Writing about Movies, TV, Comics & Toys. Critically and creatively.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Movie #11 Evil Dead Trap





Leave it to the Japanese to take what could have been a clear cut (pun intended) slasher movie and just make it a festival of weirdness and WTF's.

Evil Dead Trap focuses on a news team that do a late night program and try to do interesting stories for the people that suffer from sleepless nights. Then one day they get a snuff film in the mail, and it includes directions to where it was filmed, so in typical scary movie logic fashion they go to find it, people die yadda yadda yadda.

The movie starts off with a bang, as you get to see the snuff film they receive, and it contains a segment where someone gets stabbed in a place that I've only seen maybe one other time (Highlight here to read what body part it is: THE EYE, SHE GETS STABBED IN HER EYE. The gore in this snippet of a snuff film was enough for me to keep watching the flick, but from here the movie is very dry and dull up until the actual killing starts. The actors have fairly silly lines and behave in the stereotypes that we associate with Japanese people IE: The women are submissive and the men are very dominant, and see the woman as only sexual tools.

The movies kills are fantastic. Most of them aren't like things you see in American slasher movies, some are similar but they're at the point where it feels genuine for this movie and not over done like in most American slashers.Most of the kills happen either during coitus or right after it. We all are aware on a subconscious level that most kills in a slasher movie are minimalistically sexual and try to hide the repressed sexual tension in the deaths; however in this movie the kills are very vibrantly sexual in almost every way you can imagine. Not to the point where the violence is being committed against their genitals, but they all have this strong sense of sexual dominance over the victim. Also the sex scenes in the movie are really difficult to watch because it seems like the women are not willing participants.

The movie has a very strange last act and by strange I mean things that don't get explained, don't make sense, and you don't ever see in horror movies nowadays. I would advise anyone that wants to make a slasher movie not to model after this movie and not to make it obvious who the killer is about 20 minutes into the movie. I would also advice film makers never to use the musical score from this movie, because it wasn't scary and made the movie seem rather goofy (perhaps the Japanese are frightened by silly things?)

This movie is not bad, but it's not good either, if you are really interested you should definitely seek it out, because what happens in the final 20 minutes you'll have to see to believe.

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