EVIL DEAD TRAP – How's that for a title? Take two unrelated horror names and splice 'em together, like a dodgy car. More films should be christened in this way, especially if they're cheap, unroadworthy rip-offs from unscrupulous dealers. Then the audience would know what to expect. 'Evil Dead Trap' carries the cut 'n' shut of its moniker into its content, and very blatantly fuses some odd, slightly antithetical bits of genre film together to come up with a curious hybrid. I don't know much about the work of Toshiharu Ikeda, but didn't he do 'Sex Hunter', that slightly baffling exercise in nasty porn set in an Argentoesque ballet school? If he was swayed by Italian horror tropes for that one, here they've well and truly come home to roost. 'Evil Dead Trap' is flooded with gelled lighting, and is obviously very much in love with the whole Bava / Argento school of filters. I suppose as much could be said for any eighties horror film (EDT hails from '88) which looks like it's about to transform into a rock video. Here the Italo influences are laid on even more thickly, with some Fulci-referencing eye violence thrown in before the first reel is out. It's basically about a TV journalist who, convinced snuff movies are being made on site in an abandoned factory / warehouse / military complex (we're never quite sure), sets out with her entourage to investigate. All her mates end up being offed in the first half hour in kill scenes of varying explicitness. There's also a sleazy rape. Much more than this, there's lots of wandering up and down corridors and in and out of empty rooms, often accompanied by enigmatic conversation courtesy of a mysterious dude who keeps popping up to warn people / ramble in a vaguely opaque manner. The climax is quite – Cronenbergian? This is where the 'anithetical' bit of the horror fusion comes in, the marriage of cranked up but essentially gothic Italian influences with contradictory techno-medical concerns. Anyway, suffice it to say that the killer-duo is basically a guy with a warped baby in his stomach, who manifests at the end in quite an out of kilter way. So, 'Evil Dead Trap' is a beguiling stew of various horror odds and ends, a little bit 'Argento' here, a little bit 'Videodrome' there. But it has a magical incongruence all of its own, not mention a hard, weird edge, and that's something I often find myself thinking about a lot of Japanese stuff (very possibly the result of cultural ineptitude on my part). Bit too much running around in corridors perhaps, but in the end this is fairly full-on, atmospheric horror. The disc from Synapse looks good – but it's non-anamorphic. Surely a candidate for HD treatment now that the floodgates have opened.
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