Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

I went into this film expecting an exploitation-style otaku-for-her and was pleasantly surprised by way of the contrary. For as admittedly ghastly as are much of the acts of violence, the filmmakers succeeded wonderfully in somehow making it look somehow beautiful. I'm thinking specifically here of the fight scene between the two female leads with the white "curtains" providing wonderful contrast to the bloodshed. I can't think of a comparable genre in my country to compare with this. It is no mean feat to successfully inject a psycho killer / gore film with enough symbolism and outstanding camera-work and choreography to leave the viewer with the feeling that he or she just experienced some wonderfully violent art film wrought with psychological complexity and morally ambiguous characterization. The film succeeds on many levels but stands highest as an unexpected achievement in genre subversion.

The crew who made this film of a murderous love triangle set in a wasteland of urban Japanese anomie (revolving around an overweight movie projectionist, her spiffy TV- correspondent friend, and the man they both share, more or less) needed to decide what the heck was happening here before they went ahead into production. Sure, maybe the result would have been no less weirded out and non-linear than the mishmash fema-slasher-post-abortion-psycho-angst-fest they ended up with--but they would have made conscious decisions about how the weirdness did or did not fit together as a plot. Deliberately chosen incoherence might have jelled into a more compelling and less aimless flick. Personally, I enjoyed the film's unconventional post-Bergman moodiness: but the evident lack of storyboarded logic emphasizes budget and production shorftalls, dragging down the project.

Evil Dead Trap 2, the film, is many things. It is a brilliantly crafted series of ultra-violent sequences. It is an engaging story of a fat female projectionist in a sick sick world. It is a mind-blowing statement for the wide range of violent acts that it covers. It is a deceptively abstract story centering on perhaps the some of the most meaningless terrors in all of moviedom. Behind all that, Evil Dead Trap 2 is the apex Japanese new-wave cinema. There is not a major director today who has not been influenced by the genius Izô Hashimoto put forth in this blisteringly important contemporary masterpiece. The filmacts as a spring-board centering around a group of weirdos instigating several serial murders, guts/entrails, freely yanked from the victims vaginal cavities, dangle like bleeding wet noodles on a hot summer's day, and goes from there.From there on, the viewer is thrown into a gloriously chaotic world of violent acts upon violent acts, in which the viewer slowly learns just about everything about young Aki's enthralling depravities. From her trying childhood to her inexplicable visions of the child-like Christ/Antichrist figure, Hideki; to her difficulties relating to others, the story of fat babe Aki is presented for the viewer in a way that few other movies can offer, in a word: magically. Evil Dead Trap 2, undeniably, is THE triumph of World Cinema, and as such thus exceeds by far -- one of the greatest films every created -- it's predecessor.

I try to keep to the old Cahiers du cinema dictum (I forget exactly whose) to remark what's remarkable and ignore the bad and the ordinary. The best and only thing I can think of to say about Evil Dead Trap 2 , a.k.a. Hideki, is it made me realize how good, in comparison, was the original "Evil Dead Trap." The original film was mappable in space and time. Its horror, beginning with the maybe overdone steal from Un chien andalou , grew in fits and starts, with the rhythm of life. Characters we barely knew, with overlapping points of view, roaming a terrain that in its emptiness, indoor and out, foreshadowed that of Kairo...But save that for the comment I may yet write there.Any who let sympathy for EDT2's corpulent heroine trap you into excusing the rest of the film would do better to seek out Junji Sakamoto's wondrous and just as lethal, in its own way, Kao (face) or even Catherine Breillat's hard to watch Á ma soeur! a.k.a. Fat Girl .