Years before the ‘Resident Evil' and ‘Silent Hill' franchises, and J-Horror classics such as ‘Ringu' and ‘Ju-On: The Grudge,' pulp filmmaker Toshiharu Ikeda created a plethora of pulp films to simultaneously disturb and intrigue his late night viewers. Sadly, Ikeda's legacy came to an end when he passed away in 2010, but fans of J-horror still uncover, restore, and admire his films today. Arguably Ikeda at his weirdest and best, ‘Evil Death Trap' is a visceral sexploitation horror from the 80's which would go on to set the standard for the countless celebrated horror films and video games to come out of Japan within the next decade. With the movie's recent Unearthed Films restoration, ‘Evil Dead Trap' has never felt more hideously enthralling.
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The story begins at a production studio in the 1980's, where an almost exclusively female TV crew is desperate for leads on a new story to cover. After lead news anchor Nami Tsuchiya asks viewers to submit videos on live TV, she soon discovers a haunting home video in the mail which depicts a woman getting her shirt cut open and her eye impaled. Shocked and disoriented, a bombardment of questions flood Nami's head: Is this snuff film real? Is someone messing with me? Who are these people, and why did they send me this? Nami decides to investigate further, pinpointing the abandoned factory where the video took place and coaxing her TV crew to join her on her quest to uncover the truth. What follows is an indescribable nightmare of extreme proportions, and as night falls and Nami's camera crew begins mysteriously dying one-by-one in gruesome fashion, she finds herself running for her life in the factory's most sinister reaches.
To get a better picture, ‘Evil Dead Trap' can be best described as what would happen if one were to place Hideo Kojima and David Cronenberg in a time machine, lock them inside a movie studio during the late 80's and not let them out until they produced a feature-length film. It contains all the gory and creative zest of Kojima's ‘Silent Hill' games, alongside Cronenberg-esque explorations of dread when exploring themes of family, identity, and the brutalization and alienation of one's own body. Complete with a tense score from Tomohiko Kira (the lead guitarist from the Japanese band Zabadak) and memorable performances from an eclectic cast of Toho Studios actors and adult film actresses alike, ‘Evil Dead Trap' is bound engage every viewer who follows it through the labyrinth of rage and insanity which director Toshiharu Ikeda has created.
‘Evil Dead Trap' succeeds most in pulling archetypes from a number of film genres (such as Giallo, slasher, and surrealism) to create an extremely unique viewing experience. One might find that it falters in its scope of predictability, with plot points that range from being rather foreseeable to extremely unorthodox and unpredictable. Nonetheless, Toshiharu Ikeda's seemingly boundless creativity and convincing performances from Miyuki Ono (as the determined-yet-terrified Nami) and Yuji Honma (as a strange lurker named Daisuke who wishes to find his long lost brother) bring the film together for its 100-minute runtime of bloody entertainment. The film's ending is, simply put, very long and very, very bizarre; it feels multi-interpretational, and while some viewers might interpret the fate of Daisuke and his brother as a literal body horror, others are bound to view the events as a stand-in metaphor for isolation, rage, and mental illness.
For those who feel queasy at the sight of blood, ‘Evil Dead Trap' will likely have you running to the washroom within its first few minutes. But for those who enjoy late night splatter horror with inventive kills and unusual concepts, get your popcorn, sit back, and enjoy Toshiharu Ikeda's hidden gem.
