Evil Dead Trap II (1992)

From https://pics.filmaffinity.com/shiryo_no_
wana_2_hideki-419711928-large.jpg

Director: Izô Hashimoto

Screenplay: Izô Hashimoto, Chiaki J. Konaka

Cast: Utako Nakajima as Aki Ôtani; Rie Kondoh as Emi Kageyama; Shirô Sano as Kurahashi; Shôta Enomoto as Hideki; Shino Ikenami as Kan-nadzuki Chiyo; Sei Hiraizumi as Muraki; Kazue Tsunogae as Noda

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #125

Synopsis: Aki (Utako Nakajima) is a projectionist at a cinema who kills random women she crosses at night. Her friend Emi (Rie Kondoh) is a reporter of a morally dubious late night news show who're not above lurid reports on murders, including those committed by Aki. When a married man, Kurahashi (Shirô Sano), enters their lives, a romantic triangle is created. Kurahashi however is connected to something deeply unnatural, personified by a little boy named Hideki that randomly appears on TV or in rooms.

Evil Dead Trap II is not an actual sequel to the original 1988 film of the same name. Instead, the original director left, returning to the series for part 3, and was replaced by Izô Hashimoto, most well known for co-writing the legendary 1988 anime adaptation of Akira. His co-writer is someone whose name immediately pricked up my ears when I first heard of the film, Chiaki J. Konaka, a man who almost completely switched to animation after the mid-nineties onwards, becoming the man known for extremely esoteric storytelling. (Alongside scripts for the 2000-2 Digimon series, probably because the anime industry is one where everyone works in every genre). Evil Dead Trap 2 couldn't be so dramatically opposite from the prequel, even an entirely different cinematic species from the splatter/slasher hybrid the first was.

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original
/lTWymbo1CXJikbJbuJoUhpSdpdh.jpg

Whilst its prequel was a mess in tone and pace, for most of its length the immediate sequel is a drama with an incredibly glacial pace, one which just happens to involve one of the women in the romantic triangle in the centre being a killer who commits random murders of other women at night. A larger weighted woman, Aki is immediately intrigued the moment a man named Kurahashi is seemingly attracted to her, the relationship complicated by the fact that he's involved with her friend Emi, or that he has a wife who is seemingly traumatised by the loss of their son, one she believes is still there and acts as if he does in their family home. The film takes it time with this drama, stretching over forty minutes or more with a lingering, creepy atmosphere being built up over time. Most of the film is set at night or in darkened rooms, the early to mid-nineties tone of many Japanese genre films from the period having a sordidness even in neon light lit urban areas, a sense of strange and gristly things taking place just beyond a back alley. It's a tone which somehow allows one to imagine Ryū Murakami's erotic adaptation of his own novel Tokyo Decadence (1992) to co-exist with a full on horror film like this, a post-bubble urban Japan which feels grotty and claustrophobic as these films characters drift through their ordinary lives. It explains why I've collected all these various genres of Japanese cinema - pinku erotica, anime, crime, horror, even sci-fi - into one glorious mass as many of the best and/or most interesting emphasise the most diverse and character filled environments in the country, both its urbanscape and the rural areas. (Something which also can be seen in the period set films too). Even the scenes which are set in the day or the light have a bleakness to them, the most colour and vibrancy to be found when Aki joins a religious cult, one not taken seriously but whose elder female head immediately realises someone is lurking inside Aki the moment she joins them.

From https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original
/4Rq8mbkIgdWHdfEV8EuaEeIxqU3.jpg

At some point, Evil Dead Trap II reaches a crescendo and completely detaches itself from a clear narrative, becoming entirely subjective and weird. The genre starts to shift to the supernatural and horror when Kurahashi is shown to be more sinister than a potential romantic interest for either woman, a being whose calm manner and politeness starts to shift as his actual being becomes entirely subjective. At this point, any sense of logic breaks and a viewer caught off guard (like I was) enters a irrational dream logic. This is something particularly common with co-writer Konaka, as notorious for this completely subjective tone for the endings of his scripts as it led to acclaimed work like the animated series Serial Experiments Lain (1998).  

From http://www.horror-extreme.com/Content/images/
evil-dead-trap-2-hideki/evil-dead-trap-2-hideki-4.jpg

The experience of entering a Konaka story when it reaches this expressionist end stage, where chronology is fixed but the world is entirely subject, within the space of internal emotions and, as in this case, with characters being teleported to a multilayered warehouse environment out of time is always startling. Also prone to alienating some viewers, which is why Konaka has always been a divisive screenwriter, but a unique trait of his. Here, alongside with how its presented, the switch is with our anti-heroines ending up trying to stab each other with knives and kill each other, one whcih is sent up in plot points before the ending sequences but still disorientating. This entire ending is also when the build up and lingering pace of Evil Dead Trap II before makes the wait worth it, a delirious finale where the warehouse exists as a entity out of existence. One with a flooded subterranean level that goes underground and the sense, as the prequel did, of being in an actual nightmare realm, one here whose cold concrete and industry look is more disarming than having vibrant colour. That's before the body horror, specifically one elaborate prosthetic effect in a film that's mainly been gory than surreal, takes the symbolism to an extreme for a powerful punch line. When the first Evil Dead Trap was a disappointment for me, this disconnected sequel stood out considerably.

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

From http://www.horror-extreme.com/Content/images/
evil-dead-trap-2-hideki/evil-dead-trap-2-hideki-3.jpg