Friends, I ask you: Why bother wasting your holiday exchanging petty, inane niceties with relatives you most likely hate three hundred plus days a year(and who never shrink from tirelessly airing every last one of your failures out to the whole family around the dinner table on an annual basis) when you can enjoy an unpalatably dry Russian turkey right here with your favorite Wop?The quicker woprophile wits who invest the nearly four and a half hours necessary to endure the whole of tonight's entry will be drawing infinite parallels between the rubbery chunks of white meat on their plate and the phony latex excess lying just as dead on the screen before them.Not that revisiting the war-driven atrocities that took place inside Japanese Unit 731 is a particularly bad idea, especially when you've got a treasure trove of rare archival footage and photographs to reinforce your own cine-vision and drive the gut-punched reality home, but of course, the hands of an amateur never once sculpted a masterpiece, superlative chisels notwithstanding.If you're somehow unfamiliar with the aforementioned Imperial Japanese experimental unit's horrendous crimes against humanity in keeping up with the Russians and Germans in the chemical and biological weapon race during the second world war, that's because the Russians went out of their way to forever erase that horrific location from the pages of history.Chinese director Tun Fei Mou tackled the controversial subject with his notoriously nasty Men Behind the Sun(1988), a far superior and more effective effort than Iskanov's in every way, if you're asking me.The Russian has produced a mostly cheap-looking, longwinded, self-indulgent fap-fest that could have been a powerful, moving film with at least three hours worth of edits, methinketh.
"...in Soviet Russia, movie edits you."
At the outset, we see Iskanov in black and white, as flanked by two fellow countrymen who blow several minutes worth of flowery smoke directly up the filmmaker's ass.Iskanov foresees an unreceptive audience for his cinematic vision, unsure of whether it is based on historic fact or his own interpretation of said truth, though he's fairly sure his film isn't a horror movie, and that the two most important ideas to take away from it are simply, 'death' and 'war'.Fair enough, Andrey, I'll keep that in mind.In between exhaustingly boring interview footage of one withered old geezer who figured prominently in the Khabarosk war crimes trials that would follow, actual film and photographs of the camp and its unfortunate human guinea pigs of all nations is slapped haphazardly together with unedited-esque amateur video recreations of the experiments themselves, as acted out by a mostly silent cast of what looks to be three Asians and a handful of male and female Russian fashion model-types, and treated to closely match the grainy black and white vintage clips(doesn't work very well, either) that they're wrapped around.The withered old geezer animatedly relates his ever-changing version of the events surrounding the construction and operations of Unit 731 from his modest apartment, where he keeps his personal copier(!) under his television set.First, he's stumbling upon the camp while picking mushrooms and conversing with the guard in Japanese(apparently, being a medical student in Harbin also somehow means you're fluent in Japanese), and threateningly told by the guard to never return if he knew what was good for him, yet he later relates having casually strolled into the courtyard where victims were tied to scattered poles with no promised retribution from the security force.How's that done, eh.Oh wait, nevermind, you're a liar, you liar, you.Back to overlong segments of cheap video snow effects and expressionless closeups.And lots of 'em, by God.
Next week on "So Two-thirds of You Thinks You Can Dance?"...
In between the tedium, as described above, for those of you into cheaply orchestrated, mostly fake-looking debased cruelty as applied by one or more actors, uninterested-looking, upon one or more Russian model-types, disrobed more often than not, and equally unconcerned by the rubbery goings on being inflicted upon them, is cinematic paydirt, indeed.Unmatched scream tracks are piped in over cutaways to embarrassingly phony prop mouths, where teeth are clumsily extricated one....by....one, over...and...over...and over.Hot nude eastern bloc blondes are strapped into a chair and giant hissing cockroaches are shoved into their open vadge.Metrosexual could-be Gap models are splashed with h2o while tied nude to a pole amidst the frostbite-inducing elements outside.A prisoner is zapped with x-rays until he's deformed by the radiation.Not entirely unwilling-looking dames are given the infectious in-out by waterheaded walking std's at gunpoint(the barrel ends up getting sucked on by the victim, mid-rape, as shots of bacteria under a microscope classily flash on by).You looking for abortions, chum?Knife has abortions, abortions, abortions.Voiceover narration for a 731 nurse is provided by Dutch-German actress Manoush, who, after minutes-long pro-Imperialist dialogue with an echo attached to it, starts to sound like the mincey bastard son of Joey Grey and Udo Kier.It should also be noted, that several members of the infamous unit went on to enjoy careers in Japanese medicine and health industry, heading U.S. funded schools, or in the case of notorious camp commander, Shirō Ishii, moving to Maryland to further research bio-weaponry.Moral of the story?In some cases, people are willing to let scientific progress trump humanity and the systematic raping of said ideal.Enjoy that Thanksgiving dinner, kiddies...
"You sleep with Wop, stupid girl, we stitch you up.How many times you are told this?"
There's some good cinematography in Knife, and Iskanov knows it, too.Why else would he repeat the same shots n' sequences over and over ad nauseum?I'm just not sure he knows where they are, so he chooses to draw them all out by leaving it all in there.Trying to hang a complex arthouse label on cheap exploitative H.G. Lewis-ish shenannigans is like calling said exploitation king a master of the modern horror film.Some creative editing(more of the powerful vintage imagery, less of everything else, though, I must admit the soundtrack is tits) might have warranted the film the pretentious airs it vainly tries to surround itself with.Four and a half hours is a long time, folks.And after watching an hour and a half's worth of goodies agonizingly stretched out to that blood-vessel bursting length for the sake of the website and you readers, I'm putting myself in for a Purple fucking Heart.You know how many cigarettes I could have smoked?Do you know how much sex I could have had?Do you know how many post-coital cigarettes I could have...okay, I'll stop there, but you get my point.Cut down to a reasonable running time, this could be thought-provoking four Wop territory, but as it stands, it's more boring than a Coldplay album.Or a Nickelback halftime performance.Whichever's funnier.One wop.
I was thinking about doing the same thing after the four hour mark.
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