Shot and edited over in Super 8 over several years, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, also known as The Japanese Evil Dead, is one of the most memorably titled films to have come out of the SOV boom. Alternately known as "The Japanese Evil Dead," this legendary, sought after independent Japanese cult film will enjoy its first ever North American release in any format and features new bonus content. Over a decade later, a documentary crew ventures there to answer what happened on that fateful night. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Amateur ghost hunters in over their heads is a plot description that could apply to many found footage movies, let alone horror in general. As it turns out, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell didn’t wholly exist when I had first heard about it. Definitely not for everyone, but would probably make a great double bill with another super low budget film, like Soft For Digging - both have really cool low budget effects to show the supernatural, even if both are tonally quite different. So the reunited pair pays a visit to the house – a part of Naota’s inheritance – with Mika’s colleague the psychic Mizuguchi (Masaaki Kai) in tow. Being hailed as "the Japanese Evil Dead" it's easy to see why since most of the story seems lifted right out of the original manuscript.There is a feeling that the film is trying to be sillier than it manages to be, especially with the overuse of blood, which looks more like tomato purée than anything that could come out of a human being. After a basic opening scene that sets the scene by depicting the murder of a young woman in a basement, the film takes a little while to get going again as we meet the titular character and get the excuse to go back to the house, where all hell breaks loose pretty quickly. When a bodybuilder, his ex-girlfriend and a professional psychic enter a haunted house, they soon find themselves trapped within it. Remi Weekes’s feature debut transforms the refugee experience into a petrifying horror film with expertly crafted scares. A heavily overcrowded afterlife caused the dead to spill over into the world of the living to a chilling effect.

Mixed in there are also plenty of allusions to other films: there is the rotten corpse using the flesh and blood of the living to reconstitute itself from Hellraiser; the animated severed hand from Evil Dead II; the spider creature formed of a disembodied head from The Thing; and even the shirt burst and ripped by flexing muscles from the Incredible Hulk. The set-up and iconography are instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the Evil Dead franchise but would otherwise play as nonsensical. Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.

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.

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. The more methodical pacing allows the sense of unease to unfurl slowly, eventually stripping away any semblance of hope through terrifying spectral encounters and devastating loss. If you’re going this route, you’d better find an innovative way to set it apart from the rest, or at least ensure the scares are plenty.Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.

Her death triggers a series of supernatural occurrences suggesting that perhaps mom made a deal with the devil; and he’s come to collect. Can't help but feel kneecapped a little bit by how obviously it's not just homaging Raimi's (and Jackson’s) manic splatter comedy sensibility but straight-up plagiarizing it to less effective ends. Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell’s other effects range from a nicely done scene where a knife goes in the back of a head and emerges through an eye socket, a headless corpse that won’t stay dead and lots of primitive stop motion/Claymation meltdowns and, in another highlight a build up as a mass of disembodied flesh and blood reunites itself with its skeleton. She’d warned them not to come, and it doesn’t take long to figure out why; an evil presence has taken root on the family’s rural land, and it wants them all. The film is not just a perfect homage to the series it is indebted to – it manages to take the blueprint that was laid out for it and take horror-comedy to new heights.It’s currently available from Visual Vengeance and you can check their Facebook page for more information. On the other, it can conjure the image of the outsider artist, driven by pure passion – and more obscure impulses – to create a labour of love outside of any production system. 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.