Men Behind The Sun 4 (1995)

AKA: Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, Hei tai yang: Nan Jing da tu sha
Year: 1995
Directed by: Tun Fei Mou
Starring: Liang Zhang
Country: Hong Kong, Asian Cinema
Language: Cantonese (English Subtitles)
Runtime: 01:30:41
Genres: Military, Based on a True Story, Gore-Gruesome, Fascism, Old-Young, Violence against Men, Rape-Sexual-Violence against Women, Medical

Plot – Spoilers:
Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre is the final movie in the Men Behind The Sun series and is quite a worthy finale in its brutality.

Unlike the previous three that focused on Unit 731’s human experiments in germ warfare, this one narrates the capture of Nanking by the Japanese Army and the brutalities inflicted on the civilian Chinese population.

While there are no central characters, it does vaguely follow a representative Chinese family and a few Japanese officers. It also focuses interestingly on victors in war. While the earlier movies in the series revolved around the single common goal of achieving victory, here we get a different view.

When victory has been achieved, the focus shifts to competition among officers, squabbles over ideologies that must be imposed on the populace, debates on the quality of different samurai swords based on their efficacy in achieving kills, and inevitably – how to indulge our base instincts when anything and everything goes.

Men Behind The Sun 4 has black & white inserts of documentary footage in between the massacre, rape and pillage. There are also several effed up scenes including a domino-effect mass cremation of thousands of dead and injured Chinese by a lake, a pregnant woman attacked with a bayonet and the unborn child speared and a couple of nasty encounters with infants and children.