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Synopsis: Pity poor Yasu. Alienated from his family and trapped in a wheel chair, he has to deal with the two new additions to his extended family: Chiyo, who seems to be senile, and her companion, Yuki. Worse, Yasu seems to be the only one who sees that Chiyo and Yuki are depraved sadists. Every time Yasu is left alone with them, they contrive some new torturous game to play with him, whether it is wheeling him into traffic, using him as a human dart-board, or tormenting him with a stun gun. Life for Yasu has truly become a living hell. Meanwhile, a reporter investigating the whereabouts of Chiyo discovers some shocking information about her family relationships...

Living Hell is the first DVD from the new Subversive Cinema line. The DVD is great--it's loaded with extras that include four of the director's short films, a biography, a commentary, the whole works. Subversive looks like it will be an excellent boutique label of the Anchor Bay/Blue Underground variety. They've put a lot of effort into their product and it shows. I can't wait to see what they can do with some of the other odd films out there lying in wait for a distributor.

The movie itself, alas, leaves a little to be desired. Living Hell is obviously inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with its wheelchair-bound protagonist at the mercy of a family of depraved psychos. In terms of how it is presented, director Fujii is obviously a student of the genre, borrowing bits wholesale from giallo thrillers, psycho movies, and the recent Japanese horror boom. He seems particularly enamored of the films of Brian De Palma, from whom he appropriates several plot points and set-pieces. The results of this conflation are uneven.

The main virtues of the film are to be found in Fujii's placement of the camera and his shot compositions. Like De Palma, he has an eye for composing the film frame in a way that makes the film look considerably better than its budget would ordinarily allow. I must admit, though, that there is a shot composition in one of Fujii's short films, Black Hole, that is better than anything in Living Hell. In stringing his shots together, Fujii trips himself up. There are far too many instances of his villains moving around through off-screen teleportation and portions of the end of the film are punctuated by periods when the screen goes black for effect, though the effect is different than what the director intends, I suspect. Much of the good will towards the film that I built up during the first hour evaporated in the last thirty minutes, in which many characters spend a goodly amount of time screaming directly into the camera. To top it off, there's an explanatory coda that incorporates all the worst elements of the explanatory coda in Psycho (both films feature psychiatrists expounding at length). At the very least, the film is ambitious beyond its means.

Generally speaking, the film strikes me as the work of a gifted, but green, amateur, not terribly different from the student films on the disc. That's not necessarily a condemnation. Films like The Evil Dead and Bad Taste are also the works of gifted amateurs, and look what happened to those filmmakers. Not that Living Hell is in the same league as The Evil Dead, mind you, but it ain't bad even if it ain't great.