Jigoku (1960, Nobuo Nakagawa) (Patreon)

58/100

So this takes, shall we say, a turn (albeit one telegraphed by the title, for those who know what it means). Frankly, I was starting to get pretty exasperated an hour in, as more and more characters suffered absurd semi-accidental deaths—if memory serves, there's one hit-and-run accident, one fatal car crash, two people plummeting from the same high bridge within minutes of each other (but totally separately), and then another deadly fall, this time indoors. What's more, almost none of these folks have any plausible reason to be assembled at the old folks' home where nominal protagonist Shirō has gone to visit his terminally ill mother—everyone just sort of follows him there, individually and in most cases for no very good reason. Apart from the occasional striking composition, e.g. ultra-low-angle shots at a strip joint (one of which features a bizarre optical illusion that had me genuinely uncertain for a while whether that scallop-shaped hole was in the background ceiling or a foreground table)...

...there just wasn't much of interest, with both narrative and psychology coming across as largely random. For good (or at least comprehensible) reason, it turns out, as Nakagawa's only goal, one recognizes in hindsight, was creating a morally dubious ensemble via whom he could eventually conduct us on a guided tour of actual, literal Hell, complete with surprisingly graphic eternal torment. Watching Jigoku’s lengthy home stretch—a good 40 minutes—is a lot like wandering through an enjoyably chintzy Halloween hell house (as seen in George "Joshua" Ratliff's documentary Hell House), with a new gruesome vision around every corner. See! a man flayed to his skeleton. Behold! adulterers and pervs drowning in an enormous lake of blood. Egad! that dude's being slowly sawed in half. The entire sequence has been deliberately underlit, each atrocity unfolding in a single concentrated pool of light (the better to avoid costly set construction/dressing, no doubt), and it's never remotely scary or upsetting. Nor would I call the film as a whole particularly satisfying, given that fully ⅗ of it amounts to needlessly protracted setup for a grotesque carnival. At the end, though, you know that you saw the fuck outta that. Which is worth something.