HELL is the low budget Thai remake of a famous Japanese film from 1960, called JIGOKU, about a group of people who find themselves sent down to Hell before their time. The resultant film follows the misadventures of these survivors as they attempt to escape the confines of the fiery caves and return themselves to earth.
Whew! What a premise. It sounds like the perfect set-up for a full-blooded, truly horrific type of film charting all the pain and punishment you could imagine. A story that proves a godsend to imaginative set dressers and production artists everywhere. Sadly, though, this movie goes absolutely nowhere with the storyline. The narrative consists of members of the group separating and wandering around the hostile environment, encountering demons and tortured souls at every turn. They're captured, subjected to torture, escape, wander a bit more and are then captured again. That's the narrative for the whole movie.
Elements of interest in the storyline are jettisoned in favour of a distinctly muddled non-starting plot that really does go nowhere. Some of the superficial scenes are great – the idea of the injured crash victims lying in E.R. fighting for survival while their souls fight for survival in Hell itself is great and more should have been made of it. Some brief scenes of demons pouring lava into the mouths of their victims are certainly horrific enough to do justice to the subject matter.
But then we have to counter in the demons themselves – guys in Halloween-style costumes who ultimately destroy any credence or believability you might have built up beforehand. They're ridiculously stupid-looking, like they've wandered in from the set of some no-budget fantasy flick, and they undo all the effort that's gone in elsewhere.
An interchangeable cast of rather uninteresting characters doesn't help the attention span, either, and it does feel like the scriptwriter got his characters into the setting and then didn't have a clue what to do with them afterwards. I'm beginning to think that SHUTTER was a fluke and hardly representative of the quality of Thai horror films after all
