We reported last week that Wild Eye Releasing is launching the Visual Vengeance label in July — MVD Entertainment Group will be providing sales and distribution support. The focus will be on vintage, overlooked, underground and lost films from the 1980s forward.
The first film we focused on was the July 19 Blu-ray debut of director Matt Jaissle’s 1997 direct-to-video zombie/horror classic, The Necro Files. This week, we have release news for both Blu-ray and DVD editions of Japanese filmmaker Shinichi Fukazawa’s Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell. The street date is July 5.
This 1995 homage to Sam Raimi’s iconic 1981 horror film, The Evil Dead is so much of an homage that among film aficionados it is referred to as “The Japanese Evil Dead.”
Short, swift and getting right to the point, Fukazawa gives us a prologue that features a woman being murdered by her cheating lover and then being buried underneath his house. That’s the set-up.
We then skip ahead some thirty years and meet the murderer’s son, Shinji (played by Shinichi Fukazawa), a body-builder who has a girlfriend by the name of Mika (Masaaki Kai), an expert on house-hauntings, and she wants to investigate Shinji’s father’s long-abandoned home for spirits. He agrees and off they go with her associate, Mizoguchi (Asako Nosaka), a “psychic,” in tow.
Before you can say “evil dead,” Mizoguchi has a mystic encounter with the spirit of the dead woman and then all hell breaks loose!!
As far as we can tell, bootlegs and out-of-zone imports aside, this is the first time that Fukazawa’s Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell will be available in the domestic marketplace.
Bonus features include two commentary options … the first with fellow filmmakers Adam Green (Hatchet, Frozen) and Joe Lynch (Shudder’s Creepshow, Mayhem), while the second features film historian James Harper. There is also a newly-prepared video session with Shinichi Fukazawa and two separate image galleries.
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