there that evening, as Ma goes off to fetch his lover Yu'er from a neighboring village. During the feast, Captain Sakatsuka demands to have the man who captured Hanaya. He also accuses Ma of sneaking off to fetch resistance fighters. Not given a satisfactory answer, he orders all villagers to be killed and the village to be burned. Ma and Yu'er return on a raft only to find the entire village in flames. Meanwhile, Hanaya is about to commit harakiri before being stopped by Captain Sakatsuka and informed that Japan has recently surrendered, and the war is over. After the Chinese National Revolutionary Army takes back the area, Dong is publicly executed for collaborating with the enemy. Ma, bent on revenge, disguises himself as a cigarette vendor and loiters outside the Japanese encampment, now converted into a POW camp. When two Japanese soldiers come out to buy cigarettes, Ma hacks them with an axe and breaks into the camp, killing more POWs. He finds and pursues Hanaya, but is brought down by guards before he can kill the latter. Major Gao, commander of the Chinese Army contingent administering the town, condemns Ma's act as too despicable to deserve death by the hands of a Chinese soldier, and instead orders a Japanese POW to carry out the execution before a massive crowd. Captain Sakatsuka hands a katana to Hanaya, who takes careful aim before delivering the fatal strike. As Ma's head falls to the ground, it rolls nine times, blinks three times, and smiles, just as 'One Strike' Liu's victims were supposed to have done. Genre The film is a war drama with a dark sense of humor about the Japanese invasion of China. It shows the brutality of war and how it affects the Chinese people. Historical background The events of Devils on the Doorstep take place in the last few years of the Second Sino-Japanese War. While the story is fiction, it is set during the events of 1944-1945 and the final moments leading up to Japan's surrender, marking the end of World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War. The film takes a different approach in comparison to other Chinese cinema, which traditionally is anti-Japanese and contains the Chinese hero narrative. The opening invasion of China by the Japanese and the atrocity that was the Nanjing Massacre created even stronger anti-Japanese sentiments that progressively grew stronger as the