Jigoku

Plot synopsis:
A young Tokyo theology student, Shirō (Shigeru Amachi), is set to marry his girlfriend, Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), the daughter of his professor, Mr. Yajima. After announcing the engagement, Shirō's dark and unsettling colleague, Tamura (Yôichi Numata), drives Shirō home, suggesting that Shirō had been sleeping with Yukiko for some time. Taking a side street at Shirō's request, Tamura hits and kills drunken yakuza gang leader, Kyōichi. Though Shirō wants to stop, Tamura keeps driving, stating that it does not concern him and that ultimately, the murder is Shirō's fault for asking him to drive down the street. Unbeknown to either of them, Kyōichi's mother (Kiyoko Tsuji) witnessed everything and resolves to find and kill them.
Though Tamura feels no guilt for the murder, Shirō does and attempts to go to the police. After telling Yukiko of what happened, Shirō insists that they take a taxi cab to the police station, despite Yukiko's pleas to walk instead. While in the cab, Shirō hallucinates that Tamura is driving the cab, and it crashes, killing Yukiko. After her funeral, Shirō seeks solace in the arms of strip bar worker and Kyōichi's grieving girlfriend Yoko (Akiko Ono), who discovers Shirō's culpability for the hit-and-run after sleeping with him and, with Kyōichi's mother, plots revenge.
Shirō receives a telegram that his mother, Ito, who lives in a country-side retirement community run by his father, Gōzō, is dying and rushes to see her. There, he meets the other residents including a disgraced painter, Ensai, who is painting a portrait of Hell, a former reporter, Akagawa, a corrupt detective, Hariya, and the community doctor, Dr. Kasuma. He meets Sachiko (also played by Mitsuya), a nurse and Ensai's daughter, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Yukiko, and is taking care of his mother. During his stay, Shirō and Sachiko become close while each of the residents' sordid activities are revealed: His father carries on an open affair while his mother lays dying and also cheats the community of its money by cutting corners; the painter is wanted for a crime in another city; the detective threatens to turn the painter in unless he gives her Sachiko to marry; and the doctor knows his diagnoses are wrong, but feels seeking a second opinion too cumbersome. Both Mr. and Mrs. Yajima, both despondent after Yukiko's death, arrive by train to pay their respects to Shirō's mother. Ito dies, and Ensai blames Gōzō; decades ago, he and Ito were lovers before Gōzō came between them and married her leaving her unhappy. Inexplicably, Tamura appears and reveals that each of the residents has some complicity in a murder: Mr. Yajima killed his comrade during the war, stealing his water for himself; both the detective and reporter framed or slandered innocent men who then both committed suicide; and the doctor knew his diagnosis of Ito's condition was wrong, but chose not to tell anyone.
Yoko tracks Shirō down and meets with him on a rope bridge in the area. There she reveals her identity and attempts to shoot him while Kyōichi's mother watches from the trees, but she trips and falls to her death. Tamura appears, and the two struggle over the gun, and Tamura also falls into the gorge. Shirō stumbles back in time for the community's tenth anniversary party, where Gōzō has knowingly allowed cheap, rancid fish to be served to the residents. As the party descends into debauchery, Mr. and Mrs. Yajima both decide to leap in front of the train, killing themselves, and Gōzō's mistress falls to her death following an altercation. The residents die from consuming the tainted fish, and Kyōichi's mother sneaks into the party, poisoning the remaining residents' wine, killing them. Tamura, near death, stumbles into the party and shoots Sachiko, while Kyōichi's mother strangles Shirō to death and then commits suicide.
