Evil Dead Trap

Time to delve into one of the first releases of 88 Films Japanarchy range, one I'd had an eye on (oh dear - see below) but only just now finally seen.

The first few minutes of Evil Dead trap worried me; there is a mix of visual deliciousness and literally eye-popping gore. Gore is not something I particularly like, nor the concept of how imaginative you can make death, which is something you often see noted in 1980s horror onwards: the idea of people being killed in imaginative ways, if I am honest, I find a bit disturbing and also, to be more honest, dull. The point of horror films is not blood and spilling guts but moral crisis. I appreciate others will feel differently and that’s fine, but torture porn for me has no interest (right there with you - squeamish Ed). Thus the first moments had me thinking: this film is not going to work for me. Would director Toshiharu Ikeda (Mermaid Legend, Scent of a Spell) prove me wrong?

Late night TV show anchor Nami (Miyuki Ono) is sent a tape of an apparent snuff film; wanting to research it, her producers say no, but she sets off anyway with her production team. Following the roads she saw in the film to an abandoned wasteland, they investigate only for her colleagues to be slowly killed off...

The short answer to my "is it for me?" question is: yes. The story is pretty rote and has many of the problems inherent to the genre: how it can separate out our protagonists so that they can be picked  off? Why would they even be doing this in the first place, entering an abandoned area having apparently watched a snuff movie (why did they not immediately send it to the police?) and so on. Absurdities abound and so it’s really down to the director to paper over these cracks and create a visually and tonally compulsive movie and arguably that is exactly what Ikeda does. There’s definitely a large dose of Dario Argento and Gialli in general behind Evil Dead Trap. Even the soundtrack has much in common with Argento’s work but that’s more a tonal equivalent and interestingly the film comes a year before Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo the Iron Man and it prefigures it with many short sequences shot in grainy black and white, sped up, and have a Tsukamoto-esque kinetic quality.  

Ikdea’s history with Roman Porno also enters the equation, one couple deciding in this desolate arena to get it on. Though slightly absurd, it shows Ikada’s skill in the same way as Scent of a Spell, in how it manages to convey sexual acts with surprisingly little skin. 

But lets get to death, having touched then on sex, because the cover of the Blu-ray itself did much to put me off; the image of the woman impaled by spikes. It reminded me of many covers that the distributor Shameless released, where they tend to focus on what they think is the demographic: go full on sex and death, rather than think of the film and how it may appeal more widely. The image from the cover is from a scene in the film, this is no surprise, but it is not as unpleasant - in terms of how it could be gratuitous – as it turns out in the film. Is the scene pleasing? No, it conveys death, so of course not, but it is not such that it goes overly gore heavy

One of my problems I suspect with graphic violence at times is not that it is graphic but how the film seems to treat it. Watching Only God Forgives for instance, the violence there at its most extreme seemed almost like the director was getting off on it, and that if anything makes it worse because there is no implied concern, rather its violence cos: phwooar. Some people may disagree but this is how that film hit me, Evil Dead Trap did not. Maybe this was budgetary, I don’t know but it really doesn't matter. True, there are some absurd methods of murder and at least one struck me as deeply improbable at best, but I did not get a sense that the film was enjoying itself with the carnage.

Ultimately this feels very much Ikada’s film, because it’s one that fuels itself on visual and tonal balance. The performances are fine, because there’s little here that you could describe as character and the story is thin, but it is Ikada’s ability to create a film experience that engages you throughout, through visual invention and drawing you into what story there is that is most impressive. I was really expecting to give up but ended, even with the most obvious aspect screaming at you, curiously impressed.

Ikeda has a skill for building up mood and generating sequences that suck you in, while working with thin material he makes of a sow’s ear a silk purse.