Popular reviews

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★ 12

  Well, in a way it does lives up to both of its titles. You got some fast tracking shots are very reminiscent of Evil Dead. But the movie as a whole feels much like a riff on the giallo genre, especially that of Fulci with its sickening love for eye piercing (though here is usually more suggestive), some aesthetically appealing and gory kills by some serial killer with a nice and weird look to him that may have been hiding something much more sinister. Also the score is pretty groovy. The cinematography with its grimy, grungy and dirty look really fits with the whole snuff aesthetic the movie and story seems to be aiming for. The acting is pretty odd…

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  Review by Bob McCully ★★★★½ 8

  Late 80's Japanese ultra-banger supernatural-slasher industrial-nightmare. Get your hyphens ready, cutie-pie! This one mixes all the right ingredients together for that ultimate brain rot.
   
  Nami, a late night TV host, receives a mysterious VHS tape containing the real deal: a snuff film of a woman's eye getting brutally punctured in an abandoned warehouse. Intrigue levels skyrocket, leading Nami to bring a small production crew out to investigate this decrepit setting where she's certain the filming took place.
  Sure enough, she's right, and splatter rules the world.
  Turn up & bleed out, this is nightmare alchemy times infinity.
   
  Where do I even begin?

  Italo horror vibes are in full effect here, with an emphasis on that late 80's style-overload of Stage Fright…

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  Review by Tony the Terror 666 ★★★★½ 10

  A truly unique cinematic experience. A rarity and a true oddity. It’s 80’s J-horror spliced brilliantly with Italian horror and it’s a combination that has absolutely no business being as good as it is.

  Immediately after the opening credits, the “theme tune” begins playing and you’d swear you were watching an Argento giallo. The bright colors and almost neon blood only help that feeling, as do the elaborate murder sequences. The close-up gore evokes a definite Fulci vibe and yet, it’s also distinctly Japanese with its overly dramatic supporting cast (read: victims) and somewhat uncomfortable sex scenes where the woman always sounds a little too much like a teenager.

  These two wildly different genres continue to indescribably blend together until…

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  Review by Tears_in_Rain ★★★★★ 7

  Wow! I was absolutely floored by this. I mean, I love Japan and everything, but I had no idea they put out the best slasher film ever, hands down, all the way back in the 80s. It has the brutality of something from the 2000s, with elaborate death traps that predate Saw by well over a decade. And, like, I expect Japanese stuff to be gory and mean-spirited, but I didn't expect it to be wrapped in a style that felt so Italian. The Italo-horror vibes just rolled off this thing in pulsating waves, particularly calling to mind Fulci. It even has a Goblinesque score, composed by Tomohiko Kira, who later played guitar on the Xenogears soundtrack. But just when…

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  Review by Jayson Kennedy ★★★½

  A news crew is lured to an abandoned military installation after receiving a purported snuff video with inserted footage of one of their reporters. Once there the sprawling base becomes their evil death trap orchestrated by a rainjacketed psycho who always seems several steps ahead.
  
  A shame one of the most stylish slashers this side of gialli and De Palma devolves into towering aimlessness. Fortunately the ride there is a partnership showcase of director Toshiharu Ikeda and cinematographer Masaki Tamura; both of which largely worked out of the horror industry. Especially upon reaching the dilapidated base, there's hardly a frame that doesn't exhibit rich multilayered use of color, lighting, and shadow. There's also several stunningly gruesome kills inflicted upon characters…

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  Review by belial_carboni ★★★★ 4

  Evil Dead Trap just trapped my brain in an unforgiving vortex of visceral violence! The overall style and visuals check a lot of boxes. We are hurled into a hazy late 80s nightmare packed full of surreal Italio horror flourishes, the creepy atmosphere of a Japanese dreadfest and goopy Cronenbergian body horror. Buckle up for a mean spirtited splatterfest spectacle of spontaneity! Say that five times fast Jack!

  A supernatural slasher that isn't afraid to balance the more brutal moments with that indefinable campy charm. Inventive and gory kills, dramatic performances, the Goblin-esque synth score, the jarring black and white camera zooms and that unique low budget glow of late 80s horror. A magical mash up of cinematic influences that…

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  Review by kat🕷 ★★★½

  Basket Case meets Giallo.
  J-Slasher, who took inspiration from Italian gore and splatter movies of the 80s for the score, the lighting, the use of critters and bugs, and especially the atmospheric and carefully crafted murder sequences. Various stylistic and rough elements awaken memories of Argento & Fulci and are savored in a macabre and bloody way.

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  Review by Ben Peterson ★★★★★ 1

  Simply amazing. The atmosphere is unrivaled. The location and set design, the Suspiria-like score that really brings you in to the movie’s world, the way the story constantly reveals itself and reinvents what it’s doing… I loved this. It sits somewhere between wild and unsettling, never scared of what it is and gets the strong story beats just right. Wowed. So glad this got a new blu-ray release because it’s a cult film that’s definitely deserving and will only grow in name.

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★½

  Gory fusion of Japanese and Italian horror styles that manages to succeed in spite of a terrible screenplay just because of how outlandish it is. The film begins with a newscrew who travel to an old factory to investigate a snuff tape they received. Once there, they begin being picked off by an unseen assailant. Evil Dead Trap has one of the weirdest scores I've ever heard; it sounds so inappropriate at first but, like the rest of it, sort of starts to work as the film goes on. The plotting is terrible, with most the action focused on the first and final thirds, resulting in a tedious middle part that really should have been trimmed down. Where the film…

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  Review by 8 b i t m u r d e r b o t ∆ ∆ ★★★★½ 10

  "Is killing really that much fun?"

  I'd seen stills from this and made note of it over the decades. I used to sleep on a pile of Fangoria and Rue Morgue and Trap always seemed to make it on the underrated or alternative must-see list. Still, it remained fairly elusive and I had never seen it in the wild. I always thought the title was a bit goofy and assumed it was some derivative gore bore. I was way wrong.

  I read Tears_in_Rain's excellent review this October and it cemented my plans to seek and destroy the blind spot. I went to the mall equipped with a fully loaded FYE gift card from my daughter and snagged the 4K Day…

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  Review by strida ★★★★ 1

  totally mutoid climax ... swollen frontal lobe shit. music deployed as liberally and brutally as goblin in suspiria. starts with a gross snuff scene, downshifts into industrial waste hellslasher, and hits orbit with the psychic fetus rampage

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 1

  a very unpredictable and unsettling mix of j-horror, slashers, and argento/fulci gory nightmare logic done by a dude who saw a chance to apply his unique familiarity with pinku and extreme cinema (which one nasty scene in particular will make clear, be warned) to an already fairly disturbing and tangible genre as is. as a result has some of the more upsetting violence and gore you'll see in a movie like this (eyes punctured, wire strangulations, head-slicing, chest-bursting, and impaling all vividly present) that is all the more effective because of the mud-encrusted, maggot-filled setting of its abandoned military base and the eerie, existential atmosphere of its style. the visuals especially: snuff video static texture, raimi-esque shaky floating/lurching POV shots,…