Philosophy of a Knife Limited Edition

One of the most ambitious, graphic, deeply disturbing and heartbreaking films ever conceived.
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...

Not Iskanov's best by a longshot, but still valuable.
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...

Creepy and disturbing at first...
I bought this DVD knowing full well that it would not be easy to watch, but little did I know the real reason why. The film is several hours long, four hours to be exact. On the good side of things, the angles and lenses used are artistic and unsettling. I know that sounds like a pretty bland explanation, but the camera work is quite good. That is about the only good thing about the movie really. While watching it, I got that feeling that a lot of other movies had borrowed some of its better elements since its release in 08...or maybe it's the other way around. Who knows? Who cares? Gore porn gets boring to this desensitized soul after an hour or two so the film lost much of its appeal. Even the stark reality of the Unit 731 experiments on which the film is based cannot save it after the third hour of seeing a man "microwaved" on a micro film budget. The actors and effects are not good enough to convey such an atrocity but I commend the effort. My advice to those out there looking for...

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