Daily Archives: January 9, 2017

Jigoku (“The Sinners of Hell”)
Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa
Written by Nobuo Nakagawa and Ichiro Miyagawa
1960/Japan
Shintoho Film Distribution Company
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Enma, King of Hell: Hear me! You who in life piled up sin upon sin will be trapped in Hell forever. Suffer! Suffer! This vortex of torment will whirl for all eternity.[/box]

This vision of Hell is enough to keep even the most ardent sinner on the straight and narrow!

Shiro is having a series of very bad days mostly due to his constant companion, the clearly evil Tamura.  First he lets Tamura drive his car and immediately flees after hitting and killing a yakuza.  The mother and mistress of the yakuza are on a mission to kill both men. Then his fiancee dies in a taxi accident.  Shiro was the one that insisted on taking a taxi.

It goes on and on.  Every time Shiro shows up, somebody dies.  Tamura is always leering somewhere nearby.

Most of the other characters in the film are also guilty of sins that have gone undetected thus far.  Finally, Tamura takes Shiro on a grand tour of the Eight Buddhist Hells that will greet all sinners who have gone unpunished during life.

The plot and acting are not up to much.  It is the cinematography, color, and nightmare vision of Hell that make the film worth seeing.  It would make a fitting Halloween double bill with Nakagawa’s Ghost Story of Yatsuya (1959).

Trailer (no subtitles)

Beyond the Time Barrier
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by Arthur C. Pierce
1960/USA
Miller Consolidated Pictures
First viewing/YouTube

[box]Dr. Bourman: Yes, they are a dying race. There hasn’t been a new birth on this citadel in the last twenty years.

Capt. Markova: That’s where you fit into the plan, Allison. Make no mistake about it.[/box]

Mutants are much cheaper than monsters.

Test pilot Maj. William Allison finds himself in the year 2024. He is promptly arrested as a spy and finds himself thrown underground with blood thirsty mutants.  At the last minute, he is wanted for questioning.  It turns out that a plague ravaged the Earth in 1973 and caused the mutations.  The people living above ground are also slightly mutant, being entirely sterile – that is except for possibly the Supreme’s deaf-mute daughter Tirene.

Others have crossed the time barrier before him, but Allison is the only pre-plague traveler. The group plots to sent him back to his own time, where he can possibly avert the plague.

This is moderately OK but did not really float my boat.  The poor quality print available on YouTube did not help.

Trailer

First Spaceship on Venus
Directed by Kurt Maetzig
Written by Kurt Maetzig; adapted by Jan Fethke et al from a novel by Stanislaus Lem
1960/East Germany/Poland
VEB DEFA-Studio für spielfilme/Film Polski/etc
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] You can’t plan for the future, because some guy’s going to land in a spaceship with three heads and a big beak and take over everything. Paul Kantner [/box]

From behind the Iron Curtain comes an innocuous B sci-fi flick.

It is 1985 and the era of peace and World Government has arrived.  America is part of one big happy family.  Scientists are investigating a location in Siberia where a meteorite had been thought to strike.  A rock contains a strange “spool”.  After months of work it is determined that the landing was by Venutians and laborous translation efforts reveal secret plans to conquer the Earth.  A spaceship to Mars is easily diverted for a mission to Venus.

An international team mans the spaceship and has various adventures on the strangely lifeless planet.

This is one of those flicks where the actors keep saying “Incredible!” and I am hard-pressed to find anything incredible going on.  The lack of an alien or monster keeps things mighty tame.  I don’t think the dubbed American version I watched hurt the film any.