Black Sun: The Rape of Nanking

TerrorFirmer

http://imdb.com/title/tt0113281/

Has anyone seen this film, and is so, is it any good? There's a newer DVD release out recently so I was thinking of picking it up.

tj-music.com

I haven´t seen the film and I am not sure if I want to. It is always a double edged sword wether to look or not to look at the atrocities of human nature.

ShiverinEskimo

Based on what I've read online about the Nanking massacre it would make for some grim viewing. But people should never turn their back on an attrocity for the sake of their stomach contents. Brutal stuff..

Xcom2

It is quite a good film.Although how Tartan got this through uncut is a mystery as there is one scene that I could never imagine the BBFC passing.I guess it help's when the film is of limited appeal and subtitled.

The older release(region 1) from UNEARTHED has a documentary on it "Why We Fight" The Battle Of China" a 1944 Propaganda Film which is better than the main feature.

Overall this is an interesting film that shed's light on an period of Japenese history that they still have difficulty admitting to.

X

TerrorFirmer

Xcom dunno if we were watching the same film but I've just finished watching this movie - which incidentally is called The Nanking Massacre, not the Rape of Nanking, which was the title of a book I was reading. So, oops.

Anyway - appalling film. Tartan should be ashamed to release this drivel on their label.

There were a handful of good scenes that held promise - namely the scenes of the Japanese soldiers mowing down the mobs of chinese people and the burning of the thousands of bodies by the river banks.

They must have used the entire budget in these scenes however because the rest of the movie looked like it was shot in someones back garden. No sense whatsoever of ongoing war, nor of a city enviroment. Nothing, in fact, other then countless tiny sets, cramped scenes and the like with laughable direction, acting and in fact, virtually every aspect one would associate with a film. The gore, worth mentioning if only for the box being plastered in self proclaimed heights of horror and violence, is absolutely useless and is actually more funny then horrifying and as such is a total farce.

On one hand you have some beautiful scenes - beautiful, in the sense, that they are genuinely moving - like the mentioned scenes above. Then you have this sort of garbage like a Japanese soldier laughing while he rips a baby out of a womans stomach - trust me, as sick and horrificly moving as it sounds, it looks like something from a Troma movie and is absolutely laughable, not to mention about as realistic as...god, I just don't know.

A well deserved 0/10 from me. This film, if words can convey and emphasize this enough, is a total and absolute joke, both to film in general and to such an important historical event that deserves so much more then this tripe in its memory.

TerrorFirmer

Have been watching "Men Behind the Sun", another film by the same director of the above film.

So far it's quite good - very disturbing, but effectively and realistically so. A far superior film to Nanking (which in itself isn't saying much)