:
Miyuki Ono,
Miyuki Ono,
Fumi Katsuragi,
more...
:
Toshiharu Ikeda,
Toshiharu Ikeda
see all cast/crew...
: Not Rated
: Synapse Video
: Foreign, Horror, Supernatural/Occult, Japan, Asian Horror
: 102 min.
: Japanese
: English
see additional details...
|
|
Toshiharu Ikeda directed this provocative horror film which spawned two sequels. Miyuki Ono stars as Nami, a talk-show hostess who receives a grotesque snuff video in the mail. She is outraged as she sees a young woman horribly murdered on the tape, complete with a truly foul sequence in which a blade is graphically plunged into the victim's eyeball. With her crew, Nami decides to track down the killer, leading her to an abandoned factory where her crew is repulsively slaughtered one by one. The outlandish ending depicts a man giving birth to his own split personality. Fumi Katsuragi, Hitomi Kobayashi, and Eriko Nakagawa co-star in this sickening but riveting slasher, which closely imitates Italian thrillers by Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava in style. The unrelated Shiryo No Wana 2: Hideki (1991) followed. All three films in the series were written by Takashi Ishii. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
You might also enjoy:
Organ
Another highly disturbing thriller from Japan
Thesis
Chilling, often brilliant Spanish film about a college student who discovers a snuff film ring on campus
|
| A Horror Fan's Horror Film
by colintappe
June 9, 2009 - 5:17 AM PDT
|
|
| Well, this is an intense watch to say the least. Imagine the sophisticated death scenes of prime Italian horror, shot with all the unflinching cinematic techniques that make those scenes have such an impact, coupled with the quick pacing and dumbed down premise of an 80's American slasher, all packaged in a Japanese horror movie, and there you go, Evil Dead Trap. I really love how quickly the film moves along to the setup--a TV crew going into an abandoned warehouse to investigate a snuff flick sent to the station--and the absolutely MORBID ways the crew gets picked off one by one. Like, I know it's 2009, and yeah "fucked up Japanese movie, news at 11," but this one really goes for the throat with BRUTAL Argento style death scenes that really leave the viewer feeling...Ugh, unclean. I mean, sure, you can strap a woman to a chair and drive some wooden pikes through her, but without a film technique that makes the viewer feel an intimate connection to the body that's being massacred, it's all a bit hallow, isn't it? And this film does do a great job of connecting the viewer to the body, even in the rape and sex scenes, which are rife with groping and close shot struggles, a far cry from the sterile soft focus style nudity you see in most 80's American horror. Basically, this movie is after one thing: your moment-to-moment reactions to the horrors displayed on screen. The plot and characters are transparent, and the film leaves itself wide open to be picked apart and criticized, but one can't deny the EFFECT of the film overall. The film also occupies an interesting space where the obscure and purist nature of the piece is bound to please genre diehards, while the lite, familiar premise and pacing would probably satisfy a more pedestrian crowd, or even successfully accompany a party environment. Definitely recommended. |
| Alternate title: Derivative crap!
by Chiend
February 10, 2006 - 6:57 PM PST
|
|
|
0 out of 4 members found this review helpful
|
Well, it looks like the legion of lousy horror movie aficionados will be coming out of the woodwork to crawl all over this review, so here goes...
"Evil Dead Trap" is probably the most derivative work of cinema ever produced in ANY country. Even the theme music so closely resembles the works of Goblin that I can't believe they haven't tried to sue. It mimics the music from Dario Argento's "Deep Red" and "Suspiria" so close as to make the comparison undeniably obvious. It even has maggots dripping onto a girl's hair (as in Argento's "Suspiria") and a scene where several long blades bust through a wall and skewer one victim, an idea that could have easily been culled from any of Argento's scripts. Given the title of this nonsense, I sense some are wondering if it rips off Sam Raimi as well. YES IT DOES! Raimi's shakycam style and off-kilter camera angles are prevalent throughout, as is his "sitting ducks" idea (the victims trapped in a confined area). Ripping off the title of Raimi's most notorious work may have been a good marketing decision, but it doesn't help enhance the quality of the end result by any means. I could name a slew of other horror works this celluloid manure-fest rips off (such as "The Johnsons" and the "Guinea Pig" series) but the point is that "Evil Dead Trap" has lousy acting, gratuitous sex, is cheap-looking and poorly scripted, and has WAY TOO MANY false scares. The violence is obligatory enough to bore any gore hound to the point where they're ready to settle for reruns of the Brady Bunch. As for the plot, you have to wonder why a news reporter and camera team would venture into a location where people are mysteriously murdered on tape and do so little to escape once they find the trouble they were looking for. Eddie Murphy once criticized white people for not having the sense to leave a haunted house. Apparently, some Japanese have the same problem. |
| Meat-grinder
by tboot
July 24, 2002 - 4:40 PM PDT
|
|
|
4 out of 5 members found this review helpful
|
| Japanese pop culture is a well-known meat-grinder when it comes it comes to appropriating another culture's effluvia, especially ours. Like those wacky Japanese product names that warp random English words into Burroughsian art, this notorious 1988 release tosses a dozen U.S. horror movies into a blender (the short list would include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, The Brood and, of course, Evil Dead), and comes up with grisly, occasionally silly, poetry. The film wastes no time: in the first couple of minutes we see an alligator eat a pigeon and a snuff video in which a woman is mercilessly, horribly knife-tortured. The snuff tape has been sent to the hostess of a TV magazine show, Late Night With Nami, daring Nami to show it on her program. Nami, looking to boost her ratings, rushes off with some of her colleagues to try and find the killing room where the video was shot. They end up at an abandoned American military base -- and so begins your basic horror movie funhouse set-up, as they wander from room to shadowy room, succumbing to complex killing machines along the way. Little of this is particularly surprising or original, since we all know the horror movie rules by heart, and EDT sticks to the formula with almost homage-like slavishness. But, before you know it, almost everybody's elaborately dead and (no shock here) only Nami is left, along with a Mysterious Stranger who leads her -- and us -- into a wondrously ridiculous climax where Evil Dead Trap transforms into an unrestrained and thoroughly satisfying "what the...?" experience. |
|
|
GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 5.84)
95 Votes
add to list 
|
|
|
Your cart
Chiend
beretta
© 2006 All Media Guide, LLC. Portions of content provided by All Movie Guide®,
a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.