Men Behind the Sun, 1988

Most of the movies on this list are either semi-official classics or sequel-spawning hits, and all but five are in some way American. Time for an Asian weirdie that is both obscure and, to those who've seen or just heard about it, notorious. The Chinese-Taiwan docudrama Men Behind the Sun, aka Squadron 731, details the sadistic experiments undertaken by Japanese physician Shiro Ishi during his country's occupation of Manchuria. Director Mou Tunfei/T.F. Mous parades the atrocities: of a man whose intestines explode out his anus (faked), of a dead boy slit open to have his organs removed (supposedly using the corpse of a child who'd died the day before) and, most infamously, of a live cat eaten alive by hundreds of rats. You could say it's all instructive; supposedly there's nothing shown here that Ishi didn't do. Or you could say that this is splatter porn in its purest, most toxic form.