Jigoku (eng subs) [1960] Nobuo Nakagawa

http://bayimg.com/EAddJaAdj The Sinners of Hell (1960) Jigoku (original title) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154683/ Japanese language with English subtitles Includes trailer and documentary BUILDING THE INFERNO Jigoku is a 1960 Japanese horror film, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa and starring Utako Mitsuya and Shigeru Amachi. Jigoku was re-made in 1970 by Tatsumi Kumashiro, and later re-made again under the title of Japanese Hell by Teruo Ishii in 1999. Shigeru Amachi ... Shirô Shimizu Utako Mitsuya ... Yukiko / Sachiko Yôichi Numata ... Tamura Hiroshi Hayashi ... Gôzô Shimizu Jun Ôtomo ... Ensai Taniguchi Akiko Yamashita ... Kinuko Kiyoko Tsuji ... Kyôichi's Mother Fumiko Miyata ... Mrs. Yajima Torahiko Nakamura ... Professor Yajima Kimie Tokudaiji ... Ito Shimizu Akiko Ono ... Yoko Jigoku is notable for separating itself from other Japanese horror films of the era such as Kwaidan or Onibaba due to its graphic imagery of torment in Hell. Nobuo Nakagawa asked Ichiro Miyagawa to write the script, which was originally supposed to be called Heaven and Hell, under order of producer Mitsugu Okura. Mitsugu Okura read the script and angrily said to Miyagawa that "Heaven is nowhere to be seen in this script!", to which Miyagawa jokingly replied that he would write about Heaven in the sequel. Actor Yoichi Numata played Tamura in the film, and expressed that he had tried to analyze the role, but couldn't find the best way to play it. The film was not expected to be well received, as Shintoho studio was considered to be a maker of low budget, gory films. Jigoku was made in a hurry, and was the last Shintoho production. For the scenes which take place in hell, the cast and crew used Shintoho's largest soundstage and put dirt over it. In a recent documentary, a crew member said that normally it would be just the crew helping to build the sets, but because it was Shintoho's last production, all the extras were helping. Mamoru Morita said that Nobuo Nakagawa tried in many ways to make Jigoku different from other horror films from the time. In 1979 the acclaimed Nikkatsu Roman Porno director Tatsumi Kumashiro remade Jigoku for Toei. Never mind that damnation to the fires of Hades is said to be eternal. For some of us, the wait we’ve already endured for a glimpse of hell has been plenty long enough. Director Nobuo Nakagawa’s Hell, that is, otherwise known as Jigoku (1960), the legendary—and for Western audiences, long elusive—genre-­busting Japanese masterpiece about the infernal desires that forever tempt us during our mortal existence here on earth and the afterlife agonies awaiting those who succumb. An exact contemporary of (if rather more ideologically obscure than) the first films of the nascent Japanese new wave, Jigoku was released in 1960 and quickly attained the status of “cult classic” in its home country—even as it would remain, for decades thereafter, a wildly rumored about but rarely screened phenomenon in international cine-extremist circles. Today, it is recognized as the cornerstone of extremist-visionary Nakagawa’s long and extraordinary career. Born from some unholy union of Goethe’s Faust and Genshin’s Ojoyoshu, a tenth-century Buddhist treatise on the various torments of the lower realms, Jigoku was the last in a nine-film string of innovative and deliriously eccentric horror films made by Nakagawa during his 1950s tenure at the genre-driven Shintoho Studios. 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. But it’s the degree to which Nakagawa uses that familiar narrative framework to fearlessly extend the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) ingredients beloved by Japanese filmmakers since the silent heyday of Yasujiro Ozu that preordained the film’s lasting notoriety. 