Jigoku (The Criterion Collection)
by Nobuo Nakagawa
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Fumiko Miyata, Hiroshi Shinguji, Shigeru Amachi, Utako Mitsuya, Yoichi NumataDirector: Nobuo Nakagawa
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Japanese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-09-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Criterion
Movie Reviews of Jigoku (The Criterion Collection)
Movie Review: Death is the door
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Jigoku (The Criterion Collection)
JIGOKU - DVD MovieAs long as human beings have conceived of an underworld, they have sought to represent it in art. Nobuo Nakagawa's 1960 film Jigoku joins this artistic niche alongside Dante's Inferno and Monkeybone starring the great Brendan Fraser. The story, meant primarily to provide a frame from which to hang a series of creepy set designs, concerns a college student, Shiro Shimizu (Shigeru Amachi) who flees a hit-and-run accident. Even though he wasn't the one driving, Shiro is plagued with guilt, which begins to interfere with his courtship of Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), whose father just happens to be a theology professor who lectures on Buddhist concepts of Hell. The first half of the film sets the stage for the cast's decent into Hell, where things start to get really freaky. Lit with sickly blue and red light, Nakagawa's vision of the afterworld is bleak and expressionistic. In one scene, lovers struggle to come together across a field of jagged glass shards. In another, the damned run across fields of wriggling hands and feet. Perhaps most disturbing, many of those condemned to an eternity of suffering find their heads and wrists shackled in what appear to be boards in the shape of coffin lids. It's no wonder audiences of the time were scared witless. For a contemporary viewer, however, it's easier to observe the film as an exercise in creative cinematography and a precursor to the J-horror genre. More than the imagery, it?s this subgenre's roots in spirituality that give it the power to chill, with the implication that we bring torture upon ourselves with our own moral violations.
The Criterion Collection does its usual fine job presenting the disc with plenty of extras. The "Building the Inferno" featurette is an amusing glimpse into the working methods of the enigmatic--and hard-drinking--Nakagawa, considered by many in Japan a third-tier director. It's hard to tell whether the transfer itself or the original film is too dark--one is inclined to believe the latter; many of the pre-Hell scenes are blackened to the point of making it hard to see who's doing what. But no one should expect anything light and sunny from this DVD. --Ryan Boudinot
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