When you're a movie lover... scratch that... when you're a movie fanatic and you're looking for a way to make money while enjoying this forbidden lust, what choices do you have? Well, you could always become an employee at your local rental store, either one of the 20 Cocksucker or Whoreywood Video places in your town or one of the dirt rental "mom & pop" outlets if you're lucky enough to find one (where they have original copies of Deathrace 2000 or Microwave Massacre and every movie Charles Band made pre-Puppet Master). Then again, if you choose that route you'll forever be faced with morons and infidels who want to know what you recommend for their children (cyanide) or why they can't find a copy of "Bone Crusher" (because it's called "The Bone Collector" and I'm no longer on speaking terms with you because you want that piece of shit). I had a job like that once. It was a dream job. Sweet gig with good hours, 5 free rentals at a time and access to all the screeners and free samples of tape cleaner I could ask for! But, like Randall said in Clerks., "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fuckin' customers." and my short lived career as a rental jockey ended in 12 dead, hundred injured and half a million in property damage, all because some 8 year old girl's parents were letting her rent Crossroads, Glitter and an N'Sync concert video. You'd never guess how much spin you can get off a kid's head with a properly stocked cash register!

Obviously that's not a job without it's pitfalls, so what else is out there for the movie freak? You could always start up your own video review website and sell merchandise! This way you get to bitch and rant about other peoples' crap while making a mint off of travel mugs, floppy frisbee discs and embroidered ponchos... yeah, right, you think people actually buy shit like this!? Who puts down $20 to wear a dime store tee shirt for a website?! The answer: Nobody. Yes, it's the movie geek's fantasy, but it's just that, a fantasy. If you venture down this path, you'll just find out that no one goes to your site and you'll end up with $5000 in unsold junk with your site's name and logo on them stored away in boxes in your parents' attic or basement... I gotta get those back from my mom, they'll cover my Christmas gift giving requirements, plus my girlfriend's mom's birthday is coming up... Okay, so Shangri-La is an illusion, so what else can you do? You could always make an independent film, but that requires lots of cash, people willing to sacrifice their social lives for you and the patience to wait 20 years until it becomes an "underground cult classic". If it does get any kind of release, you'll also need a strong constitution to protect your fragile self esteem from the hate and mockery you'll be targeted with from those aforementioned online movie critics. Oh, and you're girlfriend will leave you for your leading man and your best friend will hate you because he doesn't get a sex scene with the leading lady... who will hate you because you reduced her role down to a series of shower scenes and moments of her character repeatedly getting dressed and undressed. If your movie DOESN'T turn out like a mooshy butt nugget and someone actually decides to release it to fan acclaim? Be sure to wax your back so the distributors have a nice clean shot to plant the machete between your shoulder blades and rape you as far as any money the movie makes.

Okay, we're starting to lose faith here, but how about a projectionist? You spend the entire time kickin' back in your little projection room, watchin' free movies and knockin' down bag after bag of free popcorn!... well, reduced price popcorn that's been sitting out since the previous night's showing. Problem? The shut-in lifestyle will only serve to hurt your already ravaged complexion and destroy your vision, leaving you a twisted and squinty-eyed Morlockian mockery of a human being... moreso than when you started the job. Also, you'll be forced to sit through repeated showings of the latest Jim Carrey nightmare or 90 minute brain fuck from the cast of "Dawson's Creek". Yes, another marathon of property destruction and homicide will be the end result... trust me. Damn, looks like there's no hope for the movie lover out there looking for a way to profit on their enjoyment of other peoples' hard work. But wait! What about a movie editor? You get to sit around watching movies all day, in their purest form, and cut and paste them to your liking for distribution! Shit, with the deleted footage you could also make up your own bootlegs and sell them off to collectors! My God (i.e. Me), this looks like it might actually work! Oh wait, I almost forgot which movie I'm reviewing here... yes, leave it to the Swedes to ruin the job of a movie editor for everyone...

So, after the inexcusably long introduction, I finally get to the point of this review: the review. Evil Ed comes to us from Sweden by a group of indy moviemakers with an almost blatant taste for Evil Dead movies... and a selection of horror movie posters they're obviously very proud of. This is the tale of Eddie, a highly regarded editor at European Distributors, a European firm that specializes in the release of American films for distribution of, well, Europe. Though Ed's job is normally on "normal" movies, he winds up shipped out of his department for a temporary run in the splatter and gore department to finish editing chores on an American gore series known as Loose Limbs for the department manager Samuel Campbell (Sam Raimi + Bruce Campbell = Samuel Campbell). Seems Campbell's previous editor had a little breakdown on the job as noted in our opening sequence when the tubby bald looney tune spiraled downward into an orgy of film mutilation, facial blemishes and pointless mayhem culminating in a fatal bout of oral sex with a "head" grenade. Why he went insane is a mystery, while how he got his hands on the explosive isn't much of a mystery at all. Just go for a hike around Eastern Europe and you're bound to trip over one or two! The things are everywhere since WWII, they practically grow on trees.