In Limbo, Shirō encounters Yukiko, who reveals that she was pregnant with his child, a baby girl named "Harumi", but has sent her floating away on the river of the underworld and begs Shirō to save her. Shirō enters Hell and is sentenced to punishment in the Eight Realms of Hell by Lord Enma for his sins. While running through Hell to find his daughter, he encounters each of his acquaintances, who suffer, in gruesome fashion, a variety of punishments for their sins, such as being boiled and burned alive, dismembered and flayed, or cut apart and beaten by ogres, only to be revived to suffer anew. Meanwhile, Tamura taunts Shirō, saying there is no escape from Hell, before being butchered for giving his soul over to evil. In a realm filled with glass shards jutting from the ground, Shirō finds Sachiko, but their reunion is interrupted by Shirō's mother, who shamefully reveals that Sachiko is his sister: Shirō is actually Ensai's son, and Sachiko is actually her daughter, also a product of her later affair with Ensai. Shirō is disgusted with his family, and continues searching for his daughter, determined to live and save her. While caught in a vortex of damned souls, he finds his baby daughter helplessly rotating on the Buddhist wheel of life. Lord Enma gives Shirō one chance to save his daughter, otherwise she too will suffer for all eternity in Hell. As Yukiko, Sachiko, and his mother call to him, Shirō leaps onto the wheel, but cannot reach his daughter.
The moment is frozen in time, revealed to be nine o'clock: the exact time that everyone at the party has finally died, including Ensai, who has hanged himself after completing his portrait of Hell and set it on fire. In a final scene, both Sachiko and Yukiko stand smiling in peaceful light, calling to Shirō as lover and sister, respectively, with lotus petals falling around them, symbolizing mental and moral purity.

Tags: revenge, psychedelic, violence

Review:
If good movie is sin Jigoku will surely take you to hell.
It's somewhat bizarre combination of drama, horror, film noir and art house where happy moments are more rare than good movies in Hollywood.While the hell sequences of Jigoku seem to gather most of the attention I think that the story as a whole is what makes this movie good.
It proceeds fluently from disaster to another and while some events lead to unexpected results the script never leaves a viewer with a feeling that the twist was added just for the twist's sake (as is the case with many new movies).Technically the movie is awesome; good acting, great score (especially the haunting vocals) and beautiful cinematography.
From modern perspective some of the hell sequences are way outdated (mainly the demons) while some look brilliant even today (settings like the river bank and some of the gore effects like the guy who gets flayed).I doubt that Jigoku pleases everyone but if you're into bleak and uncompromising movies this is almost a must see.
Finally I was able to secure a copy and I sat down to watch the horror.For the first hour of this film we watch as our hero lives a life that is more or less a living hell.
Words can't aptly describe the assault on the senses that is JIGOKU but I'll try anyway: over-used phrases like fascinating, surreal, disturbing and unique instantly come to mind - but the film is all of these and more.
By now, I have a fair number of strange Japanese films under my belt - but this one's something else entirely!From the stylized approach (shooting from odd angles and the occasional adoption of a greenish hue) to its plethora of arresting imagery (especially the gruesome body piercing - sword through neck, eye-gouging, feet stamping on huge needles, torso sawed in half, etc.), director/co-writer Nakagawa's vision of Hell is surely among the most visceral ever depicted on the screen.
Still, with respect to both the microcosmic viewpoint of the plot and the film's vivid color scheme, it also reminded me of GOKE - BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL (1968), while its essential nihilism (I literally lost count of the number of people killed off during the first hour!) looks forward to BLIND BEAST (1969).The doppelganger element - in the DVD's main supplement, a 39-minute featurette, it's mentioned that the script was partly inspired by the Faust legend - heightens the film's already disquieting aura: Yoichi Numata as an emissary of Hell in human form (though he's not spared the painful retribution for his sins once the scene shifts to the netherworld) is especially effective; interestingly, the actor was disappointed by his own performance and admits now that he couldn't understand the role!
However, I need to point out that - much like I had written of Ingmar Bergman's THE RITE (1969) - the plot reaches a level of implausible melodrama as to feel almost like a parody (even more so when considering the various characters' penchant for bursting into sentimental songs a' la the work of John Ford!).Anyway, while I found the DVD transfer somewhat dark, I'm glad to say that the copy I own is the 'Second Pressing' - this means that the problem concerning a 2-minute sequence, which previously got skipped when watching the disc on a DVD player, has now been fixed.
