More than 35 years on, The Evil Dead remains as beloved and influential as ever, ranking alongside Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween and The Blair Witch Project as one of the most endlessly ripped-off horror movies of all time (that list is by no means exhaustive, by the way). Of course, Sam Raimi’s feature debut
ranks not only as a perennial genre classic, but also as one of the key video nasties, so given contemporary indie horror’s fascination with revisiting the VHS era, it seems timely for a low-budget film to emerge with designs on directly recapturing that spirit.
As we can rather easily ascertain from its alternate title The Japanese Evil Dead, writer/director/actor Shinichi Fukazawa’s Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell is modelled so closely on The Evil Dead that it seems just as much a remake as Fede Alvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead was; indeed, it’s considerably closer to Raimi’s film in tone, content and most notably visual aesthetics. And given that this new DVD from Terracotta (released under their Terror Cotta imprint) boasts artwork from none other than Graham Humphreys, the iconic artist behind the classic Evil Dead VHS cover, Fukazawa’s film is very much being sold on that link. The key question, then, is whether we can regard Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell as a notable new addition to the horror canon, or essentially a fan film done good.
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