Director: Anders Jacobsson
Year released: 1995
THE CHARGE: Practicing evil without licensing or documentation of proper training. Record keeping is important, people!
THE EVIDENCE: Evil Ed opens with a scene of a film editor sitting in front of an editing machine. You see, kids, in years gone by, movies were recorded on something called "film" and this "film" had to be manually cut and sliced together in order to create a movie. Well, the person in front of this particular machine is going completely mental and when the head of the movie studio enters the room to tell him to knock it off, the editor puts a grenade in his own mouth and pulls the pin. After being covered with gore, the studio head promptly fires the deceased editor.
Yep, it's going to be THAT kind of movie.
Realizing he still needs his movie - the latest in a franchise called Loose Limbs - finished, the studio head hires mild mannered Ed to do the final cut. Disgusted by the displays of graphic violence in the movie, he removes the most offensive parts until his boss reams him out for getting rid of the best parts of the movie. But as he edits out the scenes and is subsequently forced to edit them back in, Ed has to repeatedly view those scenes over and over until the hamster wheel in his brain flies off its track.
Ed, now evil and more than a little delusional, takes cues from the movie's killer and recreates his own murderous scenes in real life. During his psychotic rampage, he terrorizes the studio's employees, the studio head's family, a couple of thugs that pick the wrong time to break into his house, several doctors and a few members of a special ops commando force.
In keeping with the tone of the opening scene, all the chaos is played for laughs. There are a few token attempts at suspense scattered throughout but Evil Ed is as much a horror flick as This is Spinal Tap is a serious documentary. This wouldn't be a bad thing if the humor was funny. But it's not. It's all a Troma-esque parade of stupid characters doing stupid things that get them killed in exaggeratedly violent ways showcasing very cheap gore effects.
And the story... oy vey! This thing bounced around more than a ping pong ball in a room full of monkeys on Ritalin. It starts promisingly enough, using the first twenty minutes after the cold open to establish Ed as a character and detailing his eventual dive into madness. But once Ed goes full blown kookoo for Cocoa Puffs, the movies degenerates into a bunch of loosely connected scenes that serve to both honor and parody older horror films like The Evil Dead, Halloween and (of all things) Critters. Ultimately, it just made me wish I was watching any of those movies instead. Yes, I would even have settled for Critters.
You see, kids, in years gone by, cutesy creatures doing evil things was a subgenre popularized after the success of Gremlins. Critters was one of the movies on that bandwagon, featuring monsters that were sort of like tribbles with sharp teeth. And tribbles were fuzzball-resembling alien organisms that appeared in an episode of the original Star Trek series. And Star Trek was a TV series before Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto were even born. The more you know. *insert rainbow here*
Now here's the really weird part of the movie: every internet reference I can find about Evil Ed says that it was made in 1995. Since the movie is a Swedish film created during the tail end of that country's era of strict censorship laws, which were repealed in 1996, the timing seems to make perfect sense. But I swear, hand on a stack of bibles, that I saw the movie well before that. I distinctly remember the ridiculously gory VHS cover art of a guy's head being split in half with an axe. I remember it sitting on the shelves of a mom and pop video rental place close to where I lived in Long Island. And I moved out of Long Island in 1994, but not before renting it and giving it a watch. (I did rewatch the movie recently for this review, but it's definitely the same movie I remember seeing back then.)
Yet the internet is telling me this isn't possible. Did I time travel? And if I did, why would I waste that ability to watch this nonsensical movie? Or has hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of cheesy horror flicks finally warped my mind like poor old Ed? *twitch* (You see, kids, in years gone by, "twitch" referred to an involuntary facial tic or muscle spasm, not a way to watch other people play video games. And why in the blue hell do you kids do that anyway?)
THE VERDICT: Evil Ed is GUILTY of bad taste, bad storytelling and bad execution, just like that skeezy uncle no one likes who shows up every Thanksgiving to eat all the sweet potato casserole. LEAVE SOME FOR EVERYONE ELSE, UNCLE TEDDY!