Customer Reviews

Jigoku (The Criterion Collection)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What can I say about "Jigoku"? It was certainly a film I looked forward to seeing, one that I had heard good things about. Quite frankly, what movie called "Hell" wouldn't at least be worth a look. However, while I admired the movie and would cautiously recommend it, I have to face the facts that I didn't particularly like it. Yet it's easy for me to see some camps claiming "masterpiece" status for this peculiar film--and just as easy to see others deriding it as "trash". As a film, it's really neither--but I don't dismiss it out of hand. Given the context that it's a Japanese film from 1960--the imagery is quite striking, visually alluring and seems to have had an influence on many other films even to this day.

The setup is appealing, and the characters are well presented. But you know something is off from the beginning. There are hallucinatory elements wound into our hero's daily life and his best friend appears to be an omnipresent evildoer. But just as soon as you get used to things, we're whisked off to another city I like to call "crazytown". Most of the characters presented here are petty, mean, corrupt--and worst of all not really developed. I wondered why we were being introduced to so many one dimensional villains. Then the answer came to me as people started dropping dead left and right--I realized we would soon be seeing them in "Hell".

The message I got from "Jigoku" is that most of us are sinners and murderers in life, and we will pay for those sins. Even those characters that are seemingly without sins are punished for loving the sinners. And "Hell" is where everyone pays the price.

The finale of the film does take place in "Hell". It is beautifully constructed, and I believe quite well done. It's very theatrical--if you're looking for gory realism, you're going to need to look elsewhere. If I was to recommend the film, it would most likely be for these sequences. But by this time, I had lost all track of any narrative drive in the film--so the images were all I was left with.

So--worth seeing? I believe so. Enjoyable? I'll leave that up to you. KGHarris, 9/06.

I found it interesting to watch this. It is being touted as a horror film. Would I recommend it to a horror fan? A qualified maybe. It is an old Japanese film (1960). It will be something very alien to its present target audience. Most viewers will be unfamiliar with the cultural/religious context in which it is set. Although Jigoku is correctly translated as Hell, it is not the Judaeo-Christian Hell that most viewers would have in mind. This is a Buddhist vision of Hell. It may look visually similar to western portraits of Hell but the entire concept is very different. The film presupposes the audience's familiarity with Buddhist beliefs. Firstly there is no God in original Buddhism. No supernatural deity sends Shiro's soul to Hell. In this Buddhist worldview, Shiro is in Hell simply because he believes he deserves to be there for what he perceives as his crimes in his previous life. Viewed at dispassionately, Shiro is blameless in most, if not all of his "crimes" and certainly not deserving of damnation to Hell in the western sense. Hell in Buddhism is also not eternal. (In this sense it is almost like the Catholic concept of Purgatory). The Buddhist Hell is simply one stage (the lowest) in the Wheel of Life, from which everyone can leave if they make the effort. So the film is not as pessimistic, arbitrary and utterly devoid of hope as it would appear to most western audiences. Shiro and all the others will eventually work their way out of Hell to a higher plane of existence. Tamura, described here by the western term "doppelganger", is a Hell-being and a soul in his own right. Although Tamura too can work his way out of Hell, he chooses not to, and is condemned to repeat his torment until he learns his lesson and earns progression to the next level. The final scene is a visual metaphor for the Great Mandala, the Wheel of Life. Shiro is vainly trying to reach and rescue his child on the other side of the Wheel as it ceaselessly turns. We see him struggling hopelessly without success right up to the final freeze-frame. Left unsaid is what will happen given time. Shiro will eventually learn that the key to saving his child is to let go and get off the Wheel, allowing the turning Wheel to bring his child to him. That for him will be enlightenment, and with enlightenment he will be ready to leave Hell and progress to the next stage in Life. Viewed in that light, the film has an optimistic, even uplifting ending, very different from what a western audience would infer.

