Evil Ed (1995)

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Director: Anders Jacobsson

Screenplay: Anders Jacobsson; Göran Lundström; Christer Ohlsson

Cast: Johan Rudebeck as Edward "Eddie" Tor Swenson; Per Löfberg as Nick; Olof Rhodin as Sam Campbell; Camela Leierth as Mel; Gert Fylking as SWAT team lieutenant; Cecilia Ljung as Barbara; Dan Malmer as Zip; Kim Sulocki as Dix; Göran Lundström as Bondage Face; Robert Dröse as Fridge Fritz

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #142

I had never heard of Evil Ed until 2017. Immediately my interest was piqued when details of it were disclosed by Arrow Video for their physical release. A Swedish splatter film post-Peter Jackson from the nineties. Swedish horror tends to be a rare thing. Any horror film from a place that never had a large industry surrounding them(the US, Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain etc.) is immediately of interest, allowing me to witness how a country's culture seeps into a template. Them and more unconventional genre and art films are far more rewarding for this than critically awarded films in my opinion, particularly now when the auteurs of the old guard like Ingmar Bergman were replaced by "World Cinema" as a marketing concept.

There is also the fact this is a splatter comedy from Sweden. The stereotype of Scandinavian cinema is serious filmmaking. Horror films from Sweden, the few that are well known outside of the country, are in my mind Ingmar Bergman's more fantastical works and Let the Right One In (2008). Something which evokes Peter Jackson's early "splatstick" work like Brain Dead (aka. Dead Alive) (1992) is an anomaly against this stereotype. That it's from the mid-nineties as well is of interest. Horror cinema a year later from Evil Ed's debut, at least in the English speaking world, would go from years of odd, unconventional films that would only get critical status decades and terrible sequels to Scream (1996) that would become a cultural zeitgeist. Films from Asia, which became a prime influence alongside horror from non-English speaking countries, existed throughout the decade but it would be in 1998 that you get Hideo Nakata's Ringu and, from South Korea, Whispering Corridors which had an effect and attract interest. In the midst of an obscure period, this lone production clearly being made off the creators' own time and investment immediately stands out.

Immediately you come to an odd paradox with Evil Ed. Edward (Johan Rudebeck) works as a film editor. Usually he's working on black-and-white art films until he's asked to hastily replace the late editor from the horror department, whose office is decorated in arcade machines and beautiful women, led by a scuzzball manager who makes his living off a franchise of packaged horror sequels called the Loose Limbs series that he needs Edward to edit. Can a comedy horror that reveals in the gore have its tongue in its cheek when editing these splatter atrocities causes Edward to first hallucinate and then lose his mind? Admittedly David Cronenberg made Videodrome (1984) asking himself what would happen if violent television could actually corrupt people like the conservatives said, but Cronenberg even with his grottiest, early horror films always came to them with cerebral ideas. Evil Ed, made with humour could easily be called a hypocrite.

Whilst likely unintentional, there was however a period before this where extreme genre cinema existed which could even make hardened fans of splatter have existential questions. The Guinea Pig films from Japan, whilst fake, gained infamy when Charlie Sheen thought the second of them Flower of Flesh & Blood (1985) was an actual snuff movie and called in the FBI to investigate it. Far more problematic, the progression from Italian mondo movies and the Faces of Death series turned to Traces of Death (1993), which rather than a mix of pre-existing footage and faked death scenes became a series of real death compilations for the sake of a thrill, crossing a line in its point morally. A tipping point where even the creators of this film, including campy film-within-film scenes of pointless and random splatter, would distance themselves from. It could also just be a film parodying all this in the most exaggerated manner possible just for a laugh. The film was meant to be a satire of the Swedish Statens biografbyrå, the oldest censorship board in the world until it was disbanded in 2011, making Evil Ed effectively a piss take of everything their institution was meant to represent.

The initial issue you as an audience member have to deal with is the dubbing. English dubs from decades before, like the Italian films of the sixties to the eighties, have a distinction to them and there are fans of them as there are detractors. For every ill advised decision - like Bob in House by the Cemetery (1981), reoccurring child actor Giovanni Frezza clearly voiced by a woman doomed to infamy trying to do a childish voice - there's a pretty consistent, even charming, aspect to these dubs of yore. Dubbing changes in tone from the nineties on. They are more broader. A frankly artificial tone where even the American accents feel like they're faked, be it here in the nineties Gamera movies. That the film never denies that its set in Sweden, even parodying Ingmar Bergman with another film-within-a-film that's subtitled, does make the entire production decision to do this pointless and actually a detriment. The only person whose able to recover from this is Johan Rudebeck in the lead, as he's able to emote with body language and a natural charisma that shows through even if his voice isn't his own. The rest is peculiar to the ear to say the least even as someone who loves even the broadest of dubs of old Eurocult oddities.

Evil Ed can be split into two halves. The first is much more amusing, continuing on the idea that Peter Jackson's earliest films showed of ingenuity with the unpredictable. Even if some of the ideas are random, and connect to nothing else, an unpredictability came that shows the fun and imagination taken to bring the material onscreen. Edward's hallucinations bring in a whole sleuth of material which doesn't necessarily make sense in tone but work in the heightened absurdity. A large amount of this is bizarre practical effects and even puppetry, when a foul mouthed gremlin inexplicably appears in his refrigerator. Material that is never explained, but shows the creators stepping outside of convention for something more original and idiosyncratic. A sense of inventiveness that can even succeed in being sombre and menacing, as Edward finds himself in a nightmarish mental asylum room with a demonic figure, real or in his mind who convinces Edward to purge the sinful from the Earth and begins his homicidal streak.

Once the homicidal stream appears however the film falls down into the predictable. What should continue to escalate in invention, why Peter Jackson's earliest films are still beloved, is lost in favour of pretty generic and unremarkable material. Chasing his stock wife and daughter figures around, even someone as interesting as Edward reduced to a generic killer, worse when especially with the divisive English dubbing when he starts to quote other films like Full Metal Jacket (1987), utterly groan inducing especially as a far more appropriate and rewarding way to depict the creators' love for cinema could be found in keeping an eye on all the film posters on the walls in countless scenes. Dialogue, which was already in a precarious position of being merely rudimentary is less interesting, and the material becomes deliberately "wacky", not funny in a natural way as that term should mean, but artificial. Also deciding the final scenes in the hospital should be an extensive action scene with armed policemen was the straw which broke the camel's back for me, as unless an action scene is properly coordinated and/or inventive like the best of John Woo, gun battles are innately lazy even if I accept how much hard work is clearly behind them. Not disrespecting the hard work but that onscreen gun fights are not cinematic for me as the anticipation and denouement of them are. Once the film reaches this half where all these issues arise, my excitement for a discovery in Swedish ebbed away to disappointment.

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