Japan
62 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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You have to admire a movie that is this up-front about what you're gonna get when you watch it. While it might not be word-for-word literal, I.E. nobody in the film actually goes to hell (or the equivalent concept in any religion), the tone is captured perfectly by that title. The main character is buff and goes through a pretty hard time involving some evil ghosts. That's all you gotta know.
The descriptor attached to this movie in fan circles is "the Japanese 'Evil Dead'", which to my understanding is both the popular conception of it and what the movie itself was going for. I don't actually see that many similarities in terms of the plot, but it's clearly inspired by the shot-on-video cheapness of Evil Dead. It's one of those films that took an incredibly long time to get released after it was shot, which was all the way back in 1995, so a lot of the way it looks is probably not 100% intentional, but you could definitely do better than this in 1995 if you wanted to, so at least some of it has to be. Also, I think the lead (the titular bodybuilder) bears more than a passing resemblance to Bruce Campbell. I would be surprised if his hairstyle was not a deliberate attempt to replicate Ash's look in Evil Dead.
Speaking of surprises, there's a lot of them in this movie, and I'm not talking about jump scares. With a title that hints at gore and terrors, you might not expect any more than that, but there are one or two moments that are genuinely scary - much like the original Evil Dead combines some eerie scenes with the DIY gore that is enshrined in all of our hearts. The reason why this is, I think, is because of how this movie differs from what it's supposed to be a love letter to. Evil Dead has supernatural stuff, sure, but Bloody Muscle is more ghostly-supernatural, and to convey that it uses tropes that crop up in Japanese horror. The ghosts that appear are typical pale-skinned, yūrei-looking things with bloody mouths, and they show up in photos and in the static on a dead television. I wasn't expecting anything but practical effects in this, and I thought they would be used solely for body horror. That part definitely outweighs everything else, but there's snatches here and there of a more typical J-horror aesthetic. The first picture we see of the haunted house caught me off-guard because it looked so jarringly different from a standard ghost photo: instead of just a smudged shape at the corner of the frame, one whole panel of the house's door is replaced with a huge apparition of the ghost's entire face. Something about that was genuinely really unsettling.
I think the key thing about this is that it is a haunted house movie - I don't feel like Evil Dead can be pigeonholed into being described as such, but this is a story about people investigating a house that is inhabited by a very angry ghost. No matter how weird it gets along the way, that's the basic idea of it.
The pacing of this movie is really strange, and I'm not complaining about this, because I loved the whole thing and I can't think of anything I'd change about it, but it does have to be said that most of it is basically an extended fight scene. It's almost real-time at some points. It opens with a flashback that establishes why the house is cursed: an accidental death caused by the main character's father in the late '60s has attached the vengeful ghost of his ex to the property, emanating from where her body was dumped in the basement. Then the main character and his friend and his friend's friend arrive, the friend's friend gets possessed, they find out via spectral messaging that to escape they need to chop the friend's friend into little pieces, and practically the entire movie is spent trying to do that. I'm impressed at how well this scant idea is stretched out into an hour. You'd think "how hard is it to chop a person's limbs off?" Significantly harder, it would appear, when the limbs don't want to stay chopped. I don't want to disappoint anyone, but the main character being a bodybuilder actually doesn't have any relevance whatsoever until about ten minutes from the end of the film, when I was beginning to wonder if it would ever be brought up at all. It takes the horrific death and possession of an acquaintance and the near-death and possession of his friend for him to realize "Wait a minute, I'm so jacked, I can pummel this ghost into a fine red mist". But when he does, boy, things get interesting.
I will end this review by talking about the centerpiece of this film: the practical effects. Despite also containing fairly typical ghost imagery, this movie is also packed wall-to-wall with such things as: floor skeletons, flailing torsos, crawling meat, oozing meat, exploding meat, writhing meat, foot hands, foot heads, and other assorted delights. It's such a wonderful expression of love for the craft that I was stuck to the screen the whole time. CGI is used very lightly here and there as well and always compliments the practical effects rather than being used as a shortcut, which makes the whole thing look unique. This is a very original movie, and it's definitely not without substance as one might assume. It's worth spending an hour on if only for the appreciation of some excellent gore and body horror.
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