Down to Hell review

In 1996 Ryuhei Kitamura, 27 at the time, decided to make a movie with a few friends called Down to Hell, the precursor to Kitamura’s later film: Versus. I’m hesitant to call it a prequel because the two movies really have nothing to do with each other aside from the general idea of the dead coming back to life in a forest. Versus was originally going to be called Down to Hell 2 but after they began filming they realized they might have something a little too good to be directly associated with the original Down to Hell. That’s not to say it’s a horrible movie. Considering the circumstances it was filmed under it’s actually kind of remarkable. It was filmed entirely on Hi8 with a crew about 1/5th the size needed for Versus, and like Versus most of the crew pulled double duty as cast members. The budget was around $2,600. Compare that to the $300,000 or so Versus cost and you can see why they might be hesitant to call it Down to Hell 2. To put that difference in further perspective consider that grainy overrated snore-fest called The Blair Witch Project had a budget of $35,000.

The story of Down to Hell is fairly simple. A group of four thugs get their kicks by kidnapping people, letting them loose in the forest, and hunting them down for sport. It’s a fairly common idea that’s been re-treaded many times in other movies and TV shows over the years. What makes Down to Hell different is the supernatural horror aspect. What these thugs don’t realize is that they have unwittingly chosen the forest of resurrection as the setting for their little game and it was only a matter of time before one of their victims refused to stay dead.

The film begins in the forest with one of these hunts already reaching its crescendo. The scene is particularly brutal and if you can somehow manage to overlook the fact that the victim of the sadistic attack (Keishiro Shin) is wearing a dorky t-shirt that looks some something grabbed from a Goodwill bin in 1991 it effectively sets the stage for what you’re in for. With that intro out of the way the thugs move on to the next victim. They drive around the city until they find a man in a suit walking down the street alone. After an overly dramatic sequence of pauses and close-ups they finally drive around and run him down with their car. They surround him and the long-haired thug amongst them (incidentally the music composer for both Down to Hell and Versus, Nobuhiko Morino) smacks him over the head, knocking him out cold.

The next time we see the characters they have driven back out to the woods and open the trunk of the car revealing the victim they had abducted. He doesn’t quite understand the situation he’s in so the leader of the group (Masami Miyata) explains it to him bluntly: He can run away, kill them all, or choose death and escape to Hell. They offer him a 10 minute head start as per the rules of their game but he refuses to start running. He tries to reason with the thugs but in order to show they mean business Ryuhei Kitamura’s character breaks his finger. He gets the hint and starts running. Obviously, his ineptitude doesn’t allow him to last very long. After he manages to escape one of them another soon tracks him down and kills him much like the first victim – slowly and painfully. The killer relaxes and radios the other thugs to tell them that it’s over. In a scene obviously inspired by The Evil Dead some unknown supernatural force travels through the woods and brings the victim’s corpse back to life as a super-powered zombie hell-bent on revenge. What follows is basically the zombie picking off the thugs one by one in exaggeratedly gore-filled scenes. Most notably is the death of Ryuhei Kitamura’s death. He’s actually hung with his own small intestine. It’s obvious the storyline is completely secondary in importance to the death scenes.

All in all Down to Hell is really unpolished. It’s an early project by a filmmaker who would go on to make some amazing films, but at this point in Kitamura’s career he wasn’t really equipped for that sort of quality quite yet. There’s a reason DVDs of Down to Hell are mostly bootlegs in the states. No reputable distributor would ever release this as anything other than a special feature on another DVD. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching. If you’re a big fan of Ryuhei Kitamura’s work and want to see the progression of his career like I did it’s definitely interesting and somewhat entertaining, but if you’re a casual fan of Versus and expect this to be more of the same you’ll be sorely disappointed. Don’t go scouring Ebay for copies of this if that’s really your expectation. But if you’re fully aware of what you’re getting and still want to see it then by all means check it out.

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