I recorded Jigoku
And, well, it’s Japanese, so it’s two hours of men who can’t hold their liquor, simpering women — and swords!
Overflowing with brackish ponds of bubbling pus, brain-rattling disjunctions of sound and image, and at times almost dauntingly incomprehensible plot twists and eye-assaulting bouts of brutish montage, Jigoku is more than merely a boundary-pummeling classic of the horror genre—it’s as lurid a study of sin without salvation as the silver screen has ever seen.
A tale of two male college students—one weak, one evil—who make a sudden detour from the path of righteousness and wind up on the road to hell, Jigoku’s plotline takes off from the same real-life Leopold-Loeb murder case that served as the basis for both Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion
. (…)
Fusing the goriest details of thirteenth-century jigoku-zoshi (hell scroll paintings) with Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s nineteenth-century ukiyo-e illustrations of innocence disemboweled—and climaxing in a centrifugal final blast of berserk, quasi-Butoh theatrics that seems to anticipate the lysergic gyrations of the 1960s’ Living Theatre as much as the flesh-hungry flailings of Night Of The Living Dead
—Jigoku’s dazzlingly art-directed and emotionally devastating evocation of unstaunchable dread continues to leave even the most stoic of modern moviegoers in a state of stunned dismay.
