Nami hosts a late night home video program. She receives a tape which appears to be a real snuff film. She and her crew investigate the location where she meets a man looking for his brother who warns her to stay away. As she gets closer to the truth, she and her friends are subjected to a brutal nightmare.
The brutal tone of the movie is pretty much set immediately. Only 5 minutes in Nami watches the terrible snuff film that was presented to her. The gore in this sequence leaves nothing to the imagination. A tied up woman is carved with a knife in full close-up. The worse is yet to come though. After that the knife pierces her eye in full close-up causing eye fluid to burst out. Yup, director Toshiharu Ikeda sure knows how to catch your attention. Nami, frightened but intrigued by the video, quickly gathers her filming crew and heads to the place where the video was filmed (in the video was a complete segment with directions how to get to the place where the killing took part) to investigate whether the video was real or if it just was a prank. When they arrive it doesn't take long for strange things to happen. This all is supported by an amazing score that seems to return every 5 minutes. Tomohiko Kira, who composed the score, strangely enough only composed music for four other movies, of which three were directed by Ikeda. I have yet to see these movies but with the score he produced in this movie you'd put the guy in the same line as terrific composers like Fabio Frizzi, Claudio Simonetti (or the whole Goblin group if you like), John Carpenter and Riz Ortolani.
The killer that roams around in the foggy area where our tv-crew is investigating isn't any less than a brilliant appearance. Wearing a dark green raincoat and his face covered with a camouflaged mask it kinda reminded me of the killer in The Prowler (1981). The kills are great. I already mentioned the snuff video killing which was amazing but that's not the only blood that flows around in this movie. All the kill scenes are worth mentioning so lets sum it up. A girl's body gets spiked by multiple big metal pins, a man is stabbed with a knife in the back of his head while raping a girl, a girl is strangled with a big piece of aluminium wire while she gets dragged over the top of the car by the wire around her neck and last but not least a woman's head is pretty much sliced in half by a big hatchet. Gorehounds, look up this movie!
Unfortunately there are some badly done things as well, which shouldn't come as a surprise as Evil Dead Trap is a B-Movie, a good one, but still a B-Movie. For example, a girl's hand is sliced open by the killer. Painful, I get that, but in stead of running away she takes a good amount of time to slowly open her hand, look at it and then dramatically fall to the ground. Another thing that bothered me a bit was the fact that the movie just lasts a little bit too long. It could, and in my opinion should, have stopped at around 90 minutes but Ikeda decides to add another 15 minutes in which the movie goes totally over the top including a murdering fetus.
Evil Dead Trap is certainly one to check out. It's got a magnificent music score, a scary killer and some amazing death scenes. The movie definitely has got some flaws but I take them for granted as most things about this Japanese slasher flick are just fucking awesome!
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