BLOGTOBER 10/28/2022: EVIL ED
I've been aware of this movie for about 20 years, and I still know almost nothing about it. For me, it's less like a product I consumed, and more like something I experienced, something from another world that I encountered by chance in my endless cycle of renting fistfuls of movies at a time. If you pitched this to me today, I'd have some trepidation; broad parodies made by and for nerds are often condescending, unfunny, and generally just make me wish I were watching the superior movies they clumsily draw upon instead. However, EVIL ED is genuinely weird, a satire of Sweden's long history of censorship whose film references are more than winking asides; often, they're rendered in 3D with fabulous makeup effects and puppetry that have allowed the movie to stick with me all this time.
I should really just buy that Special Ed-ition from Arrow, which is packed with extras that chronicle the development of EVIL ED from short film to the gloriously odd extended feature that stands before us today. Anders Jacobsson's highly original horror-comedy is said to be Sweden's first slasher film, which rings true as its release coincided with the abatement of film censorship in its home country. While film censorship laws weren't officially done away with until 2011, the last film to be cut in Sweden was 1995's CASINO, after which the practice fell appropriately into the shameful past. The Swedish Statens biografbyrå (Cinemabureau of the state) was the oldest film censorship board in the world at the time of its abolition, having been established in 1911 to apply censorship laws so that films circulating in Sweden "shall not include any material that is offensive to public decency or disrespectful to the authorities or private individuals, nor pictures depicting the commission of murders, robberies or other serious crimes, and exhibitions that are open to children shall not include pictures depicting events or situations that are liable to arouse emotions of terror or horror in the audience or for other reasons be considered unsuitable for children to look at." 1996's EVIL ED does its damnedest to break as many of these rules as possible, while making its subject censorship itself.
Mild-mannered Hollywood editor Edward Tor Swenson (Johan Rudebeck) is in for the shock of his life when his employer, European Distributors, transfers him to their Splatter and Gore Department. His new boss Sam Campbell (Olof Rhodin, who is a bit of a show-stealer) assigns Ed the special task of making the popular LOOSE LIMBS slasher franchise acceptable for international export, which will be no small achievement; little does Ed know that his predecessor plunged into insanity and blew himself up with a grenade, declaring himself "just another chunk of meat lost in brainland!" Campbell lends Ed his private holiday cottage so he can focus on this project, but the isolation in combination with the extreme content of the LOOSE LIMBS films soon gets under his skin, and demonic hallucinations urge him to "adjust" not just the movies, but the sickos who create and consume them.
This is probably the most left field association anyone has ever made with EVIL ED, but what we see of the LOOSE LIMBS series always reminds me of the movie-within-a-movie in Atom Egoyan's art house masterpiece THE ADJUSTER. In that movie, Arsinée Khanjian is an employee of a censorship board who, for reasons that are slowly revealed, makes illicit recordings of the material she reviews. You never see the movies she watches, but the audio track effectively creates the worst possible images in your mind's eye, evoking all manner of inhuman depravity in a disturbingly sarcastic tone. Those sounds always reminded me of the endlessly perverse TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, and later on, of the movies Ed censors in EVIL ED—which is funny, because Chop Top himself, Bill Moseley, voices the killer in LOOSE LIMBS (the character is played on screen by Swedish musician Lars "Vasa" Johansson). What I mean to say is, director Anders Jacobsson's vision of the movie that ruins your mind is pitch-perfect, though interestingly, some of his specific film references are more innocent.
EVIL ED had my full attention from the moment that the unhappy protagonist finds a refugee from Joe Dante's GREMLINS fucking around in his fridge. It looks great, and it's hilarious, and it might be there just because the present film hearts the '80s so hard—it is virtually wallpapered with posters from '80s horror classics, and it refers to that time when there was worldwide hysteria over the potentially harmful effects of home video. But, I like to imagine that the invocation of GREMLINS is sort of a dig at Hollywood releases that were allowed to cross lines that smaller independent movies were punished for. The MPAA's PG-13 rating was invented in part for GREMLINS, which had all-ages appeal despite how scary and splattery it was, and the most impressive image in EVIL ED is a spin on the character of Darkness, played by Tim Curry in Ridley Scott's LEGEND. That big budget Hollywood fantasy may have received a PG rating, but it is unremittingly erotic, full of frightening monsters that would be too much more many youngsters, and who could forget the infernal scene in which Darkness's demonic chef hacks up live prisoners for dinner? Here, Ed's boss transforms into a wonderfully-rendered version of Darkness that commands him to edit not just the LOOSE LIMBS movies, but the corrupt world in which they are so popular. Other images from this film refer to more predictable fare like EVIL DEAD 2 and (I'm pretty sure) THE EXORCIST III, but there is something extra salient about EVIL ED's references to famous gateway horror movies that made their way into video stores more or less unscathed.
If I'm being completely honest, EVIL ED does run out of gas at some point (and, I'd assume, out of money), devolving into scenes of characters chasing each other around in dark buildings as so many movies do. But I'd posit that if a movie offers even a couple of things that you can't forget, then its more anonymous offerings are totally forgivable. Rewatching EVIL ED this time, I didn't remember the duller, more generic bits, but I did remember all of its exciting FX experiments, exuberant performances, and bizarre humor in a lot of detail, and I was so happy to see it all again. This movie may go some way to prove something I rarely feel: that being a fan doesn't have to mean bloating up your movie with predictable easter eggs just for the sake of recognition, and it doesn't have to mean just slavishly repeating "It's just a flesh wound!" or whatever just to reinforce your membership in the cult of your choosing. (EVIL ED is guilty of some of this, but on balance I don't care!) Being a fan can and should push you to greater heights of creativity, and if you do it right, you can convey to your audience the feeling you get from your favorite things. EVIL ED cleverly evokes the special way in which extreme movies can make you feel like you're going crazy, and if you're the kind of fan Anders Jacobsson is, it also reminds you of why you keep chasing that feeling.
