‘Heaven and Hell’ certainly sets itself up with an exciting premise, and director Chang Cheh approaches it with the flamboyance it deserves, yet the result never quite achieves true greatness, despite some inventive and often surreal production design.

Episodic in nature, a range of visual styles are employed, but the pacing is awkward, and even some of the ethical ideas which drive it don’t always seem to sit quite comfortably with the Buddhist ideology that it is based on.

Starting off in Heaven, the story first seems to be one of forbidden love, and when a young girl drops a peach, the punishment seems quite harsh, especially considering how nice Heaven is rumoured to be. Not wanting her 300 lashes of the whip, she escapes to Earth with her lover, followed by Xin Ling, banished from Heaven for protecting them.

Heaven is all dry ice, blue sky, and white marble, but Earth is presented with a minimalist surreal style. An exterior scene, for example, is shown as a black stage, with nothing but a gate, a window frame, and two men on screen. It’s an interesting idea, and to make things stranger, the film turns into a cantopop musical for the first twenty minutes. Listen out for the intro to one song which borrows part of the ‘Shaft’ theme. When a bunch of Beret and cravat wearing gangsters attack, they mix up their kung fu with some funky dance moves. It’s kitsche, camp, retro, and quite frankly, a little bit gay.

Sadly, this style is dropped for some scenes, which are just ordinary exterior locations, and then when the story leads us down to Hell for the bulk of the film, the visual style changes yet again. Hell is a labyrinth of caves lit in blue, red and purple, and occupied by sinners, monsters, and all manner of torture devices.

Hell apparently has different departments for dealing with a number of sins, and many of them are shown as truly terrible special effects. Gamblers are forced to gamble mindlessly for eternity, while alcoholics have to drink forever, and a fighter is forced to fight with himself. ‘Plough Hell’ is where people are mowed down with ploughs, though it’s never made clear what they did wrong.

Late in the film, the plot screams off on another tangent, as a series of lengthy vignettes explain how various hell-dwellers found themselves trapped in the afterlife.

For those of you unfamiliar with Buddhist theology, here is a summary of what the movie teaches us on the subject:

1. Hippies go to hell. Especially suicidal hippies.
2. Heavy Metal album covers are way off the mark.
3. They get through a lot of coloured light
bulbs in hell.
4. Illegitimate sons and the poor are damned from the outset.
5. If a ghost tells you he’s ‘the nice ghost’, he’s lying.
6. Reincarnation is, like, one far out trip, man. Groovy.

‘Heaven and Hell’ is an interesting film, especially for fans of the director. The disjointed pacing, awful special effects, wooden acting, and vague plot spoil what could have been a bizarre classic, but there is plenty to see, some decent fights, lots of unintentional laughs, and hell itself is an interesting place in the movie. This certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, and newcomers to HK cinema will wonder what the hell is going on, but for the rest of us, it’s an interesting but flawed slice of retro madness.