Evil Dead Trap (1988)

Original title: Shiryo no wana

Struggling late night TV presenter Nami (Miyuki Ono), whose original selling point of producing her show with an all-female crew seems to be losing its lustre for her audience, receives an interesting tape from a member of said audience.

It looks rather a lot like an actual snuff tape of a woman being brutally murdered. Like any sensible person, Nami calls the police. No, wait, she decides to pack her crew – and one male add-on – into a car and follow some decidedly obvious clues to the location where the murder was committed. So obvious are the clues, one might even think there’s a trap waiting for her.

The location where the tape was shot turns out to be an abandoned military base pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Also, someone’s or something’s private murder labyrinth, so Nami and her crew soon find themselves fighting for their lives.

Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap is a pretty astonishing film, still. It is a project that marries varied influences in ways that seem to then have influenced just as varied future horror films. This never is the Evil Dead spin-off you’d expect – apart from some extra chaotic Evil Force point of view shots that will be explained in the end – but rather mixes the grimiest and most “real” feeling traditions of horror – think the idea of Texas Chainsaw Massacre married to the grain of Basket Case - with the most stylized ones. The camera work and lighting appear heavily influenced by Bava and Argento.

This leads to a film whose nightmare-scape qualities are born as much from the things cinema pretends are most real – those grainy shots and the killer’s love for video – as from those that look most consciously artificial and constructed. This, and some narrative elements I feel no need to spoil, makes Evil Dead Trap a predecessor to the Saw style of conscious ugliness, as well as POV horror but also seems to have left heavy traces in everything stylized that followed it.

At the same time, this never just succeeds as a film that marries traditions as some kind of transitional piece before things become more interesting in the future, but as a very energetic, often decidedly crazy, sometimes deeply unpleasant and always exciting example of how to turn influences into one’s own style, brilliantly.