My review of 1988’s Evil Dead Trap wasn’t exactly glowing. This has bugged me in the ten years since I posted it. All the things I liked about the film remain clear in my memory. Everything I disliked pretty much faded with time. I’ve often wondered if I was having an off day because what I remember was pretty damn good. A Japanese giallo film… how exactly did I dislike that?
I hoped the loose sequel, Hideki, would click. Much like the first film, it takes its sweet time, entertaining with style rather than substance. Which isn’t to say there isn’t any substance. While I thought the first film had too little to say, Hideki feels like it has plenty to say, though how much of that is lost in cultural translation? I suspect I’m just not familiar enough with Japan’s folklore to make total sense of it. Perhaps I’m being too kind and it really doesn’t make sense at all. Considering how thoroughly I enjoyed it—which is to say tremendously—I don’t need to understand it all.
The main character is a full-figured young woman by the name of Aki. Aki mostly keeps to herself and runs the projector at a local movie theater. Her only friend is Emi, a conventionally attractive reporter who likes to throw coke parties for her sleazy producer friends. Emi is dating Kurahashi, a rascally businessman whose wife is too detached to wonder why he stays out all hours of the night. Emi is concerned about Aki’s introverted nature and asks Kurahashi to have pity-sex with her. Kurahashi tries, but Aki continuously shoots him down as she has a bit of a self-loathing complex.
Meanwhile, there’s a serial killer who’s killing and mutilating young women. Aki suspects she may be the one responsible for the murders, perhaps committing them in some kind of dissociative trance. In her dreams of the killings, she always sees a mysterious young boy who looks on at the violence with a slack expression. He looks like the boy from Ju-on: The Grudge. I’m not saying one ripped off the other (though this film predates Ju-On by a number of years), but as I said above: there’s probably more to the Japanese folklore than this foreigner can casually understand.
At any rate, Hideki is beautifully shot and convincingly performed. If you ever wanted to know why I have a such an allergic reaction to the majority of today’s horror movies with their digital cameras and LED lighting kits, it’s because few modern cinematographers can squeeze out images half as irresistible as these. The gore starts out strong and grows more and more unsettling until, at last, the blood is slinging all over the place. The final act has moments which are genuinely hard to watch, including a well-timed closeup of a curiously bloodless razor injury.
Do you know how long it’s been since I loved a slasher movie? I thought I had seen it all, but the novelty of Aki as a potential slasher makes the genre feel fresh for the first time in years. If you’re okay with a little confusion, and a lack of straightforward answers, you might enjoy it too. Unfortunately, I think this might be one of the films where my opinion will diverge from the general population because I’ve never heard much hype about it. In that sense, it feels even more special to me.
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