Description

There’s a beautifully sick simplicity to the eye-poppingly grisly new Thai horror film Hell, a loose remake of the 1960 Japanese film that shares its name: it begins with an attractive young cast of media professionals, each facing romantic problems and/or fitting into cozy genre stereotypes (the clown, the drunk, the snob, etc.), and just when you think the story will proceed along the well-worn path of having each character meet or evade fate… Hell has them all die en masse when their van is crushed by a truck, and the rest of the film is spent entirely where all of you Fantasia fans are headed: straight into the deepest pits of hell, kids! Yes, the unlucky seven are all killed and thrust into the Buddhist version of eternal damnation, which the movie renders as a sort of Bosch canvas colliding with a 1980s Italian Conan rip-off, or Coffin Joe meets The Bride With White Hair in a Frank Frazetta painting: grunting barbarians torturing agonized sinners amidst a landscape of gnarled trees and colorfully lit caves (and we do mean torturing: some of the gory bodily injuries inflicted on hell’s captives are not for the squeamish). Hope is not entirely lost, however, as it materializes that a couple of these hellbound souls have been inadvertently placed there when they are actually just in limbo, and they must find their way home.

With a fire-and-brimstone ferocity that almost makes the film feel like the cautionary Buddhist equivalent to a Left Behind-styled Christian apocalypse tract, Hell (produced by acclaimed Bang Rajan director Tanit Jitnukul) is a lavish, FX-heavy spectacle that still manages to shock. A reminder for your post-screening party: the longest suffering is reserved not for thieves or adulterers, but alcoholics, who apparently gargle boiling oil for 8,000 years. So, is that second martini really worth it?

—Travis Crawford, PHILADELPHIA FILM FESTIVAL

Credits

Director: Teekhayu Thammanittayakul, Sathit Pratitsahn
Screenplay: Marisa Mullikamarl
Cast: Arkom Predakul, Boruonrith Chatasakda, Nattawan Worvit, Panyapol Dechsong, Sittichai Laungesalee
Producers: Tanit Jitnukul
Distributor: Golden Network Asia Limited

Screens with...

Zombie Movie Canadian Premiere New zealand 2006 | 14 min English language