 |
 Nami is a talk show host who asks her audience to send in some of their own
videos so they can show them on her late night show. One tape she gets shows a
route to an 'abandoned factory" and then shows a woman being tortured and
killed. She gets a camera crew together and they go to the factory. They find
"horror beyond the imagination!" Someone or something is waiting for them.
"Evil Dead Trap is a masterpiece of Japanese horror cinema that will leave you breathless!"
1988, 102 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
The front of the DVD case contains a quote from none other than Oliver Stone,
praising this movie for being, "a daring and grim thriller - reveals Japan's
twisted sexual soul one terrifying scene after another." I'm glad to see that
his penchant for attaching great significance to unremarkable movies extends
beyond merely his own self-important works (I mean, is there a bigger pile of
exaggerations, speculations, and outright lies than JFK? Junk like that does a
better job of obscuring the truth than our government could ever hope to do.
After all, they aren't a whiz in the editing booth like Stone.). You see, if
you've ever really paid any attention to horror movies, you would know this one
by reputation. It's supposed be the greatest Japanese horror movie ever made
and full of sick and twisted stuff that you could never, eeee-ver, imagine in
your occidental lives. So does it live up to it's reputation? Well, I'll give
it its due. It's probably the granddaddy of all Japanese-made
slasher-in-an-abandoned-warehouse movies.  Like most of these cookie-cutter (ha ha) slasher flicks, you need to have some
kind of set up, because unless your slasher is going to show up where people
work
or shop, you need an excuse to get the characters into some remote place,
preferably without their cell phones, so that they can be terrorized a good long
time. Now, in this particular case, our characters decide to get themselves
isolated in one of the dumbest concepts you'll see in a long time. Nami is the
somewhat homely host (they don't really use the fact that she's homely in this
movie, I just sort of noticed it on my own) of some late night talk show and
one of the segments they do is to feature home videos that their fans send in.
It
shouldn't come as any big surprise that the kind of people who would stay up
real late to watch an ugly Japanese woman do a talk show, might be a chopstick
shy of a pair, if you catch my meaning. Nami gets one tape in the mail and
checks it out. It shows someone going through the city and ending up at an
abandoned factory. Once in the factory, we get some POV shots of some woman
being
tortured and eventually killed. To establish that this is one of those "over
the top" movies we get a nice long, loving shot of a knife going into her
eyeball.
Nami is horrified, because she's not really fan of the whole "snuff film"
genre, like you or I,
so she does what any of us would do. She gets four members of her crew
together and they follow the landmarks that were on the video tape and go to
the abandoned factory.  You may accuse me of being a nervous Nellie, backseat driver, Monday morning
quarterback, and that my hindsight is 20/20, but does anyone out there think
that's the right idea? Actually, does anyone out there think that the idea of
going out to the factory to check out the tape's authenticity is an "idea" to
even consider? I know that some may say, "oh well, they weren't sure if it was
real or not." Okay, let me break it down for you then. If it was not real, it
wouldn't be a news story at all. No one would care that some people shot a
video of someone being "killed" by special effects. If you're not sure, that
means you think there really may be a killer on the loose there. Why would
you go in there at all, then? Either way, going in is pointless: you either
end up with no story or you end up snuffed. So she and three other fairly ugly
broads and one pretty ugly dude pile into their SUV and head off to the
factory. They get there and it's abandoned and Nami immediately decides that
they should split into groups of two, two, and one. Don't they get slasher
movies over in Japan or is it all fire-breathing dinosaurs and flying turtles?
