Cast:
Shigeru Amachi (Shirō Shimizu), Yōichi Numata (Tamura), Utako Mitsuya (Yukiko Yajima and Sachiko Taniguchi), Hiroshi Izumida (Kyōichi "Tiger" Shiga), Kiyoko Tsuji (Kyōichi's mother), Akiko Ono (Yoko), Hiroshi Hayashi (Gōzō Shimizu), Kimie Tokudaij (Ito Shimizu), Jun Ōtomo (Ensai Taniguchi), Akiko Yamashita (Kinuko), Torahiko Nakamura (Professor Yajima), Fumiko Miyata (Mrs. Yajima), Tomohiko Ōtani (Dr. Kusama), Kōichi Miya (Journalist Akagawa), Hiroshi Shinguji (as Hiroshi Shingûji) (Detective Hariya), Sakutarō Yamakawa (the Fisherman), and Kanjūrō Arashi (Lord Enma, the King of Hell) Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa.
Review:
It does sometimes help to pick a horror movie from a studio that just let things twist in the wind. This was actually the last film to be produced by the studio Shintoho. The studio had come around in the late 1940s because of defectors that came from a strike within Toho. They produced movies such as Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949) but could not exactly compete with the big studios. In the last years of their run before becoming bankrupt, they pumped out a good deal of cheap period ghost movies and sci-fi movies. One of the directors brought on to do a few of those movies was Nobuo Nakagawa. He actually had been directing movies since the 1930s, having risen from amateur film review writing to working in film production. He did comedies, war documentaries, thrillers, and a small amount of ghost/horror movies to go along with work for television, and he directed all the way until near his death in 1984 at the age of 79. The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) is likely the other movie he is known for. For this film (also known as The Sinners from Hell), he wrote the screenplay with Ichirō Miyagawa. As Miyagawa explained in an interview years later, the two were engaged in a discussion about the "Plank of Carneades" thought experiment in which if one would be of guilty of murder if they pushed a person off a plank to save themselves that happened to coincide with hearing a TV report of a fisherman catching fish in the Tama River that he sold to people rather than eating it due to fears of it being poisoned. One thing leads to another in then talking about Faust and alter egos and having the question asked about having an idea in mind and boom, the two got to work (apparently, the one question the studio had is where the heaven was, since the original mandate was to make a script called "Heaven and Hell" so Miyagawa joked the sequel would be about heaven). The movie was remade in 1979 by Tatsumi Kumashiro and apparently a remake was done in 1999 with Jigoku: Japanese Hell by Teruo Ishii*.
Hell or no hell, you get a visually entertaining time watching this movie eventually unfold the deck of cards that arise in punishment for the wicked. Hell isn't just a realm of torture, it can also be the things that are seen every day on here itself. There are plenty of worthy shots to appreciate and examine in detail for a movie that might as well be a canvas of suffering. The hell sequences take up roughly 40 minutes of the 100-minute runtime, and you have to understand that the movie is basically a morality play, complete with how it is staged. You know how much the actors cared? In the scenes you see of actors in dirt (on a soundstage with no props but plenty of dirt to dig), the actors themselves dug the holes. Of course, when you have a cheap movie, you can do shots with a washtub, a mirror, a stirrer and some colors and make it look like, well, something you can believe in. This also goes for "Needle Hell", which just goes with plastic and lighting to, well, make a place look like a place. It is a disorientating movie to experience and honestly, it is darkly funny if you think about it. You have a guy who has one little thing (being the passenger to a car accident) spring consequence among consequence to the people he ends up encountering from that point on, whether that involves people that fall off bridges, folks getting poisoned from sake, double-strangulation, and people committing suicide. Sure, the people in the movie are, well, people that probably deserve hell, but screw it, I enjoy seeing the strange qualities that come with weird people all getting the curtain thrust upon them. It's like a soap opera but where everyone dies (with one consolation, anyway).
And then of course there is the whole "hell" thing, presented with bits of gore in illustrating the type of punishment that takes inspiration from Buddhist ideas about hell. Technically speaking, Amachi and Numata are meant to be playing the sides of a coin, with the latter stating that Nakagawa told him that it was "about the outside and inside of a person" (like Faust). Numata was not entirely satisfied with his performance, but I find him to be a very curious presence in this film, since there are certain sequences where he just arises out of the blue like a dark cloud that can only lead to trouble that he handles with odd charm. He looms with a knowing presence of decay that we can see in all of us. Our temptations and the decisions that come from acting on (or not) those things make us who we are and, to those with the soul to do so, where we may end up. The movie sees a bunch of people who made a few choices for themselves rather than others and says, yep, you are all fit for down under. The filmmakers theorized that if it is hard to show psychological torment on screen, you might as well make it a graphic metaphor, although its mechanisms of plight do have an abrupt end in the closing. Sure, it is a crude film that probably won't win everyone over with its pacing at times, but it sure is a devilishly curious time to at least encounter once. It takes its time to really get the footing going, but if you buy into its little play before the showstopping pits of hell, the trip (not literally) will surely be worth it.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
*Speaking of names that might merit consideration down the line. And, oddly enough, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, because I found a Criterion video about Jigoku that featured him talking about the movie. New Directors Month 2026?
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