SUB SECTIONS

DVD QUICK LINKS

BD QUICK LINKS

HD QUICK LINKS

MY ACCOUNT

SITE MATTERS

EXTRA! EXTRA!

Jigoku - Criterion Collection DVD

Unrated :: Criterion :: Released: 2006-09-19

$23.22USD

In Stock

Buy From The Marketplace:

$26.99

In Stock

Amazon Marketplace New:

$17.76

37 Available

Amazon Marketplace Low:

$10.50

11 Available

Amazon Marketplace Collectible:

$33.33

1 Available

Buy.com:

$19.99

In Stock

CD Universe:

$23.39

In Stock

Deep Discount DVD:

$22.37

In Stock

DVD Boxoffice:

$30.76

In Stock, Ships in 1 to 5 days

DVD Planet:

$17.97

In Stock

Rent Jigoku - Criterion Collection DVD:

(USA)

(Canada)

(UK)

Grab Jigoku - Criterion Collection DVD Posters:

AllPosters.com

Rank: #32105	Rating:
	4.0/5 (12 Reviews)

5/5 A Masterpiece.
  by One_Amoung_the_Fence
Dramatic, a feast for the eyes, Powerful, intense, and disturbing...
this could be one of the most mentally terrifying films ever made. It was WAY ahead of its time. It honestly shocked me to realize that this was made in the early 60's...for any horror buff or jap-horror fans, this is a MUST OWN!

5/5 Check your copy
  by Jimbob
To anyone who buys this please check your copy to ensure it is the second pressing. There was a technical glitch with the original pressing which resulting in some footage not displaying in the film. Criterion quickly issued a 2nd pressing

Source:
[..]

5/5 Death is the door
  by C. Christopher Blackshere (stalking you from the shadows)
Step on in to hell. This Buddhist vision of the fiery underworld is absolutely stunning. It also seems to simmer around a collective belief system in regards to death and punishment for sins.
The beginning of the movie shows the downfall of a young man who becomes trapped by his own guilt. The last part of Jigoku depicts the torment and suffering of the damned, literally in hell. The overall look is remarkably shot and completely haunting. It's incredibly violent, filled with eerie and desperate images of the lost souls. You've got bodies being sawed in half or being flayed alive down to the bone. It's a smorgasboard of brutality. I WAS BLOWN AWAY!!

The only other movie I've seen similar to this is What Dreams May Come. It's fairly obvious that movie borrowed some hellish ideas from Jigoku.
This film has reached cult status, a true masterpiece of horror.

4/5 The Hell with Gold Boots...
  by Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
Jigoku (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)

Imagine hell, Matt Helm-style. That's what you get in Nobuo Nakagawa's stylish, hallucinatory 1960 thriller Jigoku, a cautionary tale/morality play about the decisions ordinary people make, and the extraordinary consequences of those decisions.

The first third of this film follow Shiro (Shigeru Amachi), a guy who's just trying to get along in life. While a passenger in a car driven by his classmate Tamura (Yoichi Numata, recently of Ring), the two of them hit, and kill, a man, then leave the scene of the crime. He's not just some guy, though, and his death begins a complex, and quite unbelievable, tale of revenge, destruction, and depravity, both in the world we know (the second third of the film) and in hell itself (the final third). The first portion of the film often seems as if it's going to drag, but don't let that fool you; Nakagawa's just building up steam so that when everything gets going, he can take his foot off the brake and you'll go flying forward (rather like Tamura's driving early in the film, come to think of it).

It's an odd little film, but a very pretty (in the strictest sense; the subject matter is anything but) one; if I had more faith in various Western directors, I'd tab Jigoku as a hefty influence on everything from Performance to the Girl in Gold Boots. (I feel a lot more comfortable saying Nakagawa was an influence on the manga of Hideshi Hino, but even there, I can't be completely certain.) Whether it was the progenitor of the psychedelic films of the sixties or evolved independently of what the West was on about at the time, however, is utterly irrelevant to the average viewer's enjoyment of Jigoku as an absurdist classic. Fun stuff, highly recommended. ****

5/5 Absolutely Fantastic
  by G. Kleinschmidt (Nowhere Land, CA USA)
Entrancing, brutal, mystical, poetic, tragic, and beautiful all rolled into one. What a fine piece of art this is. There are only 8 reviews on here? More people need to see this film!

Jigoku - Criterion Collection Summary Shocking, outrageous, and poetic, Jigoku (Hell) is the most innovative creation from Nobuo Nakagawa, the father of the Japanese horror film. After a young theology student flees a hit-and-run accident, he is plagued by both his own guilt-ridden conscience and a mysterious, diabolical doppelganger. But all possible escape routes lead to Hell - literally. In the gloriously gory final third of the fi

Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 09/30/2008

As long as human beings have conceived of an underworld, they have sought to represent it in art. Nobuo Nakagawa's 1960 film Jigoku joins this artistic niche alongside Dante's Inferno and Monkeybone starring the great Brendan Fraser. The story, meant primarily to provide a frame from which to hang a series of creepy set designs, concerns a college student, Shiro Shimizu (Shigeru Amachi) who flees a hit-and-run accident. Even though he wasn't the one driving, Shiro is plagued with guilt, which begins to interfere with his courtship of Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), whose father just happens to be a theology professor who lectures on Buddhist concepts of Hell. The first half of the film sets the stage for the cast's decent into Hell, where things start to get really freaky. Lit with sickly blue and red light, Nakagawa's vision of the afterworld is bleak and expressionistic. In one scene, lovers struggle to come together across a field of jagged glass shards. In another, the damned run across fields of wriggling hands and feet. Perhaps most disturbing, many of those condemned to an eternity of suffering find their heads and wrists shackled in what appear to be boards in the shape of coffin lids. It's no wonder audiences of the time were scared witless. For a contemporary viewer, however, it's easier to observe the film as an exercise in creative cinematography and a precursor to the J-horror genre. More than the imagery, it's this subgenre's roots in spirituality that give it the power to chill, with the implication that we bring torture upon ourselves with our own moral violations.

The Criterion Collection does its usual fine job presenting the disc with plenty of extras. The "Building the Inferno" featurette is an amusing glimpse into the working methods of the enigmatic--and hard-drinking--Nakagawa, considered by many in Japan a third-tier director. It's hard to tell whether the transfer itself or the original film is too dark--one is inclined to believe the latter; many of the pre-Hell scenes are blackened to the point of making it hard to see who's doing what. But no one should expect anything light and sunny from this DVD. --Ryan Boudinot

Jigoku [Criterion Collection] DVD Techincal Details Cast: Shigeru Amachi, Yôichi Numata, Hiroshi Hayashi, Jun Ôtomo
Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Rated: Unrated
Running Time: 101 mins
UPC: 715515020121
Binding: DVD
Studio: Criterion
Release Date: 2006-09-19
Region Code: 1
Specs: Color, Subtitled, NTSC

Language & Subtitles Japanese (Original Language - Dolby Digital 1.0), English (Subtitled),