Evil Dead Trap

Evil Dead Trap (1988) aka Shiryo no wana (死霊の罠)

Dir. Toshiharu Ikeda

Written by Takashi Ishii

Starring Miyuki Ono, Aya Katsuragi, Yuji Honma, Hitomi Kobiyashi

So, you can’t have a Chainsawnukah without some Asian horror, and right from the get-go I was jonesing for some Japanese or Korean shit that would really make me sit up and say, “huh.” I figured that with access to pretty much every major streaming service, it would be no problem to just toss something on when the mood struck me. But then when the mood did strike me, I discovered that there’s an appalling lack of anything even remotely in that vein, and the closest I could get was the Chinese SINGULAR CAY, which turned out to be so spectacularly terrible I had no choice but to write nearly 3,000 words about it and feature it prominently on my website and widely promote my review. That’ll show ‘em. But the lesson was learned; if you want the real thing, you gotta go find the real thing. So I did, I went and found the very first real thing I could, and that was the unpromisingly named EVIL DEAD TRAP. I mean, come on guys, I get that the literal translation of 死霊の罠 is ‘Trap of the Dead Spirits’ (or so says Google translate) and so consequently EVIL DEAD TRAP is a workable English version of that, but here’s the thing, EVIL DEAD is already a thing, and those three words together barely even make sense, let alone meaningfully convey anything about the movie.

So I wasn’t expecting much from this one, it just happened to be the first thing I found that met my low requirement of being A) an Asian horror movie and B) that’s it.

That kind of underestimation was a rookie tactical error, because it left me woefully unprepared for the frenzied assault on my brain which was about to follow. The setup is simple enough: a plucky female reporter unfairly brushed off by her chauvinist colleagues who think she should be covering fluff pieces (remember this unexpected and welcome bit of spunky feminism, because you’ll need it to defend continuing to watch the movie when things get…shall we say problematic later on) decides to investigate a mailed-in snuff film by traveling to an abandoned industrial facility with a cadre of body count colleagues, only to be --totally unexpectedly, there’s really no way to see this sort of thing coming-- menaced by a mystery killer.

That could be any movie. But this isn’t just any more. This is a movie which casually pulls an UN CHIEN ANDALOU on us with no warning at all like five minutes in.* It’s a nasty, dirty, crazy, violent bit of work, the kind of thing that reminds you that while at times it feels a little cheap and easy to joke about Japanese cinema being crazy, holy shit, Japanese cinema really is fucking crazy. This is a movie which has a character delivering some standard movie exposition to a woman while violently raping her. Yes, in order to follow the plot of this movie you’re going to have to be able to pick out the important plot clues in the dialogue of a scene which would comfortably be the most disturbing and boundary-pushing thing in any American movie which came out in 2017. Even the Italians wouldn’t just toss something like this into theaters as if it’s a normal genre movie.

Even so, I’d wager the Italians were very much on the mind of director Toshiharu Ikeda, because unlikely as it sounds, EVIL DEAD TRAP (which, despite the name, features no “dead spirits” and certainly no evil dead of any kind) is unmistakably a giallo. From the intense and sometimes surreal lollipop-colored lighting, to its essential mystery-slasher structure, to its peppy female journalist protagonist, to its crazy improbably reveal of the killer, to its lurid sex and violence, right down to its extremely Goblin-esque… (well, score doesn’t sound quite right. It’s really just one repetitive keyboard run played through various filters. But the feel is right.) It’s frankly stunning that anyone in 1988 --let alone someone in Japan-- was capable of making a giallo this classical, but crazy as it sounds, there’s no denying that it feels almost as distinctly Italian as it does Japanese, sans, perhaps, the vague traces of techno-anxiety which remain an unmistakable through-line of Japanese horror cinema (from THE RING with its killer VHS to PULSE with its ghostly internet; here, embodied by a mysterious snuff film received by our intrepid reporters).

I’m at a loss to say how this happened. Ikeda began his career with the ‘roman porno’ (“romantic pornography,” with quotation marks weighing much more heavily over the first word than the second) ‘pink films’ made by Nikkatsu studios in the 1970s and 80, with titles like ANGEL GUTS: RED PORNO and SEX HUNTER. Which just by itself kinda tells you something of how we got to this point. I mean, remember, Nikkatsu wasn’t some grimy fly-by-night b-movie grindhouse operation… it was Japan’s oldest and most venerable film studio, and one of the biggest studios in the country. They worked with Seijun Suzuki and Shohei Imamura!** They produced some of the biggest action films of the day. And they also produced SEX HUNTER, a movie which I think is nicely summed up in the following quote (warning: trigger warning. No seriously, think long and hard before you continue) by an IMDB user whose literal, no-joke internet handle is fucking “Rapeman13:” Miki's transformation from shy, virginal ballerina to ravenous uber-slut is represented brilliantly as the film swiftly transitions from scenes of Miki gracefully practicing her ballet routines to being bound and suspended from the ceiling expelling a Coke enema from her asshole as her SM trainer leeringly looks on. (IMDB labels it a “drama”)