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. Hapless Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), engaged to his theology professor’s daughter Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), is riding in a car driven by a sinister campus colleague named Tamura (Yoichi Numata) when he becomes involved in the hit-and-run fatality of a drunken yakuza who staggers out onto a poorly lit country road. Unable to convince Tamura of their complicity in the accident—and, indeed, not even entirely certain who or what Tamura actually is—the guilt-racked Shiro gets Yukiko to accompany him to the police station to turn himself in. But when their taxi careens off the road, leaving Yukiko dead, Shiro finds his future suddenly shattered and falls precipitously into drink and despair. Summoned to Tenjoen, his father’s countryside retirement facility, on a medical emergency concerning his mother, Shiro hopes he might escape his haunted conscience there, only to find the place populated with drunken painters, unrepentant adulterers, criminally negligent doctors, lecherous cops, and an uncanny double of Yukiko—less the “heavenly garden” that the rural retreat’s name portends than an earthly version of hell. Wandering suicidally along a remote stretch of railroad track, Shiro once again encounters the mysterious Tamura, followed by the arrival of their car-crash victim’s mother and former girlfriend, who’ve ascertained the identity of the guilty couple and are intent on avenging the yakuza’s death. A night of drunken revelry follows, complete with a feast of tainted stream fish and a jug of poisoned sake, and by morning the entire community, Shiro included, is dead—and Jigoku, having at last arrived at its titular destination, suddenly comes alive. The widescreen orgy of Buddhist torments that ensues—wailing heads pulled from skinless carcasses, blue-skinned oni (demons) battering away at the legions of the damned with gore-streaked battle truncheons, and the nerve-slicing sobs of an unborn infant floating helplessly along the currents of an endless river of blood—must be seen to be believed. At once a protopop pageant of postexistential anxieties and an incessantly visceral resurrection of centuries-old dread, the film draws as liberally, and often literally, from Genshin’s pre-Boschian descriptions of the increasingly unendurable inner circles of the afterworld and from the goose-pimpling atmospherics of Edogawa Rampo’s Taisho-era tales of mystery and suspense as it does from memories of the battlefield atrocities of the war that had ended scarcely a decade before. And it looks forward to everything from Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (with its lethal mother–daughter-in-law configuration) to the scorched-earth and charnel house–bordello backdrops of Suzuki Seijun’s Gate of Flesh to Roger Corman’s soon-to-follow gossamer-and-swamp-gas adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, joining other prescient world-cinema contemporaries—including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face—in a seemingly universal campaign to find new, modern modes of inducing matinee-packing dread, even as Nakagawa remained steadfast in his conviction that sometimes the most archaic terrors can seem all too unbearably near. Born in Kyoto, in 1905, Nakagawa began his filmmaking career in 1929, as an apprentice at the second-generation cine pioneer Masahiro Makino’s Mikiko Studio, directed his first film while working for chanbara giant Ichikawa Utaemon, in 1934, and finally settled at Toho, where he specialized largely in slapstick comedies, until he was sent to a battle station in Shanghai shortly after the beginning of the war. Returning to Toho after Japan’s surrender, Nakagawa found the studio rocked by labor strikes (quelled only once the U.S. occupation force’s tanks rolled in to arbitrate the dispute) and moved to splinter studio Shintoho (New Toho) in 1947. By the time of his death, in 1984, Nakagawa had made some ninety feature films—jidai-geki samurai sagas, noirish thrillers, musicals, and melodramas alike—and enjoyed at least two distinct cinematic reputations: first as a suspense specialist, sometimes described as “the Japanese Alfred Hitchcock,” and then as the filmmaker whose mid­century reinvention of the feudal-era fever dreams of the kaidan-geki (ghost story) at Shintoho earned him distinction as the “master of Japanesque horror,” the at once semantically quizzical and yet somehow obliquely apt moniker by which Nakagawa is still widely remembered today. Shintoho had begun its relatively short-lived corporate existence producing prestige pictures like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Life of Oharu, but by the early fifties, the fledgling studio found itself increasingly outflanked by its larger competitors, who had a stranglehold on Japanese movie screens. Enter Mitsugu Okura, a former benshi and carnival barker hired as Shintoho’s new top executive in 1955 and