Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (Tartan Video)

Will attract and appall viewers in equal measure.

Film Review by Lisa Jones | 12 Nov 2006
Film title: Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (Tartan Video)
Despite sleazy-looking packaging that proclaims "this is a vile film" and features the film's single most nauseating scene emblazoned across the front cover, Tun Fei Mou's 1995 account of the Japanese Imperial Army's invasion of Nanking, China during World War II is not quite the interminable gorefest the people at Tartan Video would have you believe.

A combination of dramatization and archive documentary footage, it focuses on the innocent civilians slaughtered in their thousands, as well as examining the twisted motives behind the attack. Lengthy dialogue-driven scenes are interspersed with acts of astonishing cruelty, including a lieutenant who decapitates blindfolded victims simply to test out his samurai sword, the mass-burning of 5000 civilian corpses, and the disembowelment of a pregnant woman.

Such brutal images will inevitably attract and appall viewers in equal measure. Horror fans drawn to the film's nastiest elements may lose patience with the extensive conversational scenes between Imperial Army officials, and anyone who has somehow avoided seeing the aforementioned packaging and expects a subtle historical analysis will tire of gratuitous blood-spattered close-ups. However, despite some cheap shocks, it is Black Sun's strikingly morose conclusion that will stay lodged in the mind the longest. [Lisa Jones]
Cert. 18
Out Now
Distributor: Tartan Video http://www.tartanvideo.com