Trapped inside a haunted house, a body builder must survive a blood soaked night of insanity to save himself and his friends from a demonic ghost that is hell-bent on revenge.Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell aka The Japanese Evil Dead wears its love of Sam Raimi's original movies proudly on its sleeve and makes no bones about "homaging" styles, shots, and even classic lines from Evil Dead and Evil Dead II.
Writer/director/star Shinichi Fukazawa's 1995 subtitled horror barely lasts over an hour and while it starts slowly, the extended final act is simply a gonzo sequence of man-versus-indestructible demon that fans of Raimi's early work will really appreciate.
The basic plot wallows joyfully in its grainy, direct-to-video, amateur constraints following the titular bodybuilder opening up a creepy, rundown, old house in the city - which his father owned decades ago - to try and woo back his ex-girlfriend, a photojournalist looking for a "ghost story".
They've brought with them a psychic, who promptly gets possessed by the angry spirit of a murdered woman and can only be stopped by the complete dismemberment and destruction of their corpse.
The ghost uses the psychic's abilities to boost her own and trap the bodybuilder and journalist in the house, like a supernatural escape room where their only chance at freedom depends on the total eradication of the paranormal presence.
There are moments - particularly when animated body parts combine - that reminded me of that other old school, darkly funny, Grand Guignol splatter classic, Re-Animator.
Stop-motion special effects bring a touch of Jan Švankmajer to the proceedings, while also feeling very Japanese, and the body builder's climactic discovery of his 'inner power' was reminiscent of both the TV iteration of The Incredible Hulk and Grant Morrison and Richard Case's Flex Mentallo in Morrison's seminal run on the Doom Patrol comics.
A shockingly fun, cheap and cheerful, short film, what Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell lacks in originality it makes up for in its passion for the material, accepting its budgetary and technical limitations and embracing them with great aplomb.