Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (AKA The Japanese Evil Dead)

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I did know going in that it was inspired by The Evil Dead, but I didn’t know it was a low budget DIY SOV type deal because 80’s/90’s J-horror has just never been a part of the horror world into which I’ve taken a dive. That changes when they open up the doors to supernatural torment when a distracted Jane accidentally runs a woman over while driving home from a friend’s wedding. Many years later, Visual Vengeance — Wild Eye Releasing’s recently launched sister label crafting special edition releases for micro-budget genre films — has given the film its first official North American release.

Written and directed by Stephen Cognetti, this faux-documentary style horror movie brings tons of thrills and chills. Although that is of course the whole appeal of this film, which plays out its absurd plotting and over-the-top gestures with a sincerity that only adds to the sense of old-school authenticity. It’s currently available from Visual Vengeance and you can check their Facebook page for more information.

Trapped inside a haunted house, a body builder must survive a blood soaked night of insanity to save himself and his friends from a demonic ghost that is hell-bent on revenge. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films have obviously had just a slight cultural impact on the world of horror creating a tectonic plate level of shifting in the realm of horror films spawning an abundance of copycats, rip offs, cash grabs, and homages.

They invade like a viral infection via technology, plunging the globe into hopeless despair and death.

While the narrative bides its time unveiling the truth behind Jane Doe’s battered body, it’s heavily steeped in witchcraft. I started with the big slasher franchises then worked my way through other genre classics before seeking out increasingly obscure titles — a journey that continues to this day. Mika is a photojournalist putting together an article on the paranormal, and she remembers a photo that Naoto had once shown her of a house with an outsized female face smiling in its window.

The shaky claustrophobic POV camerawork, the dismemberment aftermath twitching gag, the big push-in and "groovy! Please consider upgrading to a Pro account—for less than a couple bucks a month, you’ll get cool additional features like all-time and annual stats pages ( example), the ability to select (and filter by) your favorite streaming services, and no ads!

The film also manages to create an eerie atmosphere from the start too to make things a bit more nightmarish. Its first international release came from the UK in 2017, and it has finally made its way to the US in 2022.