The scale and scope of the Holocaust is unfathomable. The execution and eradication of a group of people, let alone 6 million, is unquestionably one of the most depraved times in human history. Sadly, there's been other atrocities just as sick and horrific, it's just they're in the shadow of the Holocaust. One such atrocity happened at the start of the Holocaust, perhaps coherently so, was The Rape of Nanking.

Japan invaded China in the mid 1930s for steel and other materials to help in their war effort. But along the way, due to a variety of reasons, most notably the dehumanizing in their education system about the Chinese, they began a reign of terror. Rape, looting and killing followed the Japanese army along the way towards the city of Nanking. By the time they got there, the Chinese government decided to not protect the city, as it wasn't strategic enough. This allowed the Japanese to burn the city down, raping 20,000 women, children and elderly, as well as killing +/-200,000. This lasted 6 weeks.

In the mid 80s, after being a little burned out of the Shaw Brothers studio system, director Mou Tun-fei left for Taiwan for a different direction for his career. There, he learned about another Japanese atrocity on his fellow Chinese people in the Unit 731, in which the Japanese did horrific scientific experiments on POWs in the 1930s. An idea occurred: MEN BEHIND THE SUN.

This notorious shocker, one of the first Category III films, depicted these experiments in all their horrific glory in a pseudo docudrama. Critically lambasted for its exploitative depiction of these events, it didn't stop Mou from years later, to direct what will be his final film, BLACK SUN: THE NANKING MASSACRE (aka MEN BEHIND THE SUN 4).

The film is nonstop. Opening in a cold, silent black screen with text, it soon explodes as the Japanese military order the cleansing. Early on, we get one of the film's more notorious moment of a bayonet cutting into a woman's pregnant stomach, ripping the fetus out on it, as the mother holds on to the umbilical cord and intestines, in a gruesome tug of war. There's plenty of graphic violence like this - mass shootings, child violence, rapes, decapitatios, and it's aided by the use of stock photos and documentary footage. It's a grim film, gone is any of the dark humor that would coat later CAT III films.

The film moves at a fast pace like I mentioned, even with all the information of on screen text of who's who, but the film ends with a quiet moment on Christmas Eve where two boys on a lonely street at night, walk by each other without acknowledging one another, without joy. It's the film's SCHINDLER'S LIST moment; where that film has the little girl in the red coat, a juxtapositionof violence and innocence. Mou, in what's probably him in rebuttal towards MEN BEHIND THE SUN's critics, fills this with historical accuracy. Well, enough so to maximize the reality, with a little drama. It works and it's also wildly a beautiful looking film, especially the scene where Japanese soldiers light the river on fire and the sky fills with black smoke. It's haunting.

The film ends like it began: quiet, with screen text honoring the victims and telling what happened to the Japanese commanders. More troubling than this film's gore, is that Japan had largely either tried to lessen the event or outright denied it. Seriously. As of 2014, there is now an official day of memorial in China. There's hesitation in calling this a masterpiece, but it's damn good if not great, if you can ever be in the mood. But less we forget the 200,000+ victims.