Originally intended for Eclipse, Criterion's sub-label - back when it was supposed to release little-known genre/exploitation titles - I feel that the film is important enough to warrant its place in the official Collection.The bits from GHOST STORY OF YOTSUYA (1959) shown in the featurette were very intriguing and, hopefully, won't be too long in coming; still, I was equally itching to learn more about the various 'B' horror films by Nakagawa and production company Shintoho (which had actually started out by making such masterworks of World Cinema as Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG [1949] and Kenji Mizoguchi's THE LIFE OF OHARU [1952]!) whose posters form the extensive still gallery...
Although I have to admit that I'd never heard of the film prior to Criterion's DVD announcement, Chuck Stephens - in his rather pretentious essay in the accompanying booklet (though he perceptively suggests that the pairing of the dead yakuza's mother and girlfriend may well have anticipated the deadly female relatives of ONIBABA [1964]) - believes that JIGOKU ought to be thought of in the same terms as such horror landmarks as EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959), BLACK Sunday (1960), PEEPING TOM (1960) and PSYCHO (1960), films which collectively brought an unprecedented maturity to the genre.
Meanwhile Shirô decides to turn himself in to the police and he takes a taxi with Yukiko but there is a car crash and Yukiko dies, in the beginning of the bizarre journey to hell of Shirô."Jigoku" is a weird and insane Japanese horror cult movie from the 60's.
Almost everyone's evil and even the people who've committed fairly understandable and, I'd think, forgivable sins end up in hell.
"Naraka" the Buddhist word for Hell, we are told when the film opens means roughly "abdonimal" or "excrusiating", and though it's concept is more abstract than the Wests, it's torture's are much more specific, and would make Eli Roth blush.The story, begins with young man, who get's in the wrong car with the wrong guy(Tamura, who just appears out of nowhere, and then usually just to cause trouble or point out others sins), who has a hit and run, with a drunken Yakuza.
Girlfriend dies, mother becomes terminally ill, father revealed as an unrepentant adulterer and reprobate, a doppleganger of his girlfriend re-appears, and the girlfriend and mother of the man he killed are on his tail too, which all come together in one hellish night of murder, revenge, and accidental death that takes them all.The next half hour to forty minutes takes place in Hell.
We watch a series of spectacles from the outer depths of purgatory to the inner rings of the vortex of torment, where our Hero after meeting his wife again (who may have been his sister, it's revealed, at least one of the dopplegangers was), goes on a quest to find the soul of his brother/son, who is shown on screen as a baby riding a leaf down a river of blood.Severed heads, flailing, a field of faces half buried (images I recognize from "What Dreams May Come" Hell sequence), and much, much, more.Jigoku, is one of the few horror movies I've seen, that has no pre-cursors, nothing has ever looked this, though plenty have tried since.
There's elements of theater, b-movie conventions, theology, sharp editing and directing, and some of the best set design I've ever seen.Though over 60 years old, it feels surprisingly not too dated, and though bleak as any film about "Hell" could be, it's important to note that Buddhist Hell is more like a place for shedding psychic skin, than an eternal prison, as the last frame of our hero and his child on opposite ends of the wheel of torment, followed by a distant light shimmering in the darkness, would suggest.So...not to scary, but Brilliant.
Certainly not a film for everyone, 'Jigoku' combines visions of Dante, surreal art, nightmarish tortures, and of course, Japanese camp.
Director Nobuo Nakagawa presents it all in a dark, dreamlike way, shocking us (mildly) with the death of characters in the first part of the movie, and ramping this up to really shocking us with his vision of the torments of hell.
Where the film is weaker is in providing reasons for why all of the characters end up in hell in the first place.
When they get off scot-free after a hit-and-run accident, two friends go about their lives until their two family's start to come under mysterious supernatural forces, eventually dragging them into a struggle with the powers of Hell for their actions and must try to escape alive.This is definitely an exciting film with a lot to like.
