Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell calls itself 'the Japanese Evil Dead', because it's Japanese and it shamelessly rips-off The Evil Dead (and EDII). Seems reasonable enough to me. And like the Evil Dead, it's a total blast once director Shinichi Fukazawa begins to pile on the excessive gore and splat-stick comedy.
The film starts off relatively restrained, with a prologue set in Tokyo, 1978, that sees a man, Naoto, killing his wife and burying her body under the floor of his house. Years later, Naoto's son, bodybuilder Shinji (who still has a long way to go before rivaling the likes of Schwarzenegger), inherits the property, and takes his girlfriend Mika there so that she can write an article about the supposed haunted house. A psychic accompanies them on the trip.
Once inside the house, the psychic examines all of the rooms, detects an evil presence, and begins to see ghostly apparitions, and soon after the fun really begins...
Mistaking Shinji for his father, the vengeful spirit of the murdered woman possesses the psychic, and Fukazawa lets loose with the craziness, piling on the blood and guts, missing no opportunity to give his own interpretation of key scenes from Raimi's horror classics: the possessed man pops up to provide shocks, but is decapitated with a shovel; the body is chopped up, quivering parts scattered all over the floor; these pieces suddenly have a life of their own; Mika is bitten and becomes possessed herself; and Shinji arms himself with a shotgun and utters the Japanese equivalent of 'Groovy'.
It's all totally devoid of originality, of course, but the whole bloody shebang is imbued with such energy and a clear love for Raimi's films that it's hard not to like. 7.5/10, happily rounded up to 8 for IMDb.
