'Lovely' may be a strange way to describe a movie where faces are shot in half, bodies chopped to pieces, and a head is squashed like a grapefruit - but Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell is such a pure, enthusiastic bit of Evil Dead fan-art that it's hard not to fall for its daft charms. Writer/Director/Protagonist/Cameraman/Special Effects Artist/Probably-Caterer Shinichi Fukazawa sunk more than fifteen years of his life to get the movie made; It's a wonder it got finished at all, and I'm very glad it did- the end result is entertaining as all hell. Sometimes inept, always at least a little cheesy and silly, but I can't be down on something as inventive as this, or as eager to please.
The first part is not very promising, especially a prologue where a woman tries to kill her boyfriend for sleeping around and gets murdered instead. The guy uses a shovel and an axe to hide her body under the floorboards of his tiny flat; In a nice touch, both tools will make a return appearance. Other than that the whole prologue is kind of laughable, and not really in a good way.
Cut to thirty years later. Shinji (Shinichi Fukazawa), the titular body builder (the bloody muscles and hell part comes later) is contacted by Mika (Asako Nosaka), an old flame who writes articles about hauntings and such. She's after a picture of a creepy house owned by Shinji's late father; soon after she contacts him for access to the place, and asks him to give her and her psychic friend (Masaaki Kai) a tour.
Once they arrive the psychic gets clocked (literally!) and rendered unconscious. You'd think all the hair lotion he's got on would cushion his head from the blow, but no. Soon after - twenty minutes in, almost a third of the movie's barely-over-an-hour runtime, things finally pick up as he finds a knife and gets possessed by the crazy lover from the introduction. Then it's on; It's all mayhem from here on out.
Mika and Shinji get trapped in the house with the murderous possessed psychic. They fight back - successfully! - with knives and the established axe and shovel. An early eye-popping stabbing had me laughing out loud, and there's a bit with Shinji chopping up a body off-frame, severed limbs flying up into the shot whenever he takes a swing.
It's a deeply, deeply silly film, with some honest-to-god funny gags and a lot of self-conscious nods to Sam Raimi. It's also relentless in its invention, with severed limbs reattaching themselves into crazy configurations and flesh melting and taking improbable forms via the arcane arts of claymation. Buckets of blood are spilled, an amulet animates itself and digs into someone's lacrimal duct, and the protagonist has the epiphany that his muscles are the secret weapon and hulks out. Hell yeah I'm in.
Shot completely in super-8 with amateur actors, a non-existent budget and (save for a couple scenes) a complete disregard for cinematography, it's... not a great looking movie. Especially when the transfer on Shudder seems to add digital noise (this may actually be a result of all the digital corrections the director had to pay for to even out tons of reshoots that looked wildly different). There's also animated stills with some crude animation overlaid which I'm guessing were needed to tie the film together in editing when footage wasn't available; it looks jarring, but it also gives the film a jolt of Gilliam-esque weirdness. All the effects are home-made and it shows... and honestly that's part of the allure here.
It's an excellent example of the let's put on a show spirit, and a grand example of someone making the exact movie he'd like to see; I've seen enough sub-indie regional productions and amateur films to know this sort of thing seldom works out as well as this, so- well done!
No comments:
Post a Comment