Every year around Halloween, I hear my faithful mortals whining about Christmas stuff being on the shelves in the stores already, and how the big box stores are making their employees work on Thanksgiving. It's like JC's birthday is swallowing all the other holidays.
This is nothing new. Just look at his rebirthday. Never mind that it's never been set on a specific day, and you have to resort to some moon-based, pagan calculus just to figure out when it is. Though he insisted on that, not so he could have just a rebirthday, but rather a rebirthday weekend. Don't you hate people like that? No one calls him on it, because a lot of people get Friday off work.
But three days isn't enough, oh no! The whole week before gets called Holy Week. So now his rebirthday takes seven days. Does he stop there? Ha!
His rebirthday party actually starts in February on Mardi Gras, then you gotta walk around the next day all hungover with dirt on your forehead, and be good and say you're sorry for the next 40 days. Do you know anyone else who gets a 40-day rebirthday party, during most of which people aren't allowed to have fun? I don't.
Hardly surprising for a guy who says if you don't love him in exactly the way he's spelled out for you, he'll send you to Hell.
In case you were wondering what that's like, I have the perfect movie for you.
This week's Thursday Thriller is Jigoku, or, if you prefer the English title, Sinners of Hell.
This 1960 Japanese film was directed by Nobuo Nakagawa and stars Shigeru Amachi, Utako Mitsuya and Yoichi Numata.
It's not about samurais, nor does it feature a guy in a rubber monster suit smashing a scale model of a city, which were both fairly dominant tropes in Japanese cinema at the time.
Instead, Jigoku is a twisty, film noir thriller, presented in lurid color, about a college student named Shimizu who has fallen in with a bad crowd and accidentally murders a yakuza.
This sparks off a plethora of intertwining stories about sex, revenge, blackmail, medical malpractice, geishas and rotten fish heads. Then after about an hour, everyone dies and we're treated to 40 minutes of seeing them get their eternal comeuppance at the hands of Enma, the King of Hell.
I have no complaint with this kabuki-style depiction of me, even if I do look like I'm about to start a death metal band, because the tortures are nightmarishly balls-trippy. Some of them are downright grisly. IMDb says Jigoku is the first movie to use gore FX, and if the fate of the flayed doctor isn't your new favorite thing you ever saw, my name ain't Satan Himself.
Jigoku streams on Hulu Plus, subtitles included.
No comments:
Post a Comment