Why Don't You Play in Hell?Movies like Why Don't You Play in Hell?
- Key Features:
- Yakuza, Filmmaking, Gang warfare, Indie film, Violence-high, Black comedy, Satire, Exploitation, Revenge, Cult classic
- Tone:
- humorous, satirical, stylized
- Target Audience:
- Cult film enthusiasts, Action fans, Comedy lovers, Japanese cinema aficionados
- Emotional Arc:
- Absurdity → Chaos
Why Don't You Play in Hell?

In Japan, gonzo filmmakers hatch a three-pronged plan to save an actress's career, end a yakuza war and make a hit movie.
Why Don't You Play in Hell?
Minami mistakenly kills a gangster associate of his named Brother. Almost as soon as the murder takes place, the body of the deceased man is gone, prompting Minami to conduct a search. While looking, he finds a mysterious isolated hotel where he decides to take a rest. Not only are the front desk clerks a bit strange, but even the ambiance feels unusual. Minami soon realizes he may have gotten more than he bargained for.

Five men plot to steal a large sum of money from the local yakuza, but everything does not go as planned and the men find themselves hunted down by contract killers.

Shozo Hirono has managed to separate from the Yamamori family and create his own small family, and extend his circle of acquaintances. These new friendships include a powerful underboss of the Muraoka family, Noboru Uchimoto.

Nishi is a loser who has a crush on his childhood girlfriend. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place.

When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence.

Young artist Kyoko wreaks havoc on everyone that she encounters when Japan's oldest major movie studio asks a batch of venerable filmmakers to revive its high-brow soft-core Roman Porno series.

After his girlfriend commits suicide, a man becomes embroiled in gang warfare attempting to obtain a gun in hopes to kill himself.

Andrey, a detective and the world's most horrible father, brings together a terrible group of people in his apartment: his resentful actress daughter, an angry thug, and a cheated cop. Each one of them has a reason to want revenge..

A struggling director makes a desperate bid to dig into the urban legend about a film shot by a ghost, at the risk of her own life.

In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza.

Murakawa, an aging Tokyo yakuza tiring of gangster life, is sent by his boss to Okinawa along with a few of his henchmen to help end a gang war, supposedly as mediators between two warring clans. He finds that the dispute between the clans is insignificant and whilst wondering why he was sent to Okinawa at all, his group is attacked in an ambush. The survivors flee and make a decision to lay low at the beach while they await further instructions.

Bent on revenge, a traumatized ex-police officer must infiltrate a yakuza organization by befriending one of the group's most unhinged members.

As the police launch a full-scale crackdown on organized crime, it ignites a national yakuza struggle between the Sanno of the East and Hanabishi of the West. What started as an internal strife in Outrage has now become a nationwide war in Outrage Beyond.

When a tough yakuza gangster is betrayed by his bosses, it means all out war. Bodies pile up as he takes out everyone in his way to the top in a brutal quest for revenge.

A barkeeper saves a Yakuza boss' life and thus makes his way up in the organization. However, his fear of nothing soon causes problems.

The students of Suzuran High compete for the King of School title. An ex-graduate yakuza is sent to kill the son of a criminal group, but he can't make himself do it as he reminds him of his youth.

Only legendary Japanese garage rock band Guitar Wolf can stand between a race of aliens from destroying earth with an army of zombies.

A reconstructed girl is created from the pieces of a vampire girl's mini-butchery. Slaughter abounds as both of them pursue the same boy.

A gang lord hires Kamimura, a hit man, to take out a rival boss who's gotten greedy.

Real zombies arrive and terrorize the crew of a zombie film being shot in an abandoned warehouse, said to be the site of military experiments on humans.

After botching his latest assignment, a third-ranked Japanese hit man becomes the target of another assassin.

A nameless gunfighter arrives in a town ripped apart by rival gangs and, though courted by both to join, chooses his own path.

When young protege Akira Kageyama is bitten by his dying vampire boss, Genyo Kamiura, he must get used to his new powers before seeking revenge.

A warrior-in-training and his bumbling friends go in pursuit of a stolen sword.

Two high school girls who are about to graduate also happen to be highly-skilled assassins. When the organization they work for orders them to share a room, their relationship quickly sours. But when they become targets of the yakuza, the girls realize they'll have to work together to survive.

In order to settle a business dispute, a mob leader murders one of his own teenage sons. The surviving son vows to avenge his brother's death, and organizes his own gang of teenage killers to destroy his father's organization.

A con man and a would-be filmmaking crew force themselves into the lives of two grief-scarred young women. But nothing is as it seems.

