The Skinny: A latenight TV show hostess takes four co-workers out to investigate a snuff video she receives from a fan. The tape turns out to be a trap set by the killer to bring victims to his lair.
Nami (Miyuki Ono) is the host of a late night television show that shows home videos of its viewers. One night, she receives a tape from a fan that shows a woman being tortured and killed. Feeling that it could help legitimize her career, Nami takes four of her co-workers to investigate the tape. The group ends up at an old abandoned military installation and one by one, they discover the horrible truth behind the tape.
Evil Dead Trap owes a lot to Italian horror director Dario Argento. Despite being largely ignored in the U.S. until the advent of DVD, Argento's classics of the seventies and eighties enjoyed great popularity in Japan, and their influence is undoubtedly here. The roving camera moves, the odd angles, the muted color palette, the pulsing musical score and the over the top gore are all straight out of Argento's work. Fans of Suspiria will even note the maggot-in-the-hair-scene as a direct rip-off.
However, Evil Dead Trap does manage to carve its own path through the genre with a few surprises of its own. All the way up to the last act, you think you're going to get a standard slasher pic, and then you're taken down a very strange and different road. The end of this film is bizarre to say the least, and lends a new perspective on all that preceded it. Instead of having the killer reveal his motivations at the end of the film, we are told very little about how or why everything is happening. A supernatural (or preternatural, depending on one's point of view) relationship between the killer and the killer's brother is left disturbingly ambiguous. It's what you don't fully understand that creeps you out after the credits roll.