RIP Evil Dead Trap Director Toshiharu Ikeda

[M Arnold]

What a shame. I just re-watched Evil Dead Trap on DVD a couple of months 
ago. It was one of the films I saw early on in my explorations into 
Japanese film years ago, before I really knew where Japanese splatter 
movies came from. I rented an unsubtitled copy of a copy of a VHS tape 
from one of the shady Japanese video rental stores in the Pacific 
Northwest.

Like Jasper, I can't say that I really enjoyed the movie at first. I 
remember feeling unimpressed by the weak characters and hurt by the sex 
scenes, which seemed like they were cut out of a cheap porno and didn't 
belong in a horror movie. (Makes sense now that I know it was a JHV 
production.)

I developed something of an appreciation for Trap over the years though, 
especially in its use of TV or AV-ish video footage--a technique, I 
might argue now, that channels some of the self-reflexive video images 
that appear in 1980s Pink and Roman Pornos, and foregrounds the video 
horror we saw ten years later in Ring.

Only later did I notice that it featured actors like Kobayashi Hitomi 
and was shot by Ogawa Pro cameraman Tamura Masaki, who was working on 
all sorts of interesting projects around that time. At any rate, it's a 
bizarre blend of doc-/mockumentary, horror, porn . . . or maybe, in a 
sense, a perverse retelling of the adult video "birth" documentaries 
that were not uncommon in the 1980s.

I remember that video store had a copy of Ningyo densetsu too, but I 
never got around to watching it. I'm sure those VHS tapes are long gone now.

Michael Arnold