Repeatedly beat to a pulp by gamblers, cops, and gangsters, lone wolf Shoji Yamanaka finally finds a home as a Muraoka family hitman and falls in love with boss Muraoka's niece. Meanwhile, the ambitions of mad dog Katsutoshi Otomo draws our series' hero, Shozo Hirono, and the other yakuza into a new round of bloodshed.

A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade. Taking the name Sanjuro Kuwabatake, the ronin convinces both silk merchant Tazaemon and sake merchant Tokuemon to hire him as a personal bodyguard, then artfully sets in motion a full-scale gang war between the two ambitious and unscrupulous men.

Kensuke Sonomura directs the legendary Hitoshi Ozawa in this ultimate V-Cinema actioner. Kaiko City is plagued with poverty and crime. When a corrupt businessman decides to run for mayor and starts eliminating opponents from the rival mafia, a former police captain serving time for murder is secretly released and put in charge of a special task force to arrest him.

The Fable is a legendary yakuza hitman equal to none—but his boss orders him and his sultry associate to lay low and learn how to live a "normal life" in Osaka.

A Hollywood studio executive is being sent death threats by a writer whose script he rejected - but which one?

Tells the story of the samurai Gengobe, who seeks revenge after falling prey to the schemes of a geisha and her husband.

Ryuzo and his 7 former henchmen are all retired yakuza, but they now live as regular old men. One day, Ryuzo becomes the victim of a phishing fraud. He calls his 7 men together to reform their society.

In the Sengoku period, a woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero to quell what is evidently an Onryō ghost. He encounters the two beautiful women in an eerie, beautiful scene. After spiritual purification, he meets the demon in a thrilling fight.

Ruthless dominatrixes pursue a mild-mannered salesman who wants to get out of his unbreakable contract with a secret bondage club.

Ogami Itto volunteers to be tortured by Yakuza in order to save a prostitute and is hired by their leader to kill an evil chamberlain.

With most of his family already dead at Ogami Itto's hands, Retsudo launches one final plot to destroy him, and when that fails, unleashes the fury of every remaining member of the Yagyu clan.

Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic effect in Kurosawa's tightly paced, beautifully composed "Sanjuro." In this companion piece and sequel to "Yojimbo," jaded samurai Sanjuro helps an idealistic group of young warriors weed out their clan's evil influences, and in the process turns their image of a proper samurai on its ear.

A self-destructive man becomes a powerful member of the yakuza but quickly loses his self-control. Based on the true story of Rikio Ishikawa.

A group of sinners involved in interconnected tales of murder, revenge, deceit and adultery all meet at the Gates of Hell.

When Japanese organized crime imbeds itself within LA, the police turn to one man to take down the deadly Yakuza — Joe Marshall, aka "The Samurai." With his fearless swagger and rock hard jaw, The Samurai tears a two-fisted hole through the mob and doesn't stop until the job is done.

Former yakuza underling Kazuma Kiryū has recently been released from prison after a lengthy incarceration and is trying to piece his life together and distance himself from his yakuza past. Unfortunately, Kiryū's problems slowly escalate as he is pursued by a former associate, the baseball-bat-wielding psycho Gorō Majima, who has a grudge to settle with Kiryū.

A group of ruthless gangsters, an unknown woman and an escaped convict have met, in The Forest of Resurrection, the 444th portal to the other side. Their troubles start when those once killed and buried in the forest come back from the dead.

Drawn by the exorbitantly high hourly wage of 112,000 Japanese yen, ten men and women gather at a mansion. Everyone thinks the simple psychology experiment will get them some quick cash... until one of them winds up dead. The participants are overcome with frenzied suspicion. Various deadly weapons are left in their rooms and they are killed off one by one.

Framed for his family's murder and left for dead, an ex-hitman will stop at nothing to exact revenge on the masked "demons" who have taken over his city.

Soon after being named the new leader of his high school's gang system, Kujo grows bored with the violence and hatred that surround him. He wants desperately to abandon his post… but his once-enviable position of power has a strange way of making him feel powerless.

Zatoichi is sworn to protect the life of a young girl and without any real allies finds himself in the middle of a bloody turf war.

A pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute. One, previously a farmer, longs to become a noble samurai. The other, a former samurai haunted by his past, prefers living anonymously with gangsters. But when both men discover the wrongdoings of the nefarious clan leader, they side with a band of rebels who are under siege at a remote mountain cabin.

