It details the various cruel medical experiments Unit 731 conducted on Chinese and ethnic Russian prisoners towards the end of the war.

The purpose of the experiments is to find a highly contagious strain of bubonic plague, to be used as a last-ditch weapon against the Chinese population.

When the young soldiers realize what has happened, they stage a minor uprising by ganging up and physically beating their commanding officer.

Afterwards, Unit 731 destroys evidence of their research, including gassing the surviving test subjects to death and blowing up the facilities.

It was originally banned in Australia[4] and caused public outcry in Japan to such an extent that director Mou even received threats on his life.

[6] The film garnered further controversy for its use of what Mou claims to be actual autopsy footage of a young boy and also for a scene in which a live cat appears to be thrown into a room to be eaten alive by hundreds of frenzied rats.

noting that "Explosive material is dramatically potent and could have been handled tastefully, as with Kon Ichikawa's classic films like Fires on the Plain" but "resorts to nauseating sensationalism, with butcher-shop depiction of autopsies on live subjects, a disgusting "decompression" experiment spewing intestines out of a victim and a horrendously realistic scene of a pussycat bloodily mauled by a room full of rats.