This is a highly visual film, with a large amount of time spent on simply creating wonderful images for inconsequential moments, such as the encounter on the bridge to the weirdness of the caricatures in the opening montage to their idea of Hell, where shots feature select objects sitting in the middle of the picture with a black frame around everything else, these create all sorts of impressive and enjoyable series of scenes.
When it gets to the final act, it becomes far more prevalent as it's literally in the afterworld and is just a continuous stream of incredible images, from the interactions with the God of the Underworld to the scenes with them by the river meeting each other and the conclusion where the hero climbs along the cogs of a giant machine to rescue the spirit of his unborn child that is one of the most exciting and action-packed scenes in the film.
One of the only problems here is the fact that, during the middle segment, it noticeably stops being a horror film and instead turns into a character study about the effect their actions have on them.
we get some great effects and moods, which are ahead of their time and look like a precursor to such films as Fulci's "The Beyond".What struck me as odd, though, was the idea of "heaven" and "hell" in a Japanese film.
A typical bad film will have various moments of deficient acting, but Jigoku is systematically deficient, meaning that there are extremely long periods of time where just about everyone on screen is stinking the place out.
For example, the latter half of the film – which takes place in Japanese Hell – is basically a 45-minute trainwreck that is the epitome of quintessential artificiality.
Just look for the dude who gets "flayed", which will undoubtedly have the viewer rolling hysterically.At one point the movie shows extreme closeups of random people screaming at the camera, which gets very annoying.The finale has the lead character run in ultra cheesy fashion (in slow-motion) after his baby, which is strapped onto a big, turning wheel.
It's almost as if the filmmakers weren't so much intending on depicting hell as they were attempting to INFLICT hell on the viewer with this pathetic attempt at film-making.To supplement the horrible finale with the spinning baby, the lead character jumps in an attempt to save the child, but mis-times it so badly that he ends up on the OPPOSITE SIDE of the giant wheel.
I knew this guy was stupid, but it doesn't get any more moronic than that.Some gore (that was a ahead of its time) and a few scenes with fantastic imagery could have saved this one from the cinema sewer, but everything else is of such an unbelievably low quality that this film easily steamrolls to the bottom of the barrel..
The film is a true work of art.Jigoku weaves the story of a young man who has a devil of a friend.
As for me it is principle question: who was the first in modern horror genre?Italy or Japan?Father of Italian horror Mario Bava was first who explore sex and violence theme ("The Vampires"," The Mask of Satan ").Most cinema products of Italy interest (at 50s) rather "historycal" adventures than tits and blood.Front edge of Japanise genre cinema was Godzilla (at 50s).Without sexual tits too.It seems that Nobuo Nakagava one of the first directors who knowingly using shocking images (blood,tortures) and naked bodies for creation of modern sad Gothic movie - "Jigoku" (1960).May be some times "Jigoku" is too much slow movie.But always impressive style (espetualy in second part of the film)..
Seriously, as far as old fashioned Japanese movie go, this one is pretty much straight-forward and understandable enough for western people, when you have subtitles available of course.But above all things this movie still manages to impress the most with its visuals.
The mother and widow of the slain yakuza boss have also chosen such a fate- as they plot their revenge against the two killers...by any means necessary.The fact that Tamura seems to know everything about everyone- including all their dirty secrets; and how he manages to pop up whenever bad things are happening...and people die...leads you to believe that he is some sort of demon.
The final shot offers an interesting little psychological twist, that makes you question whether this was all truly a journey to hell; or whether it was all a hallucinatory experience, brought on by the onset of death, resulting from the consumption of poison fish heads.A truly beautiful film, all around.
And of course it's all downhill for Shiro as bad karma just brews, left and right everything goes wrong to the point of his inevitable doom which is when things really get exciting or terrifying however you see it, but that's what were all really in this film for the visuals/journey to Hell.The hell sequence is fantastic, the only other film that has this type of sequence is one of the Coffin Joe films but that's a different story.