mandated to slim down operating costs and sex up the studio’s box-office receipts. Under Okura’s watch, war pictures, space operas (including the cult-classic Super Giant series), and a slew of increasingly naughty nudies starring office girl–turned–striptease sensation Michiko Maeda soon became the genrecentric studio’s low-budget mainstays. One might even term Okura’s Shintoho tenure a veritable reign of terror—not as a reflection of his managerial style but in accordance with the new brand of Japanese horror film that the hands-on Okura would take a personal interest in cultivating during his stay. Traditional, if somewhat extra­lurid, kaidan-eiga had been a Shintoho staple since at least as early as Kunio Watanabe’s 1949 Nabeshima kaibyoden (a variation on the age-old blood-slurping black cat theme), but it was under Okura’s aegis that, a decade later, numerous gore-streaked chillers, with titles like Blood Sword of the 99th Virgin, were being churned out every year. Many of Shintoho’s top contract directors took stabs at the genre, but it was Nakagawa’s talent for turning formula assignments into such distinctly personal forays into Gothic excess as Vampire Moth (1956) and Black Cat Mansion (1958) that separated him from the pack. Rife with eccentric camera movements, jarring sonic surges, soul-smashing twists of karmic retribution, and an assortment of hideously deformed she-demons, Nakagawa’s smoke-machine succession of Shintoho spine-tinglers would eventually reach their penultimate fever pitch with his 1959 version of Ghost Story of Yotsuya, a classic of Kabuki theater, written in 1825, that had been a perennial of Japanese directors as disparate as Shiro Toyoda, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Kinji Fukasaku since its first silent-screen incarnation, in 1927. Despite the familiarity of this tale of a murderous samurai whose ruthless actions are avenged by the ghosts of those he’s sent to untimely graves, no other Ghost Story of Yotsuya had ever, or would ever, match the intensity of Nakagawa’s synesthetic tapestry of boiling blood baths, irrationally enlarged emotional turmoil, and furiously rotting flesh—ingredients that shocked cineastes during the film’s initial release and that are today regarded as the missing links between the chimerical kaidan-eiga of the past and the drone-choked modern nerve-janglers of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the jet-black gore comedies of Takashi Miike, and the unstoppable shockwaves of that phenomenon with the silent final vowel, known round the world by the unfortunate trans(il)literation Ringu. But where Nakagawa’s Ghost Story of Yotsuya seemed to set new standards for the genre’s future, his wholly unprecedented follow-up, Jigoku, seemed to augur no future at all—and not simply because, having partially financed Jigoku himself, Nakagawa would never make another film for Shintoho, or for the fact that Shintoho would itself go bankrupt the following year. Embracing the aesthetics of annihilation in ways that even new-wave nihilist Nagisa Oshima’s The Sun’s Burial and Night and Fog in Japan didn’t dare, Jigoku was a film so sui generis in its fevered desire to peer into oblivion that, in loitering ever closer to the edge of the Pit, it finally plunges in. Resolutely unafraid of incomprehensibility, Jigoku proves ultimately less an articulation of the moral and postmortal conse­quences of sin than a free-associative head-on collision of righteously motivated evil intentions and well-intentioned innocents who capriciously lose their souls. How else is one to account for a character like Tamura, who seems forever (and often quite comically) to materialize from out of nowhere, spotlighted from below and slathered in corpse-white greasepaint when he interrupts Shiro and Yukiko’s bliss near the film’s beginning, and adorned in a half-unbuttoned, bloodred sport shirt when he cruises into Tenjoen, forever sniffing after Shiro’s tail? Is Tamura a scorned former suitor of Yukiko’s, driven by some jealous rage to destroy the life that Shiro seems poised to inherit in his stead? Or is Tamura some sort of demiurge on a mission from the underlord, sent to claim those guilty mortals scheduled for damnation, whose secret litanies of former atrocities he somehow knows so well? And if so, why must Tamura finally join them all in their eternal agonies, shrieking like a blood-daubed voodoo