The horror effects may have been good in their day but they are very dated now and look decidedly amateurish. Most of the tortures depicted, are traditional tortures featured in Eastern mythological portraits of Hell and you can see them depicted in texts, temples and theme parks across East Asia. If you are seeing it mainly for the shock or horror effects, don't bother. But it is a fascinating look at a wholly different worldview from what most westerners would be exposed to. It remains a fascinating work in its own right and deserves recognition for that alone, rather than for simply being another "J-horror" movie.

Criterion's DVD is as usual very professionally produced. The print looks its age. But it is clean, undamaged, and aside from a jumping frame here and there, is very good. It is presented in its OAR of 2.35:1 (anamorphic). Colours are very sombre, drab and dark for the most part, occasionally punctuated by hellish crimsons which look impressive when they appear. Sound is in the original Japanese 1.0 Mono and is perfectly serviceable. Optional English subtitltes are provided.

Less gory than hardcore horror fans might hope, yet more disturbing than anyone would expect, Nobuo Nakagawa's low-rent classic _Jigoku_ (_Hell_) paints a relentlessly bleak portrait of human depravity. At first the film spins a straightforward, Dostoevskian yarn about a well-meaning college student and his increasingly guilty conscience. But in the second half, events take a decidedly more Dantean turn. Nakagawa's surrealist imagery and daring camera work recall the best of the Italian horror mavens -- except that _Jigoku_ preceded their work by several years.

Criterion has opted to give this film a single-disc treatment, with a perfectly decent (though far from spectacular) hi-def transfer and the original Japanese monaural soundtrack. An informative half-hour documentary, two still-frame poster galleries and a theatrical trailer round out the extras.

To anyone who buys this please check your copy to ensure it is the second pressing. There was a technical glitch with the original pressing which resulting in some footage not displaying in the film. Criterion quickly issued a 2nd pressing

Source:
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To prelude my review, I should advise that I'm fairly new to Japanese cinema, having only seen about twenty-five movies, and not all of these were horror. If my attempt to contribute here is frowned upon by the genre's enthusiasts due to a lack of cinematic experience, I apologize profusely. For those still interested, thank you, and here goes...

Briefly, Jigoku tells the story of a young man weighted down by the guilt of his role in a fatal hit-and-run accident. Consequential manisfestations of said incident saturate this movie's duration until our protagonist's nightmarish descention into Hell.

Any admiration I can muster for this movie revolves strictly around its apparent boldness. Jigoku was filmed in 1960, and from what I've seen of Japanese horror, the surrounding five to ten years produced mostly artistic and angular scary movies that, to me, unfolded with a wonderful grace. (Onibaba, 1964, for example.) Jigoku, literally, took a giant saw to the backbone of this norm. Desensitized as I am, it was still a pleasant shock to see some of what Director Nobuo Nakagawa was trying to present.

This praise, however, ebbs when I consider what else was happening in horror cinema at the same time elsewhere on the planet. I hate to push a trite reference, but Alfred Hitchcock's Pyscho also came out in 1960. It's probably rude to compare the two in this forum, but I'm trying to make the point that Jigoku, to me, doesn't seem to have aged well.

I didn't enjoy the movie. I found the acting to be choppy and even obnoxious at times. (Which, now that I think about it, would be the best way for me to describe the abrubt, even jarring jumps from scene to scene. Not impressed.) A regular dose of glass-shattering screeches from the female actresses had me reaching uncomfortably for the volume on my remote on more than one occasion, which unfortunately had to happen during some of the film's best offerings. I'm sure this can be blamed largely on sound quality of that era and on Japanese horror in general. I've watched enough to know that screaming Asian females can hit notes of a murderous pitch. It hurts.

That being said, I think this is a movie that SHOULD be watched, if only for its importance. I was glad when it was over, but I knew that I had seen something that broke a fairly thick mold in its day. It's a trippy movie filmed on one of the most inventive sets I've seen from that time. This alone, which occupies only the last 20-30 minutes of the movie, has earned my humble recommendation.

It's definitely one of those movies that make for great conversation and I'm glad I can now weigh in on it with made-up facts like, "Japan never did recover from the dry ice depletion after this. I heard the director had to have more flown in from the U.S. during filming, even. Apparently we were bastards about it."

