Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki

Evil Dead Trap (1988) was not a film I was expecting to like, so it was a surprise to me, especially after it’s eye-popping intro, just how good a film it was. Cue Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki (1992). If I could be surprised once I could be again, though let’s face it, what’s the chances of that? Seemed pretty slim I have to say, cash-in sequels are usually pretty awful and not something you’d expect much of, but hope springs eternal and all such cliches.  

A killer is murdering women in the city in which cinema projectionist, Aki (Shoko Nakajima), lives and works. Aki’s friend, Emi (Rie Kondoh), a TV reporter is often first on the scene to report each murder. Aki is unnerved by a small boy that she keeps seeing; by Kurahashi (Shiro Sano), the man Emi is in a relationship with but keeps chasing her and by the recognition that she may be the murderer.  

I’m not sure if my brain ever quite made sense of Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki (henceforth EDT2:H) but I certainly liked it. It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider why. The director and co-writer is Izo Hashimoto, one of the writers of the adaptation of Akira; the other writer is Chiaki Konaka (minus the “J”) responsible for authoring Serial Experiments Lain and Texnolyze. We have some talent here and in Konaka especially one happy to develop an ambiguous narrative.

Straight off the mark, the film makes great use of the city, with characters cast against the massive glowing lights of advertising hoardings; our protagonists turned into small, anonymous creatures. The night is a dark, casually threatening and morally dubious arena filled with lecherous men and prostitutes. This is a city of vice, sin and isolation. Aki is a young woman, overweight, uncomfortable with people, perhaps even her friend Emi, a news reporter but ex-idol, who seems to both love and hate her friend, even setting the married man she’s in a relationship with onto Aki. Why? To discomfort Aki? Shame and embarrass her? There are twisted motivations here and this moral murkiness seems to seep through and into the very core of the film.

But what is the film? Is it an actual sequel to Evil Dead Trap? It is, but a tenuous one. The Hideki of the title, the small boy, is about the closest link you can provide. But it doesn’t really matter and perhaps the film is better off for it. Some people define EDT2:H as a slasher but though there are murders and some scenes of blood and guts, it never really focusses on this over-much, if anything it does so only in how it relates to our protagonists. It never latches onto guts and gore to shove it in our faces and discomfort us, it’s discomforting enough to know it is happening; so focusing on how our protagonists may relate to it, or being made to do it by this apparently supernatural image of Hideki, makes it all the more powerful. When Emi hosts a party, there’s booze, drugs and the uncensored footage played on the TV of one of the murdered women; this is played out to illustrate some kinks in Emi’s character not to put a gloss on murder and luxuriate in it. Equally, when we see Aki near a dead prostitute (which she may or may not have murdered), it’s Aki’s reaction, her movements, her emotions that are front and centre – not that it takes away from the murder of the woman, but again there’s no revelling in the violence that must have occurred.

The same is true of Kurahashi (who plays the detective in the wonderful To Sleep So As To Dream), who could be a one-dimensional lecherous married man, but when we see his home life we start to understand him better, and his connection to Hideki, so there is another layer of connectedness to these characters who all seem to love and hate one another, but in a way that seems realistic; you can imagine Aki and Emi remaining friends throughout the years, and how their relationship provides each with varying forms of emotional nourishment, some more questionable in nature than others.  I have to say, I liked Aki as a character, it’s interesting how the film focuses on her and not the ex-idol reporter – in Aki is an every-person who perhaps we can relate to more than her friend who cannot quite accept she is no longer the centre of attention and desperate to reclaim it.  

That we are never quite sure who murders who; whether this child Hideki who always seems to be in Aki’s view (even if not in that of others), is really a murderous supernatural force really never matters. Accept the ambiguity or just the plain lack of sense and go with the flow of EDT2:H – true it’s a little overlong, maybe better with ten-minutes excised to make it a 90-minute running time, but it’s a surprisingly effective piece of cinema. Though ostensibly a horror it’s really something else, a film that never really tries to define itself within a genre and more effective for it. I'm not sure if it’s brilliant, bonkers, incoherent or crazed but fuck me, EDT2:H is effective.

The much loving and hating friends