Japanese Hell (aka: Jigoku (1999)) — movie review
So here’s a film that’s received a bit of bad online press due to a rather common misconception (and one initially shared by myself). Teruo Ishii’s Jigoku is not a remake of the 1960 Jigoku, but the result of a merging of two separate Ishii projects due to budgetary constraints and studio mandates. The resulting picture shares only its name and its depiction of punishments in Buddhist hell with the Nobuo Nakagawa classic. But that isn’t to say Ishii’s picture isn’t worth a look. For Ishii fans and lovers of true low budget cult flicks Japanese Hell will prove quite the interesting-curiosity, what with its dramatic shifts in tone, from dour drama to outright gore-fest, and its full on “Hair” style ending, replete with dancing, and later disrobing female cast-members.
Ishii’s Jigoku (from here on referred to as Japanese Hell) concerns a young woman approached by Enma (a gender flipped Queen of Hell) and invited to view the torments awaiting the living should their life prove a sinful existence, in hopes she will in turn spread the word about the dangers of sin. While in Hell, the woman is invited to view sinner’s transgressions as well as their much deserved punishments. The first to meet the knife is a creepy child killer (Hisayoshi Hirayama, who would later play the Beast in Ishii’s final film, Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf). His tale is relatively short, comprising maybe 12 minutes of the film, and featuring a surprising amount of questionable black comedy. Second, we bear witness to the planning and execution of the infamous Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinriku cult. It is here that the film splits, careening off into a rather lengthy segment on cult membership, brainwashing, and human rights abuses. While certainly not the reason I picked up the film in the film in the first place, the segment was arguably one of the most interesting of the film, and the one that most felt like vintage Ishii. Eventually the Japanese Hell does return to its Hell and punishment start, complete with its carnival-esque exhibition of pain, and confidently quaint special effects work (think miniatures, dolls, rubber, and loads of red paint).
Sure, Japanese Hell is definitely not for everyone. Film school devotees will mock the flat visual style, the stage play mockup of hell, the simplistic and rather stiff acting, the radical shifts in tone, and some of the more perverse elements of the tale. Even cursory cult watchers might find the film’s unbalanced narrative and “laughable” special effects more off-putting than enticing. But the rare breed of old school genre fanatics will recognize these faults as exactly what makes Ishii’s films as fun and interesting as they are. At 80 years old, Ishii was still making films the way he wanted to, with his ragtag crew of performance artists, babes, greenhorn actors, and cult masters, and having quite a bit of fun doing it (Heck, one needs only to take a look at the bevy of rubber cockroaches and radio controlled rats in this picture to imagine a gleeful Ishii behind the camera). Japanese Hell may not be the best Ishii film, and sure, by standard cinema criterion it’s far from even a good film, but when evaluated with its budget, genre, and notoriously iconoclastic director in mind, Japanese Hell might just be worth a watch.
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