Evil Dead Trap (1988)

 

Dir. Toshiharu Ikeda

You’d think a movie called Evil Dead Trap would be some sort of rip off of Sam Raimi’s seminal splatter opus, and perhaps that’s the association American distributors were trying to create, as the exact translation of the title is closer to “Death Spirit Trap”, but even that doesn’t accurately describe what unfolds; at least not in a literal sense. There are no deadites or demons or ghosts in this movie. But there’s plenty of evil doing. And a bunch of people do end up dead.

Nami Tsuchiya hosts a late night TV program in which viewers send in home videos hoping to get them played on the air. After receiving a tape that shows a woman appearing to be tortured and killed, she jumps at the chance to produce an investigative piece, hoping to confront the tape’s creator. Using the footage on the tape as a map, Nami and her team are lead to an abandoned industrial site, where all manor or horrors unfold by the hands of a raincoat adorned murderer. As her coworkers are picked off one by one, Nami travels deeper and deeper into the factory, eventually coming to face a killer more terrifying than she ever could have imagined.

Evil Dead Trap feels like a mash up of a many different styles. The elaborate death scenes and stylized blue lighting feel like something out of 80s Argento or Fulci. There’s even a Claudio Simonetti sounding theme tune that plays at random intervals throughout the runtime. The snuff video aspect feels like something out of Videodrome, and the news team in a ‘house of horrors’ aspect feels influenced by Sweet Home. At certain points, some experimental editing is showcased with grainy black and white footage reminiscent of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo films. About halfway through the movie there’s even a death scene involving a trap that wouldn’t feel out of place in the Saw franchise. It might sound very kitchen sink, but all of these elements gel together well to create an atmosphere of nightmarish dread.

Unfortunately the halfway point is where the movie also starts to lose steam. Where the first half is an energetic, giallo-esque slasher, the second half is a bit of a slog. Having dispatched the core characters too quickly, Nami is left to wander the factory on her own, periodically meeting up with a previously seen mystery man who is very obviously the killer, or at least somehow involved with the killer. Many scenes of walking through dark corridors drag the forward momentum of the story and add nothing in the way of atmosphere or interest. The mystery man himself is a complete dud of a character with no discernible personality or motive, and most of his screen time feels like a wet blanket on the film. 

The film eventually reaches it’s completely nonsensical climax, which is reasonably entertaining outside the context of the rest of the movie, but feels unsatisfying as a conclusion to what’s been built up. It’s difficult to decipher what the movie is trying to say, if anything at all, or if it’s simply an exercise in stylish bodily carnage. There’s something there about Nami’s obsession to find the killer in the face of obvious impending doom, but it’s not explored too deeply. Parsing through the director’s commentary on the Synapse DVD sheds no light on this matter unfortunately. There are other curious elements to the film, such as the inclusion of an enslaved assistant of the killer, an idea that feels ultimately undeveloped, a sexual assault scene that feels all the more sleazier because it comes out of nowhere, and the decision to kill one of the victims offscreen, which feels like a cheat. Still, Evil Dead Trap boasts an atmospheric and engaging first half that’s a lot of fun, and a final act that’s entertainingly gonzo, even if you have to sit through some filler in between. And hey, for those who have scraped the bottom of the American slasher barrel, at least it’s something different. As far as stylishly superficial blood and gore fixes go, you could do a lot worse.