (especially if you've seen the first one). If you want to see something really shocking, upsetting, and disturbing, just rent the original. If you want to be bored, mad at yourself for wasting your money, and have your intelligence insulted, then rent this one. I heard that the third one is the worst in the series-boy, I don't even want to think about that. -
soggycow28 June 2000"Laboratory of the Devil" is one of the sickest movies ever made, though it's not as bad as its predecessor. It also lacks the sense of realism that "Men Behind the Sun" had because it replaces documentary style filmmaking with stylish camera work. It also goes for plot and character development instead of just showing the horrors of the camp. This is not to say "Laboratory..." isn't violent; it's just that the violence does not have the impact of that in "Men...".
The plot follows a man who is enlisted in the infamous squadron 731 in Japan. He is also forced to leave behind his fiance, and due to the secrecy involved with the location of squadron 731, he cannot have any kind of contact with her or any of the outside world. As he is forced to kill the Chinese, his mental state begins to deteriorate. "Laboratory..." has many scenes of various inhuman deeds being performed, which include the "skin-ripping" seen in the first film, a VERY detailed "autopsy" on a living person, and people being given lethal injections just to see how long it takes to kill them. All of these scenes are extremely realistic, and are bound to sicken even those with the strongest stomachs.
Had "Laboratory..." had the documentary style of "Men...," it easily could have surpassed it. Godfrey Ho's direction is once again very solid, and the special effects are almost too realistic, which really adds to the film. The acting is also very good. Like "Men...," this film also suffers from terrible dubbing (It sounds like those dubbing the film are talking through a mouth full of food). Like the first one, this film is not all about violence; it has a very strong message about Japanese WWII war tactics (They kidnapped numerous Chinese off the streets and killed them inhumanly in experiments. The Japanese have not apologized to this day for their actions against the Chinese.).
This film is for those with strong stomachs who want more than just violence in their films and also is for gorehounds. My rating: Seven out of ten. -
Viva_Chiba1 November 2010The first Men Behind the Sun marked the beginning of the Category III (CAT III) movies, the extreme graphic violence and the historical theme made Men Behind the sun going to the highlights, apparently, it grossed enough money for make a "sequel".
Men Behind the sun II is directed by Godfrey Ho (remember Ninja Thunderbolt ? Ninja Terminator ?), the greatest Hong Kong B-movie director.
This is more a remake than a sequel, with the only difference is that we don't see the cadet's "point of view".
Men Behind the Sun II is the most violent and nasty (at least in my opinion) of the whole Man Behind the sun Quadrilogy, it includes the most disgusting autopsy scene ever filmed.
The special effects are realistic, shocking and gross.
The English dub is cheesy.
Many people complained at the time that T.F Mou made Men Behind the Sun just for make some cash on this sad story, actually, i think that the guy who did this is Godfrey Ho, compare the original with this sequel/remake, you will notice that there is something "lacking": the historical content and the philosophy and the message. -
Laboratory of the Devil is essentially more of a exploitive rip-off / cash-in on the first Men Behind the Sun film. It does include all the gore and nastiness of the original film, but only because it's pretty much a scene-for-scene recreation of it.
It is years after the war has ended and the American government have called together all the surviving doctors from Unit 731 to offer them large amounts of money for them to continue their research into biological weapons. From here on out the rest of the film is told via flashbacks concerning the activities of Unit 731 during the war. This time we see the atrocities through the eyes of a young soldier who has been drafted and forced to leave his young wife behind to wait for his return. As he witnesses the treatment of the Chinese and the "experiments'' being carried out, he feels remorse at the crimes of his fellow countrymen and ultimately rebels.
The majority of the experiments and tortures on display here are taken as is straight from the first film - we have the hot / cold temperature tests ending in skin flayed from the bone, deliberately infecting subjects with Bubonic Plague, live vivisection, freezing limbs in liquid nitrogen then smashing them, etc, etc. The only major difference here is in the last half hour where the film deteriorates into a melodramatic action flick with Kung-fu and pointless heroics.
Due to being pretty much a straight-up exploitation film, Laboratory of the Devil looses the impact of its predecessor. It has goofy "comic relief'' scenes, some nudity, the aforementioned action sequences and an extremely trashy synth score, all of which combine to make it rather hard to take seriously.
All things considered though, its not an awful film and if I hadn't recently seen the first MBTS I probably would have dug it a lot more. There's plenty of gore and torture so I'd recommend it to all you rabid gorehound's out there, but if you're looking for a sequel as powerful and shocking as Men Behind the Sun, avoid or check out the excellent Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre by MBTS director TF Mous instead. 6/10 -
crudelithuz4 December 1999I wouldn't call this a horror movie, it is more like a very violent drama...The gore scenes are great, even if the autopsy and amputation scenes are by far the most detailed and violent. The plot is better than most of the movies I've seen, and the movie is very well-directed...Still, to be honest, I think this movie would have been even better if there were more autopsy scenes, since you watch this movie for the gore!
However, I guess I have to give this movie 10/10, cause the scenes you have heard people talk about is twice as cruel as you could imagine...watch it, and enjoy the violence!!!!!!!!!! -
I've not seen "Man Behind the Sun" or "Evil Dead Trap" or that many Asian horror films. That said, this movie is more gruesome than almost all European and of course American movies that I have seen. It is not quite as disturbing as "The Untold Story" from Hong Kong. I ran to the computer to make sure the autopsy early in the film was not real. I did not really find anything on the web that proved to me otherwise. The naked girl does not look like a dummy and the dry limbs being sawed off, that's shocking. I'm not sure that if it was a real corpse, that it was then material taken from stock footage. Anyway, it blows away the first film in the "Guinea Pig" series, which has a very low budget and poor production values.
This movie has a large cast and does not skimp on special effects. All the gun deaths result in blood splatter. In more lazy gore films they sometimes don't bother and you get a silly PG moment.
The first half of the film is heavy and serious and I was afraid each upcoming scene would make me squirm. Then the movie becomes over-dramatic and unrealistic with scenes that bring to mind "The Story of Ricky". This is an exploitation film more than a movie trying to make a statement about history. The end will have you laughing and perhaps will help ease the guilty brought on by enjoying earlier scenes of gore that are based on real human death camps. Recommended. -
Beast-523 May 2002He nailed this movie right on the head...I agree with everything he says. I found this movie at the Cleveland Public Library's audiovisual department,and being a lover of foreign horror films,I had to see it. I wound up fast-forwarding past all the talking and watching the nasty bits,which are laughable beyond belief. Of course,if you're not a nutcase like me,this movie may sicken you,but the special effects aren't quite special enough to even do that...
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I Hate Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil I Hate Unit 731: Laboratory of the Devil Hate Evil Movie Hate Evil Movie I Hate SNUFF Film