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This is one of the first gore movies ever made. When I found out Criterion, the super-serious art-film label, was releasing it on dvd in the u.s., it piqued my interest. But now that I've seen Jigoku it all makes sense- this is a low-budget exploitation movie, but with some extremely artistic flourishes and a very ambiguous moral tone. The main character is likable and most of his sins are totally accidental, as it all started to go down hill just because he was a passenger in a car that was involved in a hit-and-run with a drunken yakuza, and then things got worse when he tried to take a cab to the police to confess. On the way there, the cab crashes, killing his fiance. Eventually he finds himself surrounded by hundreds of morally corrupt people who all wind up killing each other, and then go to different hells together, where they are tortured physically and psychologically. The gore in these scenes is brutal by the standards of 1960- Psycho, Peeping Tom, Blood Feast and Black Sunday were all released around this time, but none of these feature anything comperable to the realistic flayings or graphic decapitations of living, screaming people, nor do they quite match the bleak and hopeless tone of Jigoku, which ultimately comes off as more experimental art film than cheap exploitation horror movie, though not as weighty as previous Criterion J-Horror releases Onibaba and Kwaidan. The sound and image on this disc are fantastic, especially considering the film's cheap origins. Now it is just a matter of time before Criterion releases Housu, which is my favorite Japanese horror film of all time.Read full review
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