Blu-ray Review: Anders Jacobsson’s Evil Ed on Arrow Video

This single-disc release of Evil Ed is more manageable than Arrow’s previous three-disc edition.

Evil EdAnders Jacobsson’s Evil Ed doesn’t just wear its influences on its sleeve, it plasters them all over the walls. Posters for the film’s spiritual forebears—including David Cronenberg’s The Fly, John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead—figure prominently in practically every scene of this mildly likable but quickly exhausting exercise in gonzo gore. But no influence looms larger over the project than the Evil Dead series, whose madcap mix of over-the-top violence and goofy gags serves as the template for Jacobsson’s film. It’s no surprise, then, to find the poster for the legendary second entry in Sam Raimi’s series in an early scene, but when the exact same poster crops up again minutes later on the wall of a completely different set, it’s an early warning sign that the film is never going to break free of the shackles of its antecedents.

The rest of Evil Ed more than bears out that fear. Seemingly every other line or image in the film is cribbed from some superior source, be it a demon modeled on the Lord of Darkness from Ridley Scott’s Legend or a Gremlin-like creature hanging out in a refrigerator or jokey quotations from everything from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to—surprise!—Evil Dead II. It’s clear that Jacobsson and his fellow semi-amateur filmmaking colleagues have a great affection for the films they’re cribbing from, but there’s no identifiable purpose to any of these references. Worse, they seem to have little idea about what makes their film’s forebears work so well on the level of plot and pace.

Evil Ed settles for the quick sugar rush of over-the-top violence. Admittedly, the film’s makeup effects and action sequences are executed with a scrappy panache that recalls some of the more entertaining Troma efforts. If Jacobsson, makeup artist Göran Lundström, and editor Doc have picked up anything from Raimi, it’s how to pull off an outlandish splatter sequence on a tight budget. Particularly memorable is an outrageous scene in which a crazed killer saws off a scantily clad prostitute’s limbs as prodigious amounts of blood squirt in all directions.

Advertisement

That scene comes from the film-within-a-film Loose Limbs 5, an entry in a slasher series from which Evil Ed’s protagonist, Edward Tor Swenson (Johan Rudebeck), is tasked with removing all offensive content. A censor working for a Swedish film company, Edward is used to snipping brief clips of nudity from Bergmanesque art films, so his transfer to the company’s Splatter and Gore Department isn’t an easy one for him. The deeper he gets into the job, which he carries out at the eerie suburban estate of the company’s sleazy executive, Sam Campbell (Olof Rhodin), the more his grip on reality becomes loosed. First, Edward starts to hallucinate visions of demons, monsters, and savage brutality, and before long he’s violently murdering anyone and everyone who’s unfortunate enough to show up on his doorstep.

This premise, inspired by Sweden’s long-running censorship practices, is rife with satirical potential. But outside of a few moments, such as Sam’s explanation for why a scene of a woman being raped by a beaver should be allowed to stay in one of the Loose Limbs films, Evil Ed never really settles on a point of view. The film isn’t really interested in commenting on censorship or the ubiquity of violence in media or anything else. It is, though, concerned with packing as much zany carnage into its frames as it can. If films like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive have shown that approach can pay dividends, the result here is a shambling assortment of increasingly monotonous gore and overwrought comedy loosely stitched together with arrhythmic, dawdling scenes consisting mostly of unfunny jokes delivered in poorly dubbed English. For a film that features so much of everything—action, horror, comedy, monsters, nudity, creatures, dream sequences—Evil Ed ultimately amounts to so little.

“Ninety minutes of condensed sex and violence!” shouts an incredulous Edward at one point to a fan of the Loose Limbs series. “You call that a great movie?!” His outrage is obviously intended as the film’s winking, self-effacing commentary on itself. But it’s unfortunate that the sentiment rings all too true. Evil Ed may be more knowing than the ’80s slashers it parodies, but that doesn’t mean it’s got anything more on its mind.

Advertisement

Image/Sound

Shot on 16mm in mostly overlit nighttime interiors, Evil Ed isn’t the prettiest of films, but it does have a certain distinctively exaggerated look, which is reproduced with care and fidelity on Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release. The textures of the film’s moody color palette—namely its deep, shadowy blues—really shine through. If there’s some visible grain in some scenes, that feels true to the production’s scrappy, low-budget origins. The sound levels are slightly inconsistent, with sometimes slightly muffled dialogue scenes giving way to abrasively noisy action sequences. These disparities are particularly evident in the disc’s stereo mix, while the sound levels are more evenly dispersed on the 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track. Overall, however, both image and sound are more than acceptable, with any audio-visual issues mostly being the product of the semi-amateur nature of the film.

Extras

This single-disc release features only the 99-minute “Special ED-ition” cut and doesn’t contain the original version of the film. Jettisoning the theatrical cut doesn’t constitute much of a loss, particularly considering that the additional scenes only amount to about six minutes of inessential material. The 45-minute making-of documentary You Keep ‘Em Heads Rollin’ offers a fun, breezy history of the film’s arduous production; turns out that the story of Evil Ed’s making is more compelling than the film itself. A few shorter featurettes offer largely superfluous looks at the preparation of the new cut, the early filmmaking endeavors of Anders Jacobsson and his crew their careers post-Ed. The disc also contains a brief breakdown of the scenes added in the “Special ED-ition” cut, a self-satisfied introduction to the film by Jacobsson and Doc, deleted scenes, trailers, and an image gallery. Despite the absence of an audio commentary, Arrow has still loaded this disc with a generous helping of extras.

Overall

Arrow Video’s single-disc release of Evil Ed is more manageable than its previous three-disc edition, but it’s still probably more than this Swedish genre curio can really withstand.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Cast: Michael Kallaanvaara, Olof Rhodin, Hans Wilhelmsson, Anders Ek, Memory Garp, Christer Fant, Odile Nunes, Johan Rudebeck, Ulf Landergren, Jenny Forslund  Director: Anders Jacobsson  Screenwriter: Anders Jacobsson, Göran Lundström, Christer Ohlsson  Distributor: Arrow Video  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: R  Year: 1995  Release Date: February 4, 2020

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.