At a time before the word “horror” even had a translated equivalent in Japan, writer/director Nobuo Nakagawa gave the country something to be all shook up about: a cinematic trip to Hell, and one full of gore of that! Jigoku is a real freaker-outer, starting with credits that suggest an Asian 007 adventure, but only if the guy in the audio booth tripped and fell on every SFX button at once. Your ears will hate it.
But your eyes will love it! College student Shirô (Shigeru Amachi, The Tale of Zatoichi) is having a bad run, starting when a drunk yakuza fatally stumbles into path of the car in which Shirô is a passenger. Then his fiancée dies in a wreck, so he drowns his sorrows in the bodily fluids of prostitutes. Then his mom falls critically ill. Then he becomes partly responsible for the deaths of several more people.
Finally, with a little more than half an hour to spare in the running time, he goes to Hell. Worse, Buddhists believe in a Hell comprised of eight Hells, so buckle up! Upon arrival, he gets his throat pierced, has to view a Your Life’s Greatest Fuck-Ups reel and learns just how hot flames of eternity can be. Shirô gets the 25-cent tour and sees the newly dead being flayed, boiled and spiked for punishment — different strokes for different folks, all rather graphically depicted with lots of red acrylic paint.
Weird and wild, Jigoku does drag in the middle, kinda like life itself. But its Hell sequence — if one could call a third of a film a “sequence” — is quite something to see, from both a visual and a historical standpoint. I would’ve loved to witness how it went over with audiences upon release. However, if you want to see some really crazy Asian shit without the heavy-handed morality tale but with all of the “Huh?,” 1977’s Hausu is your best bet. —Rod Lott
One emergency landing later, the remaining passengers and crew disembark into a terminal that’s sealed off from the airport. They’re flat-out stuck, which wouldn’t necessarily be bad if the infected weren’t hiding in the shadows, either. The behind-the-scenes luggage area gives newbie director (and 
I find pot humor to be the anthesis of funny when it pops up in comedies, so imagine 83 minutes of it. And I do mean imagine, because you shouldn’t waste your time on Charles Band’s 
When each guy smokes it — only Alistair doesn’t partake — he’s transported to the Club Bong strip club, where the fake-breasted dancers sport carnivorous chests that kill the dudes in real life. (All the movie is set either here — with animated ganja smoke around the edges of the frame — or at their home, which looks like the set of a sitcom threatening to burst into a porno.) Tommy Chong saves the day and runs toy cars up and down said man-made mammaries.
The paranormal activity here amounts to flickering light bulbs, closing doors, billowing curtains, strange noises, moving bedsheets and EVP instances of “kiss my ass.” Ooh, dat’s spooky! Speaking of speech, Boobs Psychic says, “Put it near your root chakra. … It’s two inches above the groin area.” Some Douche says, “We are gettin’ some kick-ass shit, knowwhatI’msayin’?” Another Douche, Maybe Even the Same Douche says, “Holy shit! Something just caressed my back!” And Yet Another Douche, Quite Possibly That One reasons, “The problem is not that there’s a demon scratching. The problem is that we’re overly tired.”