One question: Why the hell was this in the horror section? It was disgusting....yes....lots of violence.... it had rape, bondage, blood, guts, people boiling skulls, atrocious music and a massively high body count... pretty much hit all the key points of a horror movie today, even had a Japanese director. But why?
For those of you who know nothing about this movie (you lucky bastards) let me start by giving you the same first impression that I had... with these 3 rather misleading factors.
a) the movie's called Philosophy of a Knife
b) The movie is in the slasher section of things available for streaming on Netflix.
c) Cover of the movie (as seen to the left of text)
Now, this looks like your basic slasher flick right, maybe even a little J-horror? WRONG.
I will admit I missed a few things due to the late hour I watched this at.... for instance had I read the description of the movie as opposed to the reviews for it I may have been better prepared.... or had I read the review under it saying how much this movie sucked, but I walked in ready to be surprised by a cliche plot.
I was surprised. This was half documented- half reenacted failfest. It's about the Japanese medical experiments during WW2 (I think......)
It has interviews.... clips of footage from the time.... very disturbing photographs and illustrates a very serious point about the derangement of the entire situation and while I feel it had potential to be very good as a statement I have a few problems with the way it was executed. For instance... why market this as a horror movie when it is a historical documentary based off of pure fact? Horror fans don't want to see things that actually happened to people.... then we feel bad. My other problem with it.... it sucked.
Don't get me wrong.... it makes you feel very bad about the people who are in it..... as in the people who starred in it, not the people who this actually happened to because the people who died in horrific ways during the war were never exposed to this film.
The music.... was god awful. Musicians everywhere should weep for the clinks and clacks that were put to this film. There was a torture scene where a doctor put on a record before beginning the experiments and I honestly thought he was going to kill that poor soul with the soundtrack to this. I'm not even kidding.
Now the special effects..... Except for the interviews (and the one film clip.... but let's not get to that yet.....) all the movie was in black and white so...how bad can the special effects be? Answer: Pretty bad. The blood was gushing out in very unconvincing places..... and it was Kool-aid I think.... judging from the color it wasn't even dark enough to be red Kool-aid. There was one point where to show radiation damage they just used a black light..... I'm serious. There were parts that were very realistic..... I will give them that... but they were all things I didn't really need to see. (like them inserting bugs in......places *shudders*)
Anyway.... moving on... I think it's time to complain about the interviews. I was expecting terrible heartfelt confessions from survivors and all I got was "They didn't seem to be that bad of people.... I mean.... I never really talked to the doctors much but I was shocked when I found out what was going on in there." From 3 different old guys... none of them really had anything to do with the rest of the film. The only redeeming quality of the interviews is there was no background music.
Now... this is a two part movie and each part is 133 minutes (20 of which is credits) and most of it is reenactments of nothing. There were just random clips of people waiting around, and none of it amounted to anything. They used the same footage over and over and over again. I'll tell you what I think happened, they were going to edit it down but they had it all in there for the directors cut, and then they never made another version of the movie because nobody cared enough for that. While we're on the topic of repetitive film footage I guess I should tell you about the film clip (I told you I'd get to it.) There's a clip they have, maybe 30 seconds tops and it's of a reel of film going through a projector. This 30 second clip appeared so often it had to have been at least 10 minutes of this movie. There was also at least 5 minutes of watching it snow outside various points throughout the movie for no reason.
OH, I almost forgot... there are voice overs. Surprisingly not voice overs of the people talking in Russian, but a digital voice over to do scene transitions. It was super weird....
Are you ready for the worst part? I only watched part 1.... according to the time information on Netflix they run the exact same time. I'm only half way through. This has put me in a serious dilemma... while I would like never to think of this again.... I would like to do a follow up blog with the other half of this review.... and also I see a possible love interest with one of the prisoners and a guard so..... I have to stick around for that.
My point is, never watch this. Even if you have to, for school or something... fail the class. Working at McDonalds for life may be better than taking notes on this.
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