Philosophy of a Knife [DVD] [2008] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

First, I'm sick of some reviewers going on and on about the GORE in this movie. This is NOT a HORROR movie. This is not a gore-drenched rip-off of "Saw" or "Hostel." In fact, most conventional horror movie loving folk will probably not sit all the way through this film, for the simple reason that there is not wall-to-wall gore or funny dialogue or gratuitous T&A.

For the most part this is a very detailed and very long history lesson, that like "Men Behind the Sun" is not afraid to show a shameful and horrendous part of the past in horrific detail. While "Men Behind the Sun" (a film that I also have a lot of respect for) is colorful, "Philosophy of a Knife" is presented in mostly black and white with a genuine 16mm educational documentary feel. While this effect has been overused and ineffective in the past, it works very well here.

Make no mistake "Philosophy of a Knife" is very graphic, and the grotesque and horrifying medical experiments are presented in nightmare-inducing detail. But it doesn't come off like gore for gore sake. It seems and 'feels' very real; as if we're actually there witnessing these unspeakable horrors in the name of medical science.

The actual run time with the introduction is nearly four and a half hours. It actually seems longer considering the exhausting amount of interview and recreated footage to be found here. However I was never bored. And, when it was finally over, I could do nothing but sit and stare at the screen. I was experiencing feelings that I rarely feel after watching a movie. Putting it simply, I was numb from the complexity, power and the shocking historical nature of the movie that had just consumed an entire summer evening.

Philosophy of a Knife (Andrey Iskanov, 2008)

For twenty years, a debate has raged over the title of most extreme gore film. While you'll have your classicists arguing for Cannibal Ferox and the like, the real discussion boils down to two films: Hideshi Hino's sixty-minute masterpiece Flower of Flesh and Blood and T. F. Mous' infamous started-as-a-documentary-and-turned-into-a-gore-film Men Behind the Sun. Now, MbtS is twenty years old, FoFaB twenty-three; you'd think by now someone would have pushed the envelope a bit. But those two movies are like the Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jugend of filmdom; sometimes people get close, but no one ever seems to spill over into unknown territory. There are some envelopes that are, seemingly, made of titanium. The latest chap to try is Andrey Iskanov, whose Nails made me think we might be seeing the first truly boundary-battering Russian director since Tarkovsky; with Philosophy of a Knife, he decided to take what Mous was originally going to do and integrate it with what Mous finally did, creating what the horror underground have been calling a "goreumentary" ever since buzz started flying about this movie a year or so ago. And with a projected running time of over four hours (the released version does, in fact, clock in at four hours and nine minutes, excluding the intermission), a bunch of us believed it was time for Mous and Hino to step aside and acknowledge the new master. Well, now I've seen it. Mous and Hino are resting safely on their laurels.

It's tough to talk about directorial style when you're reviewing a documentary, so I'm not even going to try, except to mention that in the gore-film bits, all the wonderful stylistic quirks that made Nails (and, to a lesser extent, Visions of Suffering) such a treat are absent; I assume that's to keep the film's documentary look-and-feel. I missed them greatly, especially as it seemed to me that some more personal touches from Iskanov might have invested us a great deal more in what was going on; Mous achieves the shock and nausea he does in Men Behind the Sun specifically because he's got himself a storyline and some pretty solid characters, while Iskanov is more interested in depicting the horrors of Unit 731 in a more impressionist style. (There is one undercurrent of a storyline, actually; it involves what seems to be the growing feelings of a male nurse for one of the maruta. And it should come as no surprise that the resolution of that storyline, despite being one of the quietest scenes in the film, is also the strongest.) As a result, while there can be no doubt whatsoever that when you use a metric of gallons of fake blood and innards per hour, Iskanov probably has, in fact, created one of the most violent films I've ever seen, but the gore sequences never get under that barrier of detachment. There's no real effect to them, other than saying "hmm, interesting use of special effects." Also, a number of scenes seem designed more for shock value than anything else (though the documentary half of the film assures us that yes, these things really did happen), which took away from the movie somewhat. It should be noted, again, that the scenes obviously designed for shock value in Men Behind the Sun did not have this effect; i.e., they actually did shock, despite being far less explicit in most cases. I should also point out the soundtrack, which worked very well for a film like Nails, but constantly feels out of place here.

Still, I don't want to give the impression that this is a bad film. It's certainly the most comprehensive treatment of Unit 731 we've seen on screen, thanks in no small part to its epic run time, and that alone makes it a valuable document. And while I know Iskanov and crew spent four years on the project, it does seem as if one more rewrite of the script, to further integrate the gore-film aspects and give us some characters with whom we could empathize, would have done a great service to the finished product. ***

PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE is not simply a horror / splatter / gore movie. It's not meant to be enjoyed as entertainment, or viewed as exploitation. This is a documentary by Andrey Iskanov about the infamous UNIT 731, and the inhuman experiments conducted there during WW2. The horrific, insanely-extreme sequences in PHILOSOPHY are re-enactments, much like in any other documentary presentation. The major difference of course, is that Iskanov recreates the actual atrocities in as realistic, vicious, and detailed a fashion as possible. We are meant to go along w/ these prisoners / test subjects as they encounter their long, hideous deaths. We are supposed to experience the terror, the anguish, the torturous, mindless experimentation. We are there for the monotony of murder. We are witnesses to one of the world's darkest criminal endeavors. After seeing POAK, I am convinced, as never before, that human beings are capable of anything. Anything. One of the most chilling aspects of this film is the voice-over by Manoush, portraying a nurse at UNIT 731. She absolutely gets the idea across that in order to be a part of acts such as these, she had to forfeit her very soul. This movie contains scenes of human vivisection that only a psychopathic sadist could "enjoy". The point is, not all stories have happy endings (or beginnings or middles), and exist simply because they must be told...