Jigoku (1960) aka The Sinners of Hell

xich_lo_vn · Jul 28, 2012

Jigoku (1960) aka The Sinners of Hell
aka The Sinners of Hell
Genre: Horror
Country: Japan | Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Language: Japanese | Subtitles: English (.srt file)
Aspect ratio: Cinemascope 2.35:1 | Length: 101mn
Dvdrip Xvid Avi - 704x304 - 23.976fps - 1.13gb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154683/

A graduate-school student has a friend who is pure evil. His friend and he are out driving one night when they hit a drunkard and the friend leaves the accident victim to die. The student's life then goes downhill from there.

Horror film about the "Buddhist Hells"(an important distinction from Christian Hell). You don't go to Buddhist Hell because of any kind of God, you go because of past Karma, and you stay just as long as is necessary, for the pound of flesh to be rendered so to speak. "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. The two drive off, though our hero wants to go back, and from them on, everything in his life goes wrong. 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, and much, much, more.

Though over 50 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. One of the best horror movies ever.

Screen:

Search

Search

Jigoku (1960) aka The Sinners of Hell

xich_lo_vn

Well-Known Member