Campbell wants the job done without delay, as it's already behind schedule, so he sets up Eddie in a little house just outside of town so he can do his merciless movie hacking without distraction... plus, if he goes crazy, he won't fuck up the office like the last guy. Not a man who enjoys the occasional 40 foot squirt of crimson or a couple of gratuitous jugs slapped around on camera, Ed turns into a one man MPAA on Loose Limbs, badly butchering scenes of excessive violence and tits like it was Friday The 13th Part VII. He's probably used to doing Disney edits, the snide little turd. This means it's not too likely that Ed's been desensitized like the rest of us have, so all this explicit violence might have an adverse affect on the lad. In this case, Ed's fragile psyche is beaten bloody, doused in Clorox™ and run through the meat grinder, then served up with a side of crab legs and a bowl of guacamole... uhm, in other words, it drives him insane. Yes, just from watching some fake gore, Ed lives up to the stereotype usually saved for application to impressionable children as he begins to have violent impulses and angry hallucinations. When he tries to convince Campbell that he's not the best man for this project, well, Sam breaks it down like any employer: "I'm not your mother or shrink, I'm your boss. I don't need to know your emotional state of mind. What I need is results Edward, results!". I had a boss like that once... :::transforms into Joe Piscapo ala Johnny Dangerously:::... "once".

So, it looks like Edward's stuck with the job and violent hallucinations. Obviously not wanting to sacrifice the easy money (or just too limp in the personal fortitude department to say the 'q' word), Eddie gets back to work and continues feeding his brain to the hungry maw of Loose Limbs 7. This non-stop devotion to his work only affects Eddie further, as he next has a messed up little dream concerning himself having a chat with some lunatic in bandages hanging out in a dinghy hospital room. The freak may be representative of the crazy guy who gave himself the "pineapple facial" over editing the movie beforehand, or it may be representative of Ed's new madness taking him over. Whatever the guy's purpose, he tells Ed that he sympathizes with him in regards to his thankless job of trying to preserve "morality" and "decency" by cutting all the fun shit out of the movies he works on and just getting bullshit when people don't like his butchery. After his odd powwow, Ed wakes up from his bad dreams to find a rude visitor squatting in his icebox... a visitor who looks like the midget offspring of Jimmy Walker ala The Guyver. When Sam comes looking for his movies, he arrives to find Ed boarding up the front door, siting neighbors breaking in the night before as his reason for going all Night Of The Living Dead on the architecture... Sam just kinda blows it off and wants to see his movie.

After being chastised for cutting Sam's beloved "beaver rape" scene (likely a parody reference to Raimi's infamous "tree rape" scene) from the movie, Ed's brain trip starts burning again as he envisions Sam to be an albino Satan (hard to believe considering the heat in Hell) who's after his soul, only to live out the American dream and break Sam's neck at the encouragement of his bandaged freak of a Id, who offers to help Ed overcome the evil of the devil with hatred... uhm, how do you fight evil with hate? Isn't that like trying to stop a lava flow by dousing it with napalm, or stopping a flood by pissing on it? It's really not a "fight fire with fire" kinda situation, it's more like "fight fire with kerosene". Oh well, fuck what I think, it seems to do Ed plenty of good without my bitching. After doing the deed, Ed dismembers Mr. Campbell with a handsaw to the tune of "Them Bones" and dumps the remains into the front trash bin. Later on, when Nick, the distributor's delivery boy, comes by the house with Loose Limbs 8 for it's turn on the chopping block, he winds up with a glass bottle upside the head and numerous fists of Burt Reynolds-type fury smashed against his face, left for dead a beaten and bloody mess. He does regain consciousness later and manage to stumble to safety, but a duo of home invaders who attempt robbing the wrong house on the wrong night don't benefit from such luck, both winding up heads above the rest... with their shoulders (and the rest of their bodies) nowhere near them. Good thing Campbell's dead, I don't think he'd appreciate the destruction wrought on his decorative plate collection... Wait a sec, what the Hell was that one guy using to keep on his hat, a couple of heavy carpet staples in his scalp?! That head must've flown 40 feet and bounced off of a passing car into a drum of water without his hat even shifting an inch!

