Leofwine_draca 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

Carpe_Diem12 Being a huge fan of Thailand horror films and watching the trailer for this I decided to pick it up. I don't want to say it was a mistake but I will say it was not worth my money. The problem with this movie was the story. It drove on and on with the same concept and got pretty tedious after the first 30 minutes. The plot pretty much goes like this.. A couple of kids and some old man are driving in the night their car gets hit, the people go to hell, they're tortured and beaten, one of them becomes an asshole and they decide it's times to get out of hell. If I had known this before going to pick up the DVD I would have never gotten it because it does not sound so different from many horror films using extreme gore to appeal to audiences.One thing I found really awkward was the fact that most the male demons were dark skinned. Now if you're not from Thailand you probably don't know that in Thailand right now people of a lighter skin completion are taken more seriously then people of dark skin. They're also thought to be more attractive which is why the actors are typically always light skinned. Now to me I found this to be discriminatory. I'm not saying they purposely did that but I would have preferred it if there were some light skinned demons in the movie.. Other then those very sexy female demons who obviously were only there to add some steam it..The visuals were great! I absolutely loved the scenery and the effects. I enjoyed the fact that Hell does not look to far apart from earth. Kind makes you a little more creeped out, well maybe just me. No complaints for me on this matter..Now like I said, I am not going to say this movie was a mistake to pick up because even though it was not great it was actually enjoyable to watch for the first 30 minutes but I will say that if you are indecisive about putting that last 5 bucks on gas or on renting this movie then turn that money into an ozone killer because it really is not worth it.5 out of 10 from me.

Hakan Elverdi I have thought that a recent film from Thailand on a promising subject could be interesting, but the result was awful with such a bad movie that it nearly made me laugh.The film is sucking firstly for its childish moral lessons that it tries to give (don't drink too much, don't break others' hearts; or you'll end up in hell), then for all the stereotype and one-dimension characters, then for the bad acting, then for its loose scenario, and then for its effects and visuals. It reminded me "plan 9" of ed wood and some funny-looking costume adventure of the Turkish cinema in sixties. But it is made in the 21st century! Don't waste your time...

paintedwallpaper Both me and my compadre had some serious expectations for this film. It fell short of those expectations but it still managed to entertain.First the disappointments. The characters were all stereotypes. Some aspects didn't make sense and some twists were predictable.. The moralistic scenes tended to drag a bit. Finally, the demons and the devil were kind of a let down from a European standpoint; however this movie is from Thailand, so maybe the scariest things the writers could drum up were barbarians.This movie did show interesting mythology, and hell is truly a loathsome place to be. The torture was hard to watch, and the boiling oil effects were extra neat. Some parts were truly inspired, such as the scene with the ghoulish children. The fun in this film is the campiness, which is bad because a truly terrifying and nightmarish film on hell has yet to be made, but is good because the film does deliver entertainment. You get the feeling that if the movie was taken seriously it would suck just by how the dramatic scenes are so hammy. Anyway, I thought this film was pretty entertaining.