Jigoku is a very strange and disturbing 1960 Japanese horror film whose title literally means "Hell".
The film opens with student Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) who reluctantly falls in with another student named Tamura (Yoichi Numata), despite Shiro feeling very uncomfortable with this morally void young man.
Even worse, the drunk Yakuza's mother and girlfriend seek revenge and Shiro becomes surrounded with a group of people who, like him, all have sins to hide.
Director Nobuo Nakagawa boldly answers this question as the final act of the film literally takes place in Hell and eternal punishment is brutally given out to Shiro and the sinful individuals that came to surround him.
The film takes a surreal turn as Nobuo gives us a visually haunting portrayal of hell and the diverse punishments suffered by those who find themselves there.
It is a slow paced film but, that serves the story as we experience Shiro's guilt and the lack of morality by those around him, then are taken to Hell with them to see them receive their punishment.
Jigoku (1960) ** 1/2 (out of 4) A college student (Shigern Amachi) has his life literally go to Hell after he and a buddy accidentally run down a drunken gangster who jumps out in front of their car.
For the student to be damned to Hell for what he did and to have to suffer through various deaths just seemed a bit too much for me and this dragged down the first hour of the film for me.
After the hour mark when we finally get to Hell is when things begin to pick up with the bizarre visuals and (for the time) graphic death scenes.
Most reviews of this remarkable movie understandably focus on its last 40 minutes, which constitute the most bizarre, gruesome and sadistic scenes in any country's studio-produced feature films up to that time.
Shiro, seized with guilt for his complicity in the drunken Yakuza's death (which consisted entirely of suggesting the route they took), wants to make a clean breast of it, but Tamura refuses, setting in motion what becomes a Buddhist story of guilt and punishment, both here and in the afterlife.
In all of its bloodshed glory, Jigoku is also a frightening cautionary tale, which - through its brutally vivid imagery – introduces the important religious matters, such as the afterlife and what it really means to repay one's sins in hell.Two students – the first (Tamura) is the incarnation of pure evil; the second (Shiro) is a friendly guy, who just can't get rid of his devil friend – run over a drunkard somewhere during the night.
But, before he ultimately is killed, you get to meet his family and friends--who ALL turn out to be selfish and evil people.Once Shirô dies, the film enters a very surreal second portion where he is shown the various levels of this Shinto version of Hell.
But on top of that, some cheesy editing and special effects (the car accident scene with the taxi is just badly done) and too much spook house gore make this an interesting but very dull film after about 80 minutes--and it runs 106 minutes.
For a glimpse at a more traditional Japanese vision of Hades, though, one need look no further than Nobuo Nakagawa's 1960 film "Jigoku" (or, "hell"), a picture whose reputation seems to be on the rise lately, thanks in part to this great-looking Criterion DVD.
It might also be the first true gore movie, though it is too artful to really be mentioned in the same breath as Herschell Gordon Lewis or Eli Roth.The film's protagonist, Shiro, is a college student who is engaged to be married.
It starts with a back-road, hit-and-run killing of a drunk Yakuza boss and ends up with all the protagonists (including an unborn baby) dead and in hell (there is no heaven!).
Hell scenes are more like a theatrical stage production than a movie, and consist of a very effective blending of lighting and superimposed analog special effects.
Jump-cut editing especially in hell can be effective, but mostly serves to generate confusion even with extensive voice-over narration (there is little or no inter-scene continuity through out the film); the result often resembles a series of review skits.
But, the film's gimmicky draw is Nobuo Nakagawa's artistic vision of hell.
You just have to see the concoctions Nakagawa comes up with supplying surreal images of several characters suffering torments in hell.
Jigoku (aka Hell or The Sinners Of Hell) is a film that follows one man who seems to be forever burdened with hellish events.
there was Jigoku: a Japanese film which encompasses just about everything the horror genre would later come to gratify.
This may not be a perfect film but it has aged very well and it is a very effective horror movie – the very first to utilise gore in such a way.