So, from the mind of the visionary director of that “romantic porno,” now we have a horror movie, and he finally gets a chance to avoid kowtowing so closely to your bourgeois sense of refined high taste like he had to on ANGEL GUTS: RED PORNO. He takes this opportunity to really cut loose on over-the-top violence to the point that it comfortably crosses over from “gritty” to “surreal” right about the time our hero falls through a hole in a first-floor hallway and inexplicably awakens on the roof of the building. From there we have naked impalings, beheadings, strangulations, SAW-style Rube Goldberg deathtraps, burning corpses, and eventually a grueling battle with the killer which gradually escalates from grotesque giallo craziness to out-and-out magical realism (with the ‘realism’ a distant afterthought and possibly even an unintended side effect). Say what you will about EVIL DEAD TRAP’s title and pervasive moral repugnance, but never, ever dare to criticize its moxie.

Just how much moxie are we talking about here? Ikeda actually had the balls to claim he’d never seen EVIL DEAD (I guess the name is just a crazy coincidence) or SUSPIRIA (even though SEX HUNTER is set at a ballet school, and this movie is so stylistically similar it could handily pass as a sequel) and that he hates horror so much he never even watched his finished movie. All of which frankly sound kind of like ridiculous lies, similar to his claim that he became a director because he was sitting in a bar near the studio drinking and mouthing off about how easy it was to be a director, when someone from the company said, “OK do it” and he found himself employed as a director the next day. I have a very strong feeling that there is, at the very least, a bit more to all three of those claims than Ikeda lets on, but hey, you can tell just by watching his film that he’s a guy who knows that a good yarn is a lot more important than a logical one.

And in the horror field, that’s exactly the kind of guy you want to have on board, because by completely abandoning logic and investing wholeheartedly in a frenzy of nightmarish surreality and perverse violence, he crafted something genuinely startling, a truly unique and remarkably potent testimony to the power of that strain of Japanese cinema which just goes there. And even if it had nothing else going for it, it would be worth the ride entirely on the basis of its sporting one of the most colorfully nutty killer reveals in all of slasherdom. That’s an outcome that could only come from the lurid sleaziness of Italy being filtered through the sheer psychosis of Japan, and, well, you see the result. As far as I know, there’s nothing else in the history of cinema quite like it, and that may well be an overall good thing for mankind as a species. But as a truly unique beast, transgressive and bizarre, but also narratively grounded enough to pack a visceral punch, EVIL DEAD TRAP is a gen-u-ine highlight of 80’s Japanese horror cinema.

* Admittedly, Dali and Bunuel actually get to it even quicker, but on a shorter runtime.

*Granted, they fired Suzuki for making his most classic film and weren’t exactly running with the same crew by the time the Roman Pornos started, but still.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a trap, but adding “EVIL DEAD” in there is infuriating dishonest on two levels and doesn’t even make any sense.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	None, or at least I don’t think so (hard to tell, since the credits are not entirely translated)
SEQUEL?	Yes, two sequels, one in 1992 directed by Izo Hasimoto, and another directed by Ikeda in 1993, which bears the alternate title THE BRUTAL INSANITY OF LOVE. That would make a suitable title for a grindcore album, but unfortunately the IMDB reviews say it’s more of a thriller and less of a horror movie than the no-holds-barred craziness of EVIL DEAD TRAP 1 would cause one to hope.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Japan, but Italy in spirit
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, giallo
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, although body count friend #2 Hitmoi Kobayashi was apparently a huge star in the world of pornography (wikipedia has quotes gushing that she was, "one of the icons of Japanese adult cinema history." and "She laid the foundations for the golden age of adult video.”) This appears to be her mainstream genre debut, though any world in which EVIL DEAD TRAP is a “mainstream” movie pretty much reduces the word to utter meaninglessness.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Yes, two people, alone for all of five minutes, decide to get down and fuck naked on a filthy abandoned factory floor while looking for a snuff film killer. I’ll let you guess how well that works out for them.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, they have a weird gimp guy who engages in an extended and deeply unpleasant rape scene with one of the girls
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	A snake menaces of the girls, but she should be more worried about the body in the locker nearby.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	Sort of, but a weird one
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Definitely
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yeah, sort of.
VOYEURISM?	Yes, the film begins with a tape straight out of PEEPING TOM, with a first-person-perspective murder
MORAL OF THE STORY	As much as I support this brassy young lady making a commitment to being a tough-as-nails journalist instead of a soft focus morning show celebrity, it’s possible this was not the right moment to get all #ShePersisted on us.