I picked this one up on a lark and I was pretty underwhelmed. The opening is both stylish and genuinely creepy with its laments, wrapped corpses, and surreal hellscapes, and it segués cleverly into a college lecture hall where our protagonist, a young theology student it seems, is listening to a lecture on concepts of hell. It's by no means fair to say that it's all down hill from there, but the movie only intermittently reaches the same heights. There are deeply unsettling and scary moments, but they're balanced by lot of ho hum bits and few others that almost set one to giggling. The plot is a complete mess it pulls credulity to bits and keeps on ripping and its all so rushed that there's neither time to build any real suspense or develop the characters. This is another problem: The female lead is a stereotypical picture of what I take to be a traditional Japanese idea of womanly virtue and the protagonist is just kind of wishy washy and uninteresting. His demonic friend and tormentor Tamura steals every scene he's in; the actor was clearly having a blast chewing up the scenery. And he succeeds wonderfully in what (I presume) he's supposed to do, which is making evil look a lot more fun than our hero's imperfect handwringing sort of virtue. But of course all the plot and real world stuff is just to set up hell right? Well the hell doesn't redeem it. It's often beautiful in a sick sort of way (Brueghel has a run for his money here) and viscerally repulsive, but while it might shock and perhaps even awe the viewer at points it's more gory and repulsive than unsettling. I suppose my reaction might be culturally conditioned, perhaps it would get under the skin of a Buddhist much more than it did a (somewhat lapsed) Christian like myself, but this brings me to another point: The theology is harsh as well you know. Almost everyone's evil and even the people who've committed fairly understandable and, I'd think, forgivable sins end up in hell. I grew up in an avowedly evangelical church and their theology was much more forgiving and understanding of human weakness. Sometimes we seem to have landed in the world of those terror tracts some churches in my home town used to pass out; there's a definite air of grim disapproval (whether affected or genuine I can't tell) for the sinful modern world hanging over the thing that's so stodgy it's more than a little funny. I'll give it high marks for the visual style and for the cool jazz that floats through and most of the actors acquit themselves quite well (though some don't have too much to work with). But to say that makes a complete mess of plot, pacing, and characterization is, if anything, kind.
