Jigoku

1960 horror film

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A student's life unravels after he and a friend are involved in a hit-and-run accident. He and seemingly everybody he knows then winds up in hell. Oh, snap!

Definitely a more interesting movie than it is a good one, Jigoku reminds me a lot of those old propaganda films warning teenagers about what will happen if you experiment with weed. Here, the lesson is that you should choose your friends wisely and not befriend people who will trick you into killing people. It's ultimately just as silly as Dwain Esper's 30's "educational" films or Reefer Madness. It's really almost two separate films with the first half building sinful characters and the second half punishing them. The second half, of course, is the more interesting half with some low-budget Boschian imagery with lots of severed limbs, rivers of blood, and screaming. The visuals are surrealistic and gross (in fact, this is supposedly the first "gore" film) but they're not any scarier or more innovative than the depictions of hell in films that were made much earlier. Disjointed storytelling in the first half of the movie actually makes that a sort of weird experience, too, like watching off-kilter melodrama. Jigoku leans heavily on color symbolism and also employs some pretty inventive camera angles. This is much better than that horrible What Dreams May Come movie.