Since they're split up, this allows the group of two
comprising a female and the male (I never really caught onto their names, even
with the subtitles. I'm fairly sure that most of the women other than Nami had
names that started with the letter "R" and were only three letters long, but I
can't be certain.) to get it on! Yes, you would have thought you were watching
one of the classic Friday the 13th installments if it wasn't for the ugly
Japanese people with late eighties hair replacing the ugly American people with
early eighties hair. Because this movie is cutting edge and quite the
trailblazer, they don't get killed in the act. They get killed later. I
should also note that this "news crew" Nami has assembled consists of maybe one
or two people with regular old cameras. You're going in search of sicko,
depraved killer and you don't take a video camera or at least tape recorder and
microphone? Come on! He may grant you an exclusive! The movie then spends the rest of the time killing off everyone but Nami (Wow,
that's pretty original!) Along the way Nami runs into a whole bunch of TVs
with her image, just in case none of us caught on that the reason this idiot
sent the snuff film was because he was obsessed with Nami (Crazed fan? How
come nobody in the USA ever thought of that concept?). While Nami is milling
around the warehouse waiting for really gross stuff to happen to her friends,
she runs into a guy dressed in black, who eventually tells her that he and his
brother, Hideki, used to play in this place as kids and that he's looking for
his
little brother now. Your little brother wouldn't happen to be an imaginary
little brother would it? Is it "Hideki" that we see dressed in a rain slicker
and combat boats and mask dragging bodies through the mists around the
warehouse? It's pretty obvious from the get go what's going on, but I won't
spoil the big surprise by telling you that this guy she met is also Hideki.
"Hideki" helps her escape the warehouse (split personality and all) and she
gets ready to leave (all her friends have disappeared at this point), but then
she sets her face in a grimace, takes a swig of some soda left in the SUV, ties
her hair up in a bun, grabs a flashlight and heads back into the warehouse!
ARRRGHH! I'm sure the filmmaker wanted to show that this experience empowered
her (too bad it was at the cost of four of her friends' lives), but this isn't
some kind of Linda Hamilton-T2 thing going on here. She was trying to save the
future and she went into serious training. Nami is just going back into a
warehouse that if no one ever went in again, the killings would probably stop
since Hideki's all moved in and wouldn't want to break the lease. The movie
lost whatever momentum and mounting terror it had at this
point. It is suspenseful when someone is trying to survive an evil dead trap
(whatever that is), but once you survive and make it out, it's over. If you
make it out safely and then go back in, I'm jumping ship and I'm hitching my
bandwagon to the killer, because you don't deserve to live, but I know you
will, because that's what always happens in these cruddy slasher flicks.  Once back inside the warehouse, she finds the killer's lair and it turns out he
has a mother fixation (Now that's a new one!) and sees Nami as some type of
mother substitute (From the way she looked, I sure knew she was no sugar
substitute, if you get my drift!). Hideki and her have a confrontation and he
asks her to kill
him to stop his "little brother." Then you get him thrashing about and this
bloody little baby creature comes out of him and goes after Nami while it's
still attached by a tentacle to Hideki. The baby is actually Hideki, they
don't tell you the name of the adult, but I refuse to play along like they're
not the same person. Anyway this movie enters The Tingler territory with it's physical manifestation of a mental condition (Fear in The Tingler , being a whack job in this movie). I assume they trying to be artsy-fartsy by
having
his "madness" assume physical form with this nasty little tyke thing, but it
just comes off as ridiculous. Eventually Nami defeats him and makes it out
alive.
The movie ends with her having Hideki come out of her neck where he wounded
her in their battle (What?). Huh, so the killer isn't really dead. That's
pretty
revolutionary, I'd say. As you can see the movie is an overrated jumble of
slasher cliches. I'm guessing everyone shat themselves over it because it has
good production values. You have nice, fancy camera work and elaborately staged
death scenes to distinguish it from the rest of the murderous-freaks movies out
there, but the movie isn't about much of anything and it is basically just a
slice and dice flick with some Japanese flavoring. Sometimes you get the idea,
they're only doing certain scenes for the shock value and they don't even
pretend to have it matter to whatever skeleton of a story they have going. They
throw in a rape by
someone who's only connection to anything is that his fiancee was killed by
Hideki. After this fairly long, pointless rape scene, Hideki shows up and
kills both the rapist and his victim. Thanks for that. If you don't mind
watching a derivative
splatter movie (and if you watch splatter movies at all, you don't) that looks
better than the competition and moves along quickly, this one will do, but
it certainly doesn't deserve all the pub it's gotten. Vastly overrated and you
dopes out there that like high body counts won't even enjoy it since there's
only about seven or eight stiffs, depending on how you count Hideki and his
brother.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
