Men Behind the Sun (1988) on Netflix
NR19881h 45mDramaHistoryHorror
Recruits of the Youth Corps are sent to the Kwantung Army and brought to a facility serving Unit 731. There, under Shirō Ishii, the boys are introduced to the experiments on prisoners.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb6.1/108,404 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
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Plot summary
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army runs Unit 731, a secret program for developing biological weapons, headed by Shirō Ishii. Recruits of the Youth Corps are posted to the Kwantung Army and brought to one of the unit's facilities. There the medical staff experiments on the Chinese and Russian prisoners held at the site, and the boys feel revulsion at what they are shown. The research aims at a strain of bubonic plague contagious enough to serve as a last-ditch weapon.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Men Behind the Sun (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Two sequences in Men Behind the Sun used real human cadavers: the frostbite experiment victim's arms, placed in front of an actress's real arms, and the autopsy of a boy killed in an accident, filmed with his parents' permission. Close-ups of the autopsy were done with a pig instead.
- Men Behind the Sun was banned in Australia, caused a public outcry in Japan that led to director Mou Tun-fei receiving death threats, and had several minutes of mandated cuts imposed before it could be released in the United Kingdom.
- Men Behind the Sun was the first film to receive Hong Kong's "level III" classification, the local equivalent of an NC-17 rating in the United States.
- Shooting took place on location in Harbin, often at the real sites where the film's events occurred, and the People's Liberation Army lent military equipment and extras to the production.
- Mou Tun-fei's producer pleaded with him to cast a big Hong Kong actor such as Chow Yun-fat and give the film an identity, but Mou instead cast ethnic Koreans as the children, feeling they most closely resembled the Japanese and Chinese children of the 1930s.
- Mou claimed the scene in which a cat is killed by rats was a special effect using red-dyed honey, while other crew members claimed it was a real scene of unstimulated animal violence.
