Writer(s): Takashi Ishii
Starring: Miyuki Ono, Aya Katsuragi, Hitomi Kobayashi, and Eriko Nakagawa
I’ve seen so many movies over the span of my thirty years on
Earth that I tend to forget a lot of them.
I generally don’t forget that I’ve seen them, but it becomes harder and
harder to pick scenes out of certain films.
For example, I saw 28 Weeks Later in the theater with my friend back
when it first came out, and I couldn’t tell you a single scene from that
movie. But then again, the ADHD might
also be at least partially to blame for that…
On the other hand, there are scenes in certain films that I
won’t ever forget. Evil Dead Trap has
one of those scenes; a death so creative, intense, and bloody that it
singlehandedly is better than the entire cumulative deaths of a dozen
direct-to-video slasher “efforts”. I saw
this movie for the first time about a decade ago, and decided it was time to
revisit it, that death still fresh in my mind as if I’d seen it a month
ago. The rest of the movie I didn’t
remember at all, so it would be like watching it all over again.
Nami is the hostess of a late-night television show. She urges her viewers to send her original
VHS tapes, with the idea that she will air the most interesting videos. Then a mysterious tape ends up in the
newsroom, packaged in an unmarked padded envelope. Intrigued (and curiously, completely alone),
she pops it in the VCR and is horrified by what she finds…a woman, tied up in
an abandoned warehouse, is screaming in terror, right before being killed in a
cringe-inducing sequence of brutality.
Horrified by this, she wants the station to help her
investigate the murder, but they’re not interested in the least. So she rounds up four of her closest friends,
with a man coming along just to be a chaperone, and together, they all head to
the warehouse to try to solve the mystery.
It won’t be a spoiler to reveal that they are picked off one-by-one, as
this is the norm for films of this nature; what would be a spoiler is to ruin
the absolutely insane ending, which I wouldn’t dream of doing.
On paper, Evil Dead Trap is a pretty fun movie, in which
characters are mostly killed via booby traps within the warehouse. It’s a unique twist on the slasher flick,
though there’s still a masked man with a very sharp knife that likes to show up
every once in a while, apparently just to remind us that this is, in fact,
still a slasher flick, no matter how the characters are dispatched.
The problem is in the execution: Pretty much all of the characters die within
the first hour, leaving an excruciating gap in the middle where nothing
happens, save for characters making several stupid decisions that only serve to
elongate the viewer’s agonizing torture even more.
For example, there is a scene late in the movie (about the
point it should have ended) where Nami has an open chance to escape. She’s got a running vehicle, and even starts
to open the gate to leave. But we’re
lead to believe that, even though all of her friends were just brutally
murdered, and she narrowly escaped with her own life, that she is so curious as
to the identity of the killer, that she literally shuts the gate behind her,
and voluntarily walks right back into the place she just escaped from. It got so bad, that even by the time the
absolutely bizarre ending rolled around, my wife and I barely even batted an
eye; yet the movie still manages to go on another twenty minutes beyond that,
despite saying everything that it had to say within the first hour.
Also elongating the torture is the awful score, by Tomohiko
Kira. Actually, that’s being unfair to
Mr. Kira—the main theme, which is highly reminiscent of a Goblin score (no
doubt intentionally; director Toshiharu Ikeda wears his inspirations on his
sleeve), is actually pretty catchy, albeit a little repetitive. The problem is, it becomes increasingly less
and less catchy during each of the next thirty times you hear it. Sometimes, there are slight additions to it
(such as an organ placed in the background), but the theme itself remains
unchanged, and starts to stick out like a sore thumb.
Toward the end, we’re treated to an explanation of what
occurred, and there’s the obligatory cliffhanger that sets the stage for a
second one (that shouldn’t be any kind of spoiler, because they’ve already made
one), and there are some admittedly good ooey-gooey effects that would feel
right at home in a David Cronenberg movie. But none of it is interesting enough to
justify wasting an hour and forty minutes of your time—and it doesn’t matter how
you were going to spend it.
RECAP: The first half is very intriguing, with some graphic
and creative deaths (including one of my favorite kill scenes ever), but all
that gives way to an intensely boring middle section that makes everything drag
on way too long. Tomohiko Kira’s
Goblin-inspired score starts off interesting, but after hearing the same track
(with occasional minor additions) at least a dozen more times, it ends up being
grating. The finale has some good
effects, but chances are good that, by then, you’ll be long past the point of
caring.
OVERALL: 3/10
TRAILER:
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