Calling Sam Raimi

Film: Evil Dead Trap (Shiryo no Wana)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Sometimes, horror movies are just about the thrills and not at all about the plot. That’s certainly the case with Evil Dead Trap (or Shiryo no Wana if you prefer). As the name implies, this is a film that is influenced by Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films. One of Raimi’s signatures in his films is the first-person monster camera swooping through the woods, and we’re going to get a lot of that here.

There’s also going to be a lot of influence of Italian horror. There’s a sense in Evil Dead Trap of set pieces that have been created first and then the rest of the movie built around them. A lot of the music use seems to come from Argento, and the penchant for eyes feels straight out of Fulci’s playbook. What all of this means is that Evil Dead Trap is going to feature a lot of gore and not a lot of plot. The gore, more or less, is the point. You watch Evil Dead Trap because there are topless Japanese women getting killed in various ways.

This is true to the point that it’s honestly not worth talking about characters or knowing who is who beyond our main character, Nami (Miyuki Ono). Nami has a late night television show where she shows videos that have been sent in by her viewers. She’s disappointed in the current crop of videos and her ratings have been flagging, making her a bit desperate. When a new video shows up that appears to be a genuine snuff film, Nani creates a team made up almost entirely of women to investigate where they think the video was filmed, which turns out to be an abandoned military base.

From this point forward, everyone involved in the film is going to act like a horror movie character and not like a real person. The general “plot” of the movie is that people are going to be isolated one at a time and killed off, sometimes in a sort of trap. They’ll be impaled, strangled, stabbed, shot with crossbow bolts and more. When I say that this is the plot, it really is the plot, at least until we get to the end.

When I say that people don’t act like real people what I mean is that a lot happens to drive the action that wouldn’t happen in real life. For instance, all of these characters are walking around an abandoned military facility. When Nami runs into someone she doesn’t know, she not only talks to him, but immediately trusts him. This is after she has seen the bodies of a couple of her friends, so she realizes that there’s a killer running around, but somehow decides that it’s not this guy. Why? Because the plot needs her to follow him. When the first body shows up, they don’t leave—they go further into the abandoned facility. It’s even still daylight outside and the gate is unlocked. They could leave but they don’t. Why? Because the plot needs them to stay.

This genuinely feels like a Lucio Fulci film, or perhaps Argento, filmed in Japan with Japanese actors. The overall plotlessness, the way the characters behave, the set pieces of particular scenes that are connected simply by weird dialogue and people acting as if their lives aren’t in danger, the primary color palette, the constant, recurring theme music—all of this screams of Italian horror, and not in a way that says much positive about the film.

Fans of Italian horror will feel right at home in this film. And all of this is true right up until the closing 20 minutes or so, when the film takes a very hard left turn into body horror straight out of the works of Frank Henenlotter. And this is what the entire film builds up to.

Here's the thing—I get what the screenwriter and director were going for at the end. There’s a shock moment that builds up well, and it could be argued that we had to go through a lot of what we did to get to the conclusion. I can accept that. But there are things that could be done through the rest of the film that lead to the same place that don’t force the people involved to act like idiots. It’s not the plotlessness that bothers me, nor the gore, and not even the references to Argento and Raimi. It’s the fact that an easy rewrite would give us the same shock moments without all of the characters being complete idiots.

Why to watch Evil Dead Trap: There’s a shock moment in the third act that works pretty well.
Why not to watch: To make the story work, all of the characters have to be idiots.