Or not...

- t -
6 June, 2010

Step on in to hell. This Buddhist vision of the fiery underworld is absolutely stunning. It also seems to simmer around a collective belief system in regards to death and punishment for sins.
The beginning of the movie shows the downfall of a young man who becomes trapped by his own guilt. The last part of Jigoku depicts the torment and suffering of the damned, literally in hell. The overall look is remarkably shot and completely haunting. It's incredibly violent, filled with eerie and desperate images of the lost souls. You've got bodies being sawed in half or being flayed alive down to the bone. It's a smorgasboard of brutality. I WAS BLOWN AWAY!!

The only other movie I've seen similar to this is What Dreams May Come. It's fairly obvious that movie borrowed some hellish ideas from Jigoku.
This film has reached cult status, a true masterpiece of horror.

Jigoku (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)

Imagine hell, Matt Helm-style. That's what you get in Nobuo Nakagawa's stylish, hallucinatory 1960 thriller Jigoku, a cautionary tale/morality play about the decisions ordinary people make, and the extraordinary consequences of those decisions.

The first third of this film follow Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), a guy who's just trying to get along in life. While a passenger in a car driven by his classmate Tamura (Yoichi Numata, recently of Ring), the two of them hit, and kill, a man, then leave the scene of the crime. He's not just some guy, though, and his death begins a complex, and quite unbelievable, tale of revenge, destruction, and depravity, both in the world we know (the second third of the film) and in hell itself (the final third). The first portion of the film often seems as if it's going to drag, but don't let that fool you; Nakagawa's just building up steam so that when everything gets going, he can take his foot off the brake and you'll go flying forward (rather like Tamura's driving early in the film, come to think of it).

It's an odd little film, but a very pretty (in the strictest sense; the subject matter is anything but) one; if I had more faith in various Western directors, I'd tab Jigoku as a hefty influence on everything from Performance to the Girl in Gold Boots. (I feel a lot more comfortable saying Nakagawa was an influence on the manga of Hideshi Hino, but even there, I can't be completely certain.) Whether it was the progenitor of the psychedelic films of the sixties or evolved independently of what the West was on about at the time, however, is utterly irrelevant to the average viewer's enjoyment of Jigoku as an absurdist classic. Fun stuff, highly recommended. ****

A Symphony of Hells


Crossing the river of Acheron is no cozy scrapbook moment; scanning the charred valleys of Gehenna is far and away no sightseeing excursion; the `fiery lake of sulphur' is not one we'd like to laze next to slurping Bloody Marys, absorbing its heat. The thought of the bright orange blaze of hell stokes our moral conscience, allowing us to vacation in our own reflexivity, giving us reason to ponder how far we've descended into, put theologically, the `pleasures of the flesh'. The thought-trip always ends with a swift riposte square into the center of our soul, in light of our shortcomings. Whither will we end up...after?

This film gives us such a thrust. Criterion's glistening transfer of the visually-arresting Japanese classic Jigoku ("hell") whirls us around in a blood-boiling, flesh-peeling, bone-crushing, eye-gouging, limb severing vortex that the hapless `sons of hell' are sucked into by dint of their earthly transgressions. Though the film is ostensibly Buddhist, and notwithstanding the fact that karmic retribution is always meted out with a battle axe, it always sheers away from and gives a wink at any dogmatic undertones. Nakagawa, who is no hard-bitten acolyte haranguing us over post-life itineraries, has Dante and Goethe serve as visionary add-ins in this extra-bilious stew, surrounded by a burning ring of fire. And yet, despite all that, the film is actually more terrestrial than one might suppose (more on that later).

Two theology students are driving down a backcountry road when they inadvertently (was it?) hit a drunken yakuza ("gang member"), leaving him to die in the middle of the alley. Shiro, the protagonist, wants to turn himself in while his friend Tamura, the humanoid Mephistopheles of the film who was behind the wheel at the scene, refuses. When Shiro's theology professor's daughter, Yukiko, to whom Shiro is betrothed, convinces the latter to go to the police, Yukiko dies abruptly in a car crash on the way to the police station. Racked with guilt, a despondent Shiro devolves into a libertine existence of drink and easy women. Shiro's world becomes suffused with echt-doubles of people in his formerly pleasant life, phantasmagoria abounds, and Tamura is appearing out of nowhere to ensure that his friend will not cashier them both to the authorities.

