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

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 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.

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.