Still reeling from the events of a zombie apocalypse, a young woman, along with a group of allies, makes her way across a dystopian Japan in search of her mother, the Zombie Queen.

A Japanese master of ninjutsu and a Chinese expert in kung fu, put their differences aside after their master is killed by a mortal enemy.

Ten Years ago, Genichiro Izayoi died trying to stop the sorcerer Rebi Ra, and as a result Shinjuku became a playground for demons. And now, the day approaches when Rebi Ra will complete his decade-long ritual to plunge the rest of the world into chaos! As Genichiro's son, it falls to Kyoya to venture into the heart of Shinjuku and put an end to the sorcerer his father couldn't beat. Can Kyoya exceed his father's legacy, or will the demons of Shinjuku create Hell on Earth?

Five bizarre stories with no apparent connection to one another eventually become intertwined, resulting in surreal circumstances.

A peace treaty between the Earth and the Black World, a parallel universe of demons, is coming to an end. Two cops, Taki, a human male, and Maki, a female demon, are assigned to protect a diplomat who will help secure another treaty. A radical group of demons from the Black World are out to assassinate the diplomat and prevent the treaty; only the bond that forms between the two cops can save the Earth from destruction.

A teenager discovers an electric pylon growing out of his back and is soon forced to battle cyborg vampires over the future of humanity.

It's the 1940s, and the notorious Axe Gang terrorizes Shanghai. Small-time criminals Sing and Bone hope to join, but they only manage to make lots of very dangerous enemies. Fortunately for them, kung fu masters and hidden strength can be found in unlikely places. Now they just have to take on the entire Axe Gang.

A detective breaks all rules of ethical conduct while investigating a colleague’s involvement in drug pushing and Yakuza activities.

With a price on his head, Ichi seeks tranquillity in a favorite village. Since his last visit, it has fallen prey to Boss Masagoro, the son of a merchant rumored to have stolen gold from the shogunate. The boss has hired Yojimbo as his hard-drinking enforcer, but Yojimbo is both a spy for the shogunate, trying to find the gold, and in love with the merchant's unwilling mistress, Umeno. Ichi hires on as the merchant's masseur and buys Umeno's freedom with his employer's own money. This embarrasses Yojimbo who withdraws from a pact with Ichi to stir up trouble between father and son and their gangs. As the two sides fight, Ichi finds the gold and sets up a final set of confrontations.

The erotic novelist Taeko is writing a morbid story of a family destroyed by incest, murder and abuse. Her assistant, Yuji, sets on a mission to uncover the reality of this story, but the reality might be too much to bear.

Tatsuhito, a cop, pursues Chinese warlord Wang through the underworld of Shinjuku and over to Taiwan.

In a poor district of Edo lives a young samurai named Soza. He has been sent by his clan to avenge the death of his father. He isn't an accomplished swordsman however, and he prefers sharing the life of the residents, teaching the kids how to write etc. When he finally finds the man he is looking for, he will have to decide whether he follows the way of the samurai or chooses peace and reconciliation.

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

A failed actor switches identities with a stranger at a bath house thinking it is his way out of his life of misery but only to find himself filling the shoes of an elite assassin.

Four friends get together for a nostalgic evening of fun and games after a decade of absence, which takes a dark turn.

A group of Serbian socialists prepares for the war in a surreal underground filled by parties, tragedies, love and hate.

After being brutally murdered in a gangster-style execution, Kensuke Hagane finds himself brought back to life by a mad scientist and rebuilt as a robot-human hybrid with a serious thirst for vengeance and the tools to carry it out.

When 54 high school girls throw themselves in front of a subway train it appears to be only the beginning of a string of suicides around the country. Detective Kuroda tries to find the answer to this mystery, which isn't as simple as he had hoped.

When Kanako, a model daughter and a brilliant student, disappears, her mother asks her ex-husband, a violent former policeman, to find her. As his investigation progresses, his idealized image of Kanako cracks: the girl hides a dark life that her father can not even imagine.

A professional GO player gathers a team to help him carry out his revenge against the man who killed his brother.

The Katakuri family has just opened their guest house in the mountains. Unfortunately their first guest commits suicide and in order to avoid trouble they decide to bury him in the backyard. Things get way more complicated when their second guest, a famous sumo wrestler, dies while having sex with his underage girlfriend and the grave behind the house starts to fill up more and more.

Taken in by the yakuza at a young age, Kenji swears allegiance to his old-school boss, pledging to adhere to the family code amid ever-changing times.

