c-conley90 God, for me this has to be the worst, the worst in the world. And no, please don't tell me I'm overreacting here, it's bad, folks real bad. It's unwatchable, and its long and over 4 hours of torture scenes interspliced with horrible droning history lessons on Japanese Brutality during World War II on the Russians. That's all to this stupid movie, torture scene, torture scene, droning lecture, torture scene, droning lecture, weird freaky crap. Hostel had less torture scenes. Complete with horrible actors and actresses doing the torture scenes and the recreations and horrible looking fake gore. And it's all this really pretentious bullshit. Stay away, avoid like the plague, you won't get through it, I didn't I shut it off after two hours in. Please, watch anything else, anything else, don't even watch out of curioisity.

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.

jawramik I'm not really sure where to begin with this film. On the one hand, I feel like the story of Unit 731 and the horrors that happened there is a story that needs to be told, so I feel that this film has some merit if only because it raises awareness about a horrific point in history that seems to get glossed over all too often. That being said, the subject matter could have been handled much better. This movie just isn't really that good, nor is it terribly realistic. For some reason, all the victims in the film appear to be Russian despite the fact that historically, the vast majority of the victims of 731's experiments were Chinese. On top of that, all the victims look like super models, complete with perfect eye make-up and neatly waxed pubic hair. They look like they belong on the set of a fashion shoot rather than a POW camp. Historically, the staff of Unit 731 were highly trained scientists and medical professionals, however, in this film, "surgeries" are portrayed with the doctors just hacking and jabbing away haphazardly with blood unrealistically spurting in every direction. I also found myself wondering how many of the "experiments" portrayed in the film actually took place. While the human experimentation of 731 was no doubt cruel and inhumane, I was under the impression that the experiments at least had some medical and scientific reasoning behind them, whereas many of the experiments portrayed in Philosophy of a Knife just seemed totally pointless, not to mention highly unrealistic. Inserting a cockroach into the vagina, tearing off the victim's face, and then having the cockroach come out her mouth? Give me a break. And then, of course, there's the length of the film. 4 hours? Really? Editing seems to be a foreign concept to the director. The torture scenes just drag on and on and on, to the point where I found myself becoming desensitized and, frankly, bored, despite the graphic nature of the scenes. I literally caught myself falling asleep halfway through the second half of the film. The film could have easily been half the length. I did like the fact that the film attempted to humanize a couple of the Japanese staff characters, showing them grappling with feeling sympathy for the victims while still being brainwashed into believing that they were acting for the greater good of their country. I found that aspect of the film very interesting. All in all, Philosophy of a Knife is mostly just a bad, low-budget, poorly edited and acted gorefest that tries pretentiously to pass itself off as an artistic and realistic portrayal of historical events. It has a few redeeming qualities, but if you're interested in learning about Unit 731, you'd be better off just reading the Wikipedia page on it and saving yourself 4 hours.

squeezebox This movie is four hours long for one reason: director Andrey Iskanov wanted it to be. Lacking enough actual subject matter to warrant a four hour running time, he compensates by having virtually every scene go on for at least twice as long as necessary and inserting numerous shots of snow falling, each of which goes on for several minutes. I would say there's close to a half hour of footage of snow in this movie.We get surgeons meticulously putting on rubber gloves, prisoners being led down hallways, soldiers trudging through snow, bodies being chopped up, flesh being scraped off a skull, and countless other such sequences all in glorious real time. If tedium and banality are what Iskanov was going for he succeeded admirably.PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE is so devoid of any redeeming quality in its current state it barely even warrants discussion. One of the few positive things I can say about it is that I can see a riveting avant-garde horror movie hidden beneath all the baggage. Had he cut out 2/3 of the running time and tightened up all of his individual scenes, this could have been one of the most effective exercises in Hell-On-Earth sensory overload.Of course, in an introduction which brings new meaning to the word "pontification," Iskanov informs us that this is not a horror movie, though he expects us unsophisticated westerners to think it is. So maybe I'm even wrong about that. Maybe there's NOTHING good to say about this movie.Watching this movie has forced me to re-assess my opinion of MEN BEHIND THE SUN, which I thought was little more than an exploitive freak show as well. However, in MEN BEHIND THE SUN director T.F. Mou presented the atrocities in a brutally matter-of-fact manner and allowed us to sympathize somewhat with the prisoners. Now I'm thinking that Mou's film is at least somewhat earnest in its depictions of the horrors of Unit 731.In PHILOSOPHY, Iskanov re-creates the experiments as highly stylized set-pieces that look more like a Nine Inch Nails music video than an attempt to hit home the true horror of these activities. All (and I mean ALL) the prisoners who are tortured are young, good-looking Russian kids with no backstory whatsoever. I wonder how many female prisoners-of-war during World War II had perfect breasts and shaved pubic hair. And while MEN BEHIND THE SUN acknowledged that Russian, European and American prisoners did fall victim to Unit 731, PHILOSOPHY completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of victims were Chinese.And if what you want is nothing more than blood and guts, even that fails to live up to the hype. The effects (which Iskanov did himself) are amateurish and sloppy. Only a sequence in which a woman's teeth are pulled is even somewhat effective, not because it's well-done, but because pretty much everyone can imagine how much that would hurt. OLDBOY's teeth pulling scene is far more chilling and horrific than this.This long, boring, dishonest, self-indulgent movie is a major waste of time. I want my four plus hours back.