“God Created Heaven. Man Created Hell.”

Last night, I did something that I don’t normally do.  I watched what is purported by some to be among the most shocking horror movies ever made.  Now, as I said, I don’t normally try those kind of movies.  Don’t get me wrong, I like horror and I won’t shy away from a horror movie that shows blood and brutality, only so long as the blood, brutality, and breasts aren’t the sole focus of the film.  There has to be at least something resembling a story and likable characters for me to get into a movie – the three B’s of torture-porn are secondary to me.

…I should explain what I mean when I say “torture-porn”.  No, I’m not talking about actual pornography.  Torture-porn is a sub-genre of horror that focuses almost exclusively on gore and violence – the more over the top, the better.  Examples of the genre that general audiences might be familiar with are Saw and Hostel.  I suppose you could also call the genre “shock”, as the entire point is to shock and appall the audience.

Philosophy of a Knife is just such a movie, although the director (Andrey Iskanov) tries to pass it off as a documentary.  The movie is meant to shine a spotlight on the atrocities committed by Unit 731, a unit of the Japanese army that researched biological and chemical weapons technology among other things during the Second World War.  Unit 731 committed atrocities in their pursuit of knowledge, such as infecting prisoners of war with bubonic plague or other pathogens and using live prisoners to test the limits of human physical endurance under conditions of extreme heat, cold, or pressure.  Some people suffered vivisection, which is essentially an autopsy performed while the victim was alive. These crimes aren’t well known for a variety of reasons, not the least of which because they were perpetrated against Russians, Chinese, and Koreans, and because they were overshadowed by the sheer scale of Nazi atrocities.

This is a story that needs to be told – what was done to the victims of Unit 731 was awful, and those who did it need to be held accountable, by history at least if not the courts.  However, Philosophy of a Knife takes a subject worthy of an extensive documentary treatment and exploits it to make what amounted to a crappy, low budget torture-porn flick.

Philosophy of a Knife is a 4 hour long movie, divided into two parts, that alternates supposed archive footage including stills and film reels with recreations of the horrors perpetrated against prisoners.  The movie was shot in grainy black and white.  It’s poorly edited, and it spends long (really long!) minutes showing snow fall, exterior shots, and people marching or walking down hallways.  The music and sound effects are meant to be industrial and to add an air of menace to the movie.  They don’t.  They’re grating.  The movie feels like a cross between a Nine Inch Nails video and a David Lynch film.

And the acting…oy the acting!  I’ve seen people show more distress standing in line at Wal-Mart than these people did supposedly walking to their executions!  Seriously.  These folks were stoic as monks as they walked to their inevitable and incredibly painful deaths.

Oh and about the actors.  Apparently, Andrey Iskanov believed that the Japanese only performed their experiments on Russian supermodels because those were the only people he hired.  In the interest of history, I’d like to point out that most of the victims were Korean and Chinese, with a smattering of other nationalities thrown in, including American POWS.  Approximately 580,000 people were murdered in the gruesome experiments the unit carried out, some in the actual facilities and others during field tests of biological and chemical weapons.

And now to the most disgusting part of this film – the recreations.  These were meant to show in gruesome detail the experiments that the Japanese staff conducted on prisoners.  Now, I can’t comment on later parts of the film because I only made it an hour into this turd, but the section I saw had a few scenes of the torture.

Ishii, architect of death. He was the commander of Unit 731.

How do I not sound like a monster here?  The scenes didn’t have an effect on me.  At all.  Mind you, I may be hardened from watching and reading a lot of horror, but I still cringe at movies like Saw, Se7en, and some zombie movies.  I’m not an ice man, and I’m certainly not jaded.  The scenes in Philosophy of a Knife were almost laughable because the special effects were so lousy, especially for a movie made in 2008.  If there was supposed to be some sort of great emotional gut punch from the recreations, it was lost on me.

The recreations weren’t disgusting (only) because of their content, but because of what they were meant to exploit – the very real suffering that real people experienced at the hands of the Japanese over sixty years ago.  Most disgusting of all, the movie was dedicated both to the victims and their executioners.  Andrey Iskanov should be ashamed of himself for exploiting a subject that should be given a serious documentary treatment by making it a movie that attempts to be both a schlocky gore flick and an art film, while failing miserably at both.  Judging by the pretension oozing from this movie, I doubt shame is an emotion this guy is capable of feeling.  Do yourself a favor and ignore this turd.

For more information about Unit 731 than you’d learn in the film, check out Wikipedia.