User Reviews

A group of friends are critically injured after their van is involved in a head-on collision with a lorry. While doctors attempt to save their lives, the souls of these unfortunate crash victims are prematurely sent to hell where they suffer torment and torture according to how sinful they were during their lives.

Two of the group are judged to be sin-free, and are allowed to skip the nasty stuff and proceed straight to reincarnation. But being the good souls that they are, they pass up on the chance of rebirth and instead set off to rescue their pals.

Not a bad concept, but with a dreary script in which characters endlessly stumble from one part of Hell to another (whilst being chased by demons that look like reject Orcs from Middle Earth), this film quickly becomes repetitive and rather boring, despite some interesting visuals and a fair smattering of quite nasty gore. What could have been a wild ride of horror (especially if there had been a bigger budget, to avoid settling for sub-par CGI effects), ends up as a rather weak adventure film which is dragged down further by its clumsy morality.

Worth seeing for its occasionally impressive visions of 'the hot place' and often gratuitously nasty scenes of torture, Hell is passable entertainment that tries hard to impress, but one can't help wonder what a more accomplished group of film-makers would have made of the whole 'escape from Hell' idea.

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

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...

Usually Thai movies are good and of enjoyable character, but of course every now and then a wide swing and even wider miss will be made. "Hell" (aka "Narok") was one such movie.

The story is about a group of people who are in an accident and end up in Hell because of their sins and behavior. Yep, that's right! Some parts of the scenes in Hell were good, but in overall this movie was just too much of a snoozefest and offered very little entertainment.

The acting in the movie was adequate, although it is nowhere near impressive. It was as to be expected of a movie such as this.

The movie has an appropriate title, because it was Hell getting through it, and a constant struggle not to get up and find another movie to watch.

I wasted my time and money on this movie, so you don't have to. And now the DVD will just land on the DVD shelf to fade into oblivion, never to be watched again.

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.

While traveling during the night, the Mask Mass Production van driven by Lae hits a bus and the driver and passengers awake in hell. Art, Ja, Chod, Oon, Kim, Uncle Tao and Lae are surrounded by demons that force to follow them through an inhospitable land to meet Satan. They learn that they will be judged and punished in accordance with their sins. However Art sneaks and finds a place were he sees that all of them are in coma in a hospital; therefore they might have a chance to escape from hell. But the sinners will have no chance to return before they are tortured for their sins. Will they have chance to live their lives?

"Narok" is an underrated Thai film with an interesting visual concept of hell. I have glanced at other reviews and I found funny to read that the film is "moralist". If Uncle Tao and the teenagers are in hell, of course is because of their sins. The characters are intentionally not well developed since the screenplay discloses their sins when they die and have to stay in hell to pay for what they did in their lives. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Inferno" ("Hell")

I liked this movie. The plot is pretty stupid but the atmosphere and "beautiful" landscapes from hell make it worth watching. Oh... and the torture scenes too hehehe. The hell looks great and the demons and other monsters look convincing enough. Naturally the devil and the demons with horns and cloven hoofs from western tradition are replaced with monsters from thai folklore (i think). The devil looks like a bloated samurai, and the demons like thai-uruk-hai. But it doesn't matter because they look pretty cool. Fans of Asian fantasy/horror movies will like this movie, but if you're not into Asian movies you'll probably would enjoy Lord of the Rings (or Willow) more. Narok is not a masterpiece, but it's a movie worth watching. It's a great movie to watch when you're having a hangover as we say in Finland.

I enjoyed the wild ride that is Hell. I'm not saying this is a great movie, it's not, but it was an interesting 90 minute Thai excursion into Hell.

I don't know a lot of the Thai culture so I'm sure some of the subtleties were missed on me, but my Christian background more then made up for the holes that I saw.

The cgi effects were pretty bad, but not every movie is a 100 million dollar Hollywood blockbuster, so that's OK. The over all look of the movie, obtained by filtering the lens and funky colors in the studio, was effective. Some of the scenes in Hell were quite graphic, so I was impressed by them.

One real complaint that I have, is that I wish the Sanskrit speeches were translated with the rest of the dialog.

This is a pretty scary interpretation of hell. This is like Hellraiser (1987) but with more time spent in hell. It does make the mind think that if there was a hell you would not want to know what it was like. I also thought that once you are dying you may as well accept it as there is nothing much you can do. The story was a bit confusing and that was a shame. The love story rubbish was also misplaced. Watch for images of hell.

Oh My God Real my Story Hell I"m Good People I"m Good People I"m Good People No Evil No Evil