When a series of martial misunderstandings spirals into an international incident, a Chinese martial arts student struggling to relate to his new Japanese wife is forced to take on seven of Japan's most powerful martial arts masters, each an expert in a different discipline, ranging from karate to samurai to ninjitsu.

Film director Wai asks gang leader Ball to invest in a movie. He cheats famous actors Lok and Sa Sa to take the classical film, and then he finds two stunt actors, April and KK, for the love scene. With the editing, he changes the film with famous actors acting erotic movie. Everything is smooth, but Ball comes up and asks for “special service” from April in exchange for his continued investment in the movie…

Masaki, a baseball player and gas-station attendant, gets into trouble with the local Yakuza and goes to Okinawa to get a gun to defend himself. There he meets Uehara, a tough gangster, who is in serious debt to the yakuza and planning revenge.

After a disastrous failure to stop a robber gang, the police attempt to redeem themselves through a series of publicity stunts and shootouts.

As sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara searches for his missing boss he comes across Ichi, a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain that Kakihara has only dreamed of.

When George Tanner does business with high-ranking Yakuza Tono, Tono kidnaps his daughter, and George summons his old friend, private eye Harry Kilmer, to Japan to investigate.

An aspiring hair dresser becomes the infatuation of a tricophilic man who sells hair extensions to nearby hair salons. The source of the hair is the corpse of a girl whose dead body continues to grow beautiful, voluminous, black hair that comes alive, driving those who use the extensions insane or killing them.

One day a mysterious box arrived and a curse began to spread all over. The source of the box is 'Jukai Village'. The village is hidden in Jukai Forest, a suicide spot that once you enter it, you can never come out.

Six actors go to a graveyard on a remote island to act out a necromantic ritual. The ritual works, and soon the dead are walking about and chowing down on human flesh.

Ryūichi and his small gang of Triad vie for control of the Japanese underworld in a crime-ridden Shinjuku quarter while Detective Jojima tries to bring it down.

A month after Genji Takiya graduates, a new battle for supremacy at Suzuran All-Boys High School begins. Transfer student Kaburagi Kazeo combats Kagami Ryohei for the coveted top spot, amidst a brewing inter-school conflict with Kurosaki Industrial High.

Financially troubled, a newbie hitman reluctantly takes the job of finding the plotted killer of a Japanese tycoon.

The supernatural grudge manifests itself by way of a strange cyst growing in the body of a young woman, slowly draining all life from her in revenge for... what?

A black comedy about the events that are set into motion in a town after a man-eating boar goes on a rampage.

Kill or be killed is the golden rule of the Game of Death. Sucks for seven millennials who ignored that rule. Now each one's head will explode unless they kill someone. Will they turn on each other to survive, or will this sunny day be the last for the innocent people of their middle-of-nowhere town?

The Batman family has returned to the present to discover that Japan has disappeared, and a giant island - Hinomoto - is now in the sky over Gotham City. At the top sit the Yakuza, a group of superpowered individuals who reign without honor or humanity and look suspiciously like the Justice League. Now, it’s up to Batman and his allies to save Gotham!

Five years after the all-out war between the Sanno and Hanabishi crime families, former yakuza boss Otomo works in South Korea for Mr. Chang, a noted fixer. When tensions rise between Chang and the Hanabishi, and Chang's life is endangered, Otomo returns to Japan to settle things once and for all.

After two teenagers from abusive households befriend each other, their lives take a dark adventure into existentialism, despair, and human frailty.

In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.

When circumstances force an outlaw to impersonate a county governor and clean up a corrupt town, the Robin Hood figure finds himself in a showdown with the local godfather.

In an era where aliens have invaded and taken over feudal Tokyo, a young samurai finds work however he can.

Summoned by the black sphere, Kei and Masaru fight against extraterrestrials until Masaru grows tired of fighting and refuses to continue.

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.

Hell – A place where beings that have committed mortal sins during their lifetime are sent. It is a realm where even Soul Reapers are forbidden to interfere. When a group of vicious Sinners plot to escape from this eternal prison, they discover that Substitute Soul Reaper Ichigo Kurosaki is the key to their freedom.

Four friends become stranded in Eastern Europe and have to become hit men, prostitutes, corrupt cops, smugglers and more to make it home.

In future Tokyo, a young woman in the privatized police force tracks down her father's killer while battling against mutant rebels known as engineers.

An action comedy centered on Blubberella, an overweight half-vampire woman whose footsteps cause explosions and whose dual swords are used against anyone who makes fun of her. She must face an army of undead Nazi soldiers in her valiant struggle against bloodshed and tyranny.

