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I thought it was pretty obvious that the moralising was just an excuse to show murder and debauchery and a bloody psychadelic hell. The sinning on earth became so ridiculous you can't seriously believe it was a cautionary tale.

If you want to see a really cheesy B-Movie, Chang Che's "Heaven and Hell" lifts heavily from Jigoku. It's Shaw Bros kung fu meets Jigoku meets West side story. A great bizarro trash B-movie masterpice (I'm using masterpiece loosley here of course).

Ishmael wrote:No, no, no, the film is a caustic jeremiad against a sin as heinous as it has become commonplace, a sin that fully deserves all the torments of hell: sideswiping drunk gangsters and fleeing the scene of the crime!

Heh! That, clearly, would transcend mere venality.

But I have to reiterate my position that it's the sex, sex, SEX! - you know, of the God-hating premarital variety - that sends our feckless hero to the torments he so richly deserves. Whatever or whomever Tamura is (even is he's simply Shiro's "evil" alter-ego), the man at the wheel when the Yakuza becomes road-kill - he arose only after Shiro's unforgivable crime of having made love to his sweetheart.

Or, put another way, premarital sex is like a gateway drug to manslaughter.

hi.
i have two questions:

1. i used a bitrate calculater (the same as dvdbeaver use) and here's what i got:
japanese dvd: 1:40:33
criterion dvd: 1:38:42
it seems like the movie is about 2 minutes shorter on criterion dvd.
does anyone know why there's such a huge gap.

(maybe this gap comes from question nr. 2: )

2. criterion-dvd chapter 16:
it's a funny problem. i don't know whether my disc is defect, or not...
i can't seem to find the scene with the children appear and disappear. it looks like the criterion-dvd jumps over this particular scene.
if i choose the .vob-file directly from the video_ts folder, then the scene is there. but if i start the disc with my dvd-player and choose from the criterion-made-menu chapter 16, the scene disappears.
i tried the disc on two different players. both of them show this problem.

Uh oh.

How dare they negligently, nay, criminally, destroy the director's artistic vision like this. I demand an apology.

A personal one.

Tribe

EDIT: Not directed at you, baby godzilla. This is an important find if it's widespread.

i do hope that it's just my disc.

@all, who already have the criterion dvd:
could you please go to chapter 16 and check whether this scene with the children is there or not (the scene is about 1,5 minutes long):

baby godzilla: It is on my disc, and appears fine when played from the beginning or selected from the chapter menu.

Cosmic Bus wrote:baby godzilla: It is on my disc, and appears fine when played from the beginning or selected from the chapter menu.

ok. thank you!

still it's weird. there's a difference of 2 minutes in the running-time.
i did a comparison between scenes on criterion and japanese dvd. there's a constant time-offset of 10-15 sec because of the criterion-logo which appears at the start of the movie. this time-offset would mean, that the overall running time of the criterion-dvd is 10-15 longer than the running time of the japanese dvd, but it isn't... it's 2 minutes (see my first posting). i mean the criterion's is 2 minutes shorter.
after this particular scene (chapter 16) the time-offset switches to about 2 minutes.

here are screenshots with time-index of criterion and japanese dvd which explain the problem.
could you please check whether the time-index of the following criterion-pictures are correct. it would help me a lot.

mine doesn't have the children scene, either... although I merely don't remember seeing it... so it may be there. I'll see tonight

I should offer up a correction: this morning I only glanced quickly at the shot you posted, baby godzilla, and mistakenly thought it was a different image from that chapter stop. A second look tonight proves that it is most definitely NOT on my copy, either. Sorry for the confusion!

the children scene depicts the legend of the shores of osore / purgatory. during the day , those who died as children pile up stones, there are variations on the legend there, some are to build a bridge to cross the river, and so on, and at night the demons come and kick them over, so every day for eternity, the children are piling stones...


putney

baby godzilla wrote:could you please go to chapter 16 and check whether this scene with the children is there or not (the scene is about 1,5 minutes long):

I can confirm that this scene does not play on my copy either, even though I can find it on the fourth VOB file on disc. When viewed on a DVD player it looks like a jump cut: you see the landscape, then the man and woman suddenly appear. When played from the VOB you can see three children fade in then out of the landscape, then the man fades on, then the woman fades on. What a bizarre glitch! So, has anyone written Criterion yet?

Yikes! I ordered it recently and got an email just this morning that it was shipped, whereafter I go to this forum and read about the glitch. What a bummer - I just hope it's not a general problem.

Ledos wrote:...What a bummer - I just hope it's not a general problem.

I think it's safe to say that it is

Approximately how long is the skipped segment?

And how on earth can a scene included in a vob file get skipped over when one plays the DVD in a normal fashion? (I could see this happening if this was a complicated project -- with seamless branching -- but I don't see why such a complication would exist here).

the skipped segment is 129 seconds long. i've never encountered such a strange error.

Just wondering, is the scene at the layer change? Sounds like something went wrong in the authoring process.

As said in the 'M' thread, at least if you are living abroad, it is beginning to feel like you should wait a couple of months before buying new Criterion releases, so they have a chance to correct any mistakes.

Has anyone brought this problem to Criterion's attention? I'd be interested to know their response.

I wrote them this morning, have not gotten a reply yet...

At the start of chapter 16 it has an empty background, a second later the 2 actors are in the frame with a slight jump in the cut. when going frame by frame, it just stops there and cant go forward of backward. Thats where the 2 minute scene should be.

Still waiting from anything Criterion has to say about this.

Sorry if this has been addressed anywhere else, but is there any word on the potential availability of Yatsuya Ghost Story in any region? The clips in the Jigoku documentary looked really cool (and in very good condition, although its easy to restore 20 seconds of something vs. the full length), so I'm definitely interested in tracking it down.

Tokaidou Yotsuya Kaidan is available in Japan on DVD for a hefty Y5000+

Jigoku is available by the same company and included English subtitles, checking to see if Yotsuya Kaidan is also.....

Just checked

Yes, it is English subtitled.

Any word on that company's reputation for quality?

i have the japanese dvd (beam entertainment) of "ghost of yotsuya".
it's a barebone dvd. the quality is pretty good, but not that great as on the criterion-documentary. the black level is incorrect.

Galen Young wrote:I wrote them this morning, have not gotten a reply yet...

Still no news?

davebert wrote:Sorry if this has been addressed anywhere else, but is there any word on the potential availability of Yatsuya Ghost Story in any region? The clips in the Jigoku documentary looked really cool (and in very good condition, although its easy to restore 20 seconds of something vs. the full length), so I'm definitely interested in tracking it down.

Your best bet is to wait for a Criterion edition of it since it has already been confirmed elsewhere that this one is forthcoming.

If you just can't wait for it, I have a greek edition that is a direct port of the japanese DVD with english subtitles included that I purchased from xploitedcinema.com. It's considerably cheaper.

Just as an aside, I bet that the folks over at the oficial Jigoku thread who didn't think that much of it when they first saw it, will fall in praises over Yotsuya Ghost Story. It's understandable if it does happen because this really is a wonderful movie and perhaps a better introduction to Nakagawa than Jigoku (which is a sort of odd-man-out in his oeuvre).