doll in fathomless despair?And what of the comparatively innocent Shiro, guilty only of premarital relations with his betrothed and, perhaps, of carelessly choosing his friends? Why must he suffer along with all the others? Is it the unexplained detour he insisted Tamura take down that fateful country lane one evening that eventually sends him and everyone he subsequently encounters on their one-way trips to hell? And just what was that stop Shiro seemed so intent on making anyway? Twice remade on its own turf—first by former Nikkatsu soft-core specialist Tatsumi Kumashiro, in 1979 (with special effects by Nobuo Yajima, best known for his work on Masahiro Shinoda’s Demon Pond), then by Japanese genre cinema’s Rachmaninoff of the repugnant, Teruo “Joys of Torture” Ishii, in 1999—and remodeled, in 2005, by Thai producer Thanit Jitnukul as the ultranauseating Narok, Jigoku remains unparalleled in its self-persuasion that any mortal answers to the questions posed by our existence are bound to seem hopelessly incomplete. Was, for Nakagawa, a life spent toiling in the cinema equally absurd? Jigoku’s credit sequence, with its succession of echt Shintoho nudies and the voice of an offscreen director shouting “Action,” apropos of nothing else that transpires in the movie, seems to suggest as much. Perhaps the answers lie neither in the heavens high above us nor in the hell that—thanks to the long-awaited resurrection of Jigoku—seems now not quite so far below. Or perhaps, like the title of Akira Kurosawa’s Tengoku to Jigoku, the answers are best left slightly mistranslated. What do mortals know of hell and heaven anyway? Aren’t we all—like films of Nobuo Nakagawa, with all their munchkin-faced madmen, horribly mutilated lovers, and occasional blood-slurping moths—stranded eternally and infernally somewhere in between them, in a place both high and low? Two men in a room, debating "what is murder?" It is not a grisly talk, rather one of philosophy. They begin with a thought experiment: what if they were adrift in the ocean, certain to drown. A single plank offers escape, but it has room to save but one. No matter what happens, at least one person is sure to die. The only question is, which one? The man who takes the plank consigns his comrade to death. Is that murder? After some discussion, they concur: yes, it is like murder. From there, the talk grows more concrete. The world is full of examples of selfish actions whose consequences bring harm to others. Not all of these things are classed as crimes, but perhaps they are sins. There must be some cosmic justice, some supernatural court where immoral acts meet their punishment... These two men are not philosophers. They are filmmakers, employed by a ramshackle movie company called Shintoho, an outfit that has barely stayed on one side of bankruptcy by crafting low-budget exploitation movies. The boss, a producer named Mitsugu Okura, storms into the room. It's time to get started on the next horror movie if it's going to be ready in time for the pre-ordained summer release slot for 1960, and he's hoping screenwriter Ichiro Miyagawa and director Nobuo Nakagawa have been using their brainstorming time wisely. "Sure, thing, chief, have we got a pip for you," says Miyagawa (he said it in Japanese, but you get the idea). "It's about selfish people and the punishment they face in Hell." Okura likes what he's hearing, and proposes a working title: Heaven and Hell. When Okura later sees the movie that Nakagawa and Miyagawa actually made, he grumbles, "It's nothing but Hell. What happened to Heaven?" Shrugging, Miyagawa quips, "We'll get to that in the sequel." Jigoku (1960, aka Hell) is like nothing before it. Even today its reputation is still growing. One would have thought that fifty years' influence on Japanese horror movies would have cemented a critical consensus that it is Nakagawa's masterpiece. Nakagawa was something like Japan's answer to England's Terence Fisher--like the master director at Hammer Studios, Nakagawa was a genteel and gentle practitioner of classical filmmaking who found himself making immensely popular horror movies for a marginalized studio. The depth of his craft and the extent of his commercial appeal were counterbalanced by the fact that he was working in a disreputable genre for a company too impoverished to lend him any artistic luster. Nakagawa felt slighted by the international critical