With all interruptions taken care of, Ed can get back to goin' medieval on his film... until his wife and daughter decide to check up on daddy and see what he's really doing. He turns his torment on his loved ones as well, but before he can do either any grievous bodily harm with a pair of scissors, wife Barbara unloads a pistol round into her hubby's shoulder in a scene that seem's oddly reminiscent of the closet attack scene near the final moments of Halloween... in that, uhm, it takes place in a closet... Anyway, this gunshot is apparently enough to slow Eddie down until the cops can arrive (as per a phone call by the neighbor, who found one of the thugs' heads floating in her rain water) and cart him off in a straight jacket. End of story, the day is saved, and Ed's off to cold storage until the sequel, right? No, not yet kids, we've still got about 1/3 of the movie to go, so we're gonna follow our hapless hero-turned-villain in his magical journey to a padded cell. Try to act surprised when the orderlies at the hospital take off Ed's jacket, confident he's properly sedated, only to get their asses kicked when he wakes up and thinks the nurse cleaning his wounds is a succubus. I know some of you have a hard time feigning surprise, but try to consider the movie's feelings, okay? While Ed starts taking his demon killing wrath out on his fellow patients, we learn that Nick also happened to wind up in the facility's care following his ass kicking previously. When his spicy little girlfriend (someone tell me how this wormy little delivery boy gets to bed a chick who'd have little problem winning a Trish Stratus look-a-like contest... he's obviously the hero) shows up to give him some sexual healing, Ed stops by to put an end to it, punching out Nick's lights once more before dragging the woman away as his hostage as the local S.W.A.T. team enters through the front door, looking to blow a couple of meaty chunks off of Eddie in, "an excellent opportunity to save a taxpayer's money".

Nick hobbles in pursuit of his attacker and tries to live up to his billing as the hero of the flick, jumping Ed when his back is turned as he prepares to reenact one of his favorite scenes from Loose Limbs 5. The scuffle to ensue leaves Nick with a mouthful of a glass and a bruised ego as his abilities to hero out are put into question. Meanwhile, the S.W.A.T. proves that the Swedish elite police force really ARE a laughing matter, as the deranged killer makes apparent the S.W.A.T.'s inability to aim their rifles, engage in close range combat of any kind or look out for the safety of their teammates. Using the never fail "human shield" self-defense technique, Ed holds off the less-than-heavies long enough to gun each and every one of them down so he can get back to his work. As for Nick, he spits the shards of glass out of his mouth like any good hero, dusts himself off and heads back up to make his second attempt at being the hero, this time proving much more effective when he brings a shotgun with him... Yes, Nick has triumphed over Evil (Ed) in the name of good, love, beauty and terrible ending sequence soliloquies. Not to take away from Nick's "accomplishment" (give any guy a shotgun and point him at some guy with a scalpel and tell me who you think's gonna win), but from the way Ed's hallucinations were telling him to "look inside" for the answers and to cleanse himself, I'm guessing he was about to do some self-dissection as it is had he been given another 30 seconds. I guess we'll never know...

To be honest, Evil Ed ends on one of those "eh, I've seen better" notes. Actually, the last 20+ minutes seemed to fall under that category. Though the outing as a whole is nothing to call you mom about at 2 in the morning, it is something refreshing in terms of story. Refreshing or not though, you can always tell a low budgeter with little hope of going far by the gratuitous references to other, better movies in the genre. The Evil Dead influences alone are obvious and include the title (Evil Dead - 'd' and 'a' = Evil Ed), the character of Sam Campbell, the gratuitous peppering of walls throughout the movie with Evil Dead 2 posters (as well as posters of Cherry 2000, The Fly, Cape Fear and Dracula), one of the thugs who breaks into the house says "groovy" in his best Ash impression as he loads his shotgun and of course the use of the classic Point-of-View camera angle that had a considerate part in making Raimi and his cult trilogy noticeable. Other nods to American horror includes Ed saying a slightly modified version of the Night Of The Living Dead tagline with, "I'm coming for you Barbara" as he chases his wife around the house with scissors. As a little extra for genre fans, Bill "Chop Top" Moseley (well his voice) makes a cameo appearance as he does various sound bytes for Loose Limbs clips.

As for how I'd improve on the movie itself, aside from loosening up on the Evil Dead ass kissing, I wouldn't have moved the story from the house to the hospital, as it was really unnecessary and completely ignores the whole "the film makes him evil" story that makes up the plot. Speaking of which, what was Ed's motive for all this madness? Was the film haunted and made him crazy? Was the bandaged guy in his nightmares a restless spirit trapped in the edited film? Then again, was Ed just driven mad by his exposure to the graphic violence and senseless nudity of a horror movie? Since there was never a sequel and I'm too lazy to track down the writer-director, I guess we'll never know. Finally, I was kinda disappointed by the lack of a full on coconut splitter scene as depicted on the video cover, but what can you do? Again, the answer is: nothing. One very good lesson that can be taken away from this experience? "90 minutes of condensed sex and violence... you call THAT a good movie?!". No... well, not all the time...