Any and all further character development carried out is meant to show that the whole crew is damned from the start, that fire and brimstone are what's in store for everyone we see. There is not a single redeeming value in Jigoku; every evil act is courted without a smidge of remorse. (Shiro feels guilty for what has happened but lacks the amount of pluck needed to know what to do with himself.) Those who have won a ticket to ride on the boat of Charon include a debauched, negligent doctor and a self-interested corrupt policeman.
The film becomes a death-zone, spurred by human, all-too-human vice and folly, each character virtually his own Faust; the Grim Reaper clearly has a field day when only halfway through the film, that is, before taking the batch of sinners down with him. Almost everyone dies from eating poisonous, guppy-sized fish sold to one throwing a rather boisterous soiree--an ensign of Acheron, the river from which the fish were gathered. As the theology professor, himself having a few skeletons in his closet, says reassuringly, "everything hinges on fate."

The venue to Nakagawa's hell is simple, very noticeably from the start shot in your average studio--it would be years before the CGI technology that brought you the hell in the filmic rendition to Todd McFarlane's "Spawn" would be available. Besides, that kind of netherworld is inspired largely from the pictures presented in what Christians call the New Testament. The hell in Jigoku is more interesting and heterogeneous. Called "Naraka," actually more purgatory-like in Buddhist teaching, is the netherworld of greatest suffering. The deathly emerald green that washes our screen in the 40-minute climax is counterpointed with the rushing fires that incite a chorus of spine-tingling yowls. Babies are heard bawling as they are held in limbo (a Roman Catholic whimsy). Ogres armed with battle axes slice off hands and feet. Amidst the blood-slathered bodies running around like crabs in a skillet is a crew of skeletons and flayed corpses. The soundtrack to all this is even more bizarre, going from a jazzy mixture of taiko drums and a tenor-sounding saxophone, to an eerier timbre a la a Ligeti etude. In short, the needling imagery to this sui generis of a scene will be seared in your memory for a long time to come.

This film has been written off as a cheesy piece of glam cinema, far-Eastern kitsch par excellence, compounded with near witless dialogue, whose popularity Criterion should have confined to its native country. The film, to be fair, still only receives specialized attention, particularly when benchmarked against movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and all its oriental thaumaturgy that elicit the dumb oohs and ahs of the uncultured Anglophone. Compared with garish, high-end films like Kwaidan, what with its expressionist visuals, laconic dialogue, and frippery costumes, Jigoku is far more accessible to Western audiences unacquainted with non-Western horror--particularly since it was only a burgeoning genre at the time--and all its subliminal incorporeality.

There is a silver lining in this darkly human story. The final cathartic scene in which we see Yukiko spinning her little purple umbrella in front of a vernal backdrop is, to this viewer, emblematic of a purified soul; the fires to which Shiro was condemned is platonic in its meaning of restitution. Jigoku, I surmise, is very much a film "of the earth" in that our own past, chock full of misdeeds and transgressions, comes back to haunt us, regardless of what religious outfit you garb yourself in. That is Nakagawa's hell in its essence; to avoid it, perhaps we should hearken back to the Nietzschean dictum, "Learn to forget!"

So glad CRITERION didn't forget this splendid Japanese classic. However, I still hope a better and improved edition of this masterpiece will come out one day, and I've been looking forwad to it since receiving CRITERION edition. The image is brillant but still having some obvious flaws, and the extras are only for ones who ain't hungry for more... C'MON, show us what's real...

Dramatic, a feast for the eyes, Powerful, intense, and disturbing...
this could be one of the most mentally terrifying films ever made. It was WAY ahead of its time. It honestly shocked me to realize that this was made in the early 60's...for any horror buff or jap-horror fans, this is a MUST OWN!