attention paid to his contemporaries like Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi. Here he was, practically inventing the genre of Japanese horror single-handedly, and was being treated by the Japanese film industry like a black sheep. Nakagawa had not set out to make horror films. But he made them well, and audiences liked them, which meant he got stuck. Okura, a former carnival showman, was not about to let that well run dry. And Nakagawa kept coming back from that well with something better than before. His career-making hit came with 1959's The Ghost of Yotsuya, and its enormous success bought him a measure of creative freedom. When he and Miyagawa proposed making Jigoku as a Japanese take on Faust, Okura never blinked (even though, in order to realize his vision fully, Nakagawa ended up investing his own money in the film to enhance the budget). Miyagawa's background was in writing the Super Giants cycle of pre-Ultraman Japanese super hero movies; Nakagawa's most successful horror movies had been period pictures in which Samurais and their wives dealt with ghosts. Making a contemporary, and relentlessly grim, thing like Jigoku would bring a fresh challenge to both creators. It begins with a bang: a full-frontal cinematic assault to put the audience on notice they are in for a ride. The credits roll over shots of naked women in what could double as a James Bond movie title sequence, but this is played over an aural collage of snippets of jazz recordings and seemingly random sound effects (the soundtrack is in fact foreshadowing important moments from later in the film, much as a Godzilla movie might roll its credits over freeze frames of monster battles to come). It is hard to imagine any movie meeting the promise of such a bravura opening, but Jigoku will. It will keep its best cards until the final round, though, and begins the story on a quieter note. Shigeru Amachi stars as Shiro, a college student engaged to his professor's daughter (Utako Mitsuya). The problem is, Shiro can't seem to shake the presence of a creepy friend named Tamura (Yoichi Numata). One night, the two men are involved in a hit-and-run accident that kills a pedestrian Shiro is haunted by guilt and wants to confess the accident to the police; Tamura figures the whole thing is best forgotten. The victim was a yakuza gangster, who was crossing the street in a drunken stupor--Tamura thinks the world is better off without him. Betraying his selfish friend, Shiro tries to turn himself in--but in so doing, merely precipitates yet another car wreck, this one leaving his pregnant girlfriend dead. It is the first strike in a fast-spiraling vortex of guilt, in which everyone Shiro meets will be consigned to a grisly end. Friends, acquaintances, family members, enemies, and strangers alike die in Shiro's midst. Run over by cars, killed by illness, poisoned, shot, strangled, thrown from bridges, crushed by trains...you name it. Whether by accident or design, the story takes a form vaguely similar to Nakagawa's earlier Ghost of Kasane Swamp. That 1957 film involved a cursed man who leaves a stream of corpses in his wake without meaning to. He is the catalyst for tragedy and violence he never wants but consistently fails to prevent. Shiro's guilt has become a contagion, infecting the world, but the initial "crime" was not his. Tamura was behind the wheel and tried to conceal the death -- Shiro is punished for Tamura's crimes because this is a ruthlessly unforgiving movie. Jigoku sends its entire cast to Hell, no infraction is too small to warrant eternal hellfire. But then again, one could linger on that sentence a little longer: Shiro is punished for Tamura's crime...Shiro and Tamura, ever together--even if Tamura has to appear magically out of nowhere. Shiro has no memory of meeting Tamura, and Tamura never once acts alone. In a later interview, Miyagawa confessed that a lesser filmmaker could unimaginatively cast the same actor as both Shiro and Tamura, since they are aspects of the same person. Following the logic of a dream, where unconnected events connect themselves after the fact, Shiro's grieving meanderings introduce -- and kill off -- a number of other characters, each with their own vice and failing. Once the body count has reached a critical mass, the clock stops, it all kicks off. The rest of Jigoku is as experimental as anything attempted in the conventional, commercial movie industry. Brace yourself for an uninterrupted forty minute-long sequence of sustained surrealism and potent abstraction. Nakagawa and Miyagawa realized they would have a hard time expressing interior, psychological torment on the screen. So, they substituted a graphic metaphor: beheadings, behandings, a man sawed in half, another flayed alive, our hero suspended upside down with a spike through his neck...this is strong stuff, given that the very same year there were censors saying Alfred Hitchcock had pushed the envelope too far with Psycho (1960). The effects are not especially realistic, nor are they intended to be, but the overall impression is one of abject terror. The most powerful are also the simplest--forget the severed limbs, the most horrifying sight is a swarm of humanity, running in circles in a vast empty space. The final shot is the kicker -- Shiro has spent much of this sequence trying to rescue his infant daughter, the unborn child killed in the car wreck along with its mother. The poor screaming child is on the edge of a giant cogwheel, and Shiro is crawling along the teeth of the thing to reach her on the opposite side. She is screaming, as terrified babies are wont to do, and Shiro's own hysteria matches hers 100%. His exertions are useless--no matter how much he crawls along the edge, she will always be the same distance away. He will never reach her, and he will always try, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is Hell. (What did the baby do to deserve such punishment?) Much of the credit for Jigoku's jaw-dropping depiction of Hell should go to production designer Haruyasu Kurosawa. It was he who realized that the lack of money could be a boon rather than a deficit. Rather than try to concoct elaborate visions that would fall short of their ambitions because of poor execution, Kurosawa successfully argued for a minimalist approach. Rarely has so little achieved so much. Hell was an empty soundstage (the largest in Japan), with some colored lights and a fog machine. Instead of scenery or props, he had Nakagawa manipulate the camera. Images of blood and pain are intercut in staccato fashion with moments of poetry. The result is arresting, terrifying, and memorable. The almost immediate implosion of Shintoho's finances did nothing to help the distribution and promotion of the movie. When audiences did find their way to it, they were torn in two between the lovers and the haters. The division exposed a generational fault line. Young folks thrilled to the movie, and embraced its experimental style and outrageous imagery. Oldsters rankled against its unpleasantness and cheap look. As time went on, that younger audience grew up and became the establishment. By the 1990s, a new generation of filmmakers had come to prominence who had been greatly influenced by Nakagawa. The likes of Hideo Nakata, Hiroshi Takahashi, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa started a new cycle of Japanese horror movies ("J-Horrors") in the late 1990s in explicit homage to Nakagawa -- even going so far as to cast actors like Yoichi Numata in Ringu (1998) and its sequels. In 1999, cult filmmaker Teruo Ishii made his own idiosyncratic remake of Jigoku (it was not the first such remake, but the less said about the 1979 version the better). Nakagawa did not live to see his renaissance. He kept working, improbably, through the doldrums of the 1970s and 80s when the rest of the Japanese film industry went on life-support. He migrated to television, where the pay was worse and the hours longer but at least there was a steady audience. And on he plugged, making nightmares on the cheap for anyone that would have him, until his death in 1984. He left behind an enduring legacy that seems to grow in esteem with each passing year. Jigoku is as startling and unsettling today as it was back then.

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ElArqui (2011-01-31)

Amazing stuff.
Thank you.

ajjibhai (2012-10-27)

thanx for the upload AND the detailed info!

canofubik (2014-01-25)

7.5: Really small resolution which should be banned at these sizes. Solid quality rip and you won't hear anything from me if it were half the size.
You can find srt subtitles from OpenSub or VLSub
Codec: MPEG-4 Video (XVID)
Resolution: 576x320
Frame ratre: 23.976023
Codec: MPEG Audio layer 1/2/3 (mpga)
Channels: Stereo
Sample rate: 48000Hz
Bitrate: 128 kb/s