Pretty damned scary! 

Right from the bat, you know that this is a low-budget horror movie. The sound is crummy, the lighting is shoddy, and the acting is like something out of a porno movie. Director Sam Raimi (whom we all know and love by now) obviously knew this would be a problem, and that's got to be why he pulls absolutely no punches in delivering the fear. Yes, friends and neighbors, this is a scary movie, the scariest I may have seen since The Shining. Of course, these are two different kinds of fear here, just like The Sopranos and The Godfather are two different types of mafia movies. But they both deliver, and Evil Dead, though hailed as a cult classic of humorous tones, delivers the right kind of fright. And lots of it.

The legendary Bruce Campbell plays Ash, but he isn't the swaggering hero of bravado we see in Evil Dead. He's a slightly gawky college boy with his slightly gawky college friends Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss), Scotty (Hal Delrich), Linda (Betsy Baker) and Shelly (Sarah York) taking a trip to a remote cabin in the woods to fool around for the weekend. Before they even get near the cabin, though, we know there's going to be trouble--we've seen lots of fog, unearthly voices and something charging around the woods and over a stagnant pond, delivered via the whatever-it-is's point of view. There's a precarious bridge separating the cabin from the rest of the world, and thick, mysterious woods for miles and miles around. Soon enough, wise guy Scotty fools around in the basement and uncovers a tape recorder and mysterious book. When the tape recorder is played, we hear a somber professor's voice describing his archaelogical find: The Book of the Dead. The recording includes the professor reading from the book, which winds up releasing demons from the bowels of hell, and that's when the fun starts.

First off, Shelly goes out in the woods to see if anyone's there (again--the Dumb White Girl syndrome) and gets tied down and raped by a tree. That's right--a tree. When she manages to escape and return to the cabin, she is hysterical and adamant about getting out of the woods, but when Ash reluctantly takes her back, surprise surprise! the bridge is out. Shelly soon becomes possessed, attacks her friends and is contained, only to cheer and cackle madly when, one by one, the others become possessed and drop off one by one. Ash survives, and nearly goes out of his mind, but eventually pulls himself together and chops up his friend, beheads and buries his girlfriend, and throws his buddy on the fire.

Raimi's work with this movie, constrained by budget as he was, cannot be understated. The demonic voices are occasionally incoherent, but no less frightening, especially considering the makeup job on the possessed. The girls mostly look like casting rejects for Linda Blair in The Exorcist--lots of leering mouths, white eyes and demonic giggling, except for Shelly, who is locked in a floor cellar. Raimi places us in the monsters' point of view plenty of times, including Shelly's, as she's trapped in the floor cellar. We see her hands in front of her, hear her breathing, follow her gaze from person to person and nearly want to clap our hands over our ears at the threats she shouts at them. Raimi also doesn't overdo the fake-out surprise--i.e. somebody goes down a hallway super-slow, approaches a door slowly, flings it open, sees nothing, sighs in relief and turns around only to behold a monster behind them. Instead, he keeps up constantly on our toes with interruptions from outside just when things might start to settle down inside, or with minor plot twists that eclipse recent events and make us forget, right along with the main characters, who else might be in the cabin, ready to pounce given a chance. The girls run and scream a lot, but they manage to convince us that it's either run and scream or drop dead in fright. Campbell, however, steals all the thunder in this department--he truly looks not only scared, but as if he's about to go straight out of his mind with terror through a good three-fourths of the time.

There's some really creative use of sound here. From the outside of the cabin, we see the usual voyeuristic sights a monster typically sees: girls undressing, couples fooling around. Not particularly scary in itself, especially when you're something of a peeping Tom in real life (whoops, scratch that part). But we also hear a crescendo of voices and sounds culminating in an unearthly feel to our eavesdropping, and when the sound shifts from this to silence as we cut to the inside and outside of the cabin, the suspense can't do anything but rise. The special effects are unsettling too, in that they stop just short of gory without losing any of their much-coveted fear fator. Given the film's lack of budget in special effects, one fault of the movie is every character's tendency to stand still whenever something is grabbing them from behind or stabbing their foot or something. Raimi also has a penchant for pouring blood all over everyone and everything, and this sometimes gets a little tiresome. But he quickly makes up for it by painting blood in decidedly unsettling ways--towards the end, as Ash prowls the basement, a projector goes on and shows a screen being slowly covered in a blood-red haze. Creepy. But not gory. The ending comes as close to gory as gory can, when Ash, having burned the Book of the Dead, watches his assailants decompose into a rancid oatmeal and paper mache-type substance, complete with crawling worms. The effect is dated, done as it is in stop-animation, but it still works.

"Dated but effective," in fact, could apply to the entire movie. Evil Dead may be hokey in places, but it still scares you in that way so few movies manage these days. Trust me--watching it in broad daylight will make it no less unsettling.

--Long
 

Pretty damned funny! 

Evil Dead fans will probably damn me to the hell these demons keep coming from for giving the sequel (sometimes argued as a sequel, sometimes argued as a remake) a lower rating than the original, but I've got to stick to my guns here and point out that Evil Dead II, although obviously less about fear than it is about humor, still can't seem to make up its mind in places. The fear still scares you, and the humor still makes you laugh, but the ambiguity concerning overall effect somewhat spoiled the movie's residual effect on my palate, which was quivering in anticipating after having viewed the predecessor just minutes before.

Irrespective of my pedantic musings here, let me reiterate that Evil Dead II deserves every blood-soaked, pizza-faced drop of cult classic fame it's managed to garnish over the years, and if it truly is a remake, it's one of the more creative ones I've seen of any genre. The movie opens with a vague historical commentary of sorts relating to the Book of the Dead and its composition centuries ago, which, though it doesn't necessarily shed any more light on these creatures, is at least a step in the right direction. Flash forward to an older, broader-shouldered Ash (Bruce Campbell) and girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) on their way to the very same remote cabin in the woods. Just as before, they arrive, get ready to fool around but have their fun spoiled when the tape recording with the professor's demonic incantation is played, once again releasing the spirits that wind up stealing Linda away and possessing her. Poor Ash--not twenty minutes into his weekend and he's got to behead his girlfriend all over again! At least he could have gotten some head first.

This is where the first movie stopped. Here, though, we've only just begun. The professor's daughter Annie (Sarah Berry) and friend Jake (Dan Hicks) are on their way after having picked up some more pages from the book, but they take their time getting there. Meanwhile, Ash finds himself possessed, but apparently with an ability to thwart it and regain control. His hand becomes possessed, though, and rebels against him in some of the most hysterical physical comedy to be seen in a horror movie. It punches him, breaks dishes over his head, and even knocks him out, at which point it's got to drag his comatose body across the kitchen floor to get at a butcher knife. Fortunately, Ash wakes up in time and severs it off, managing to taunt the hand with "Who's laughing now?" as he does. Whoever made 1999's Idle Hands ought to have the pants sued off of them.

When Annie and Jake finally show up, escorted by a couple of yokels, they mistake Ash for a murderer (by now he's covered in blood and more or less out of his mind) and lock him in the cellar (that's right, the same cellar from before). Only now, he's got to get out before the professor's already-dead wife pulls herself out of the fruit cellar, not to mention the other possessions that will inevitably occur. The characters both dodge demons and become demons, whittling their numbers down to two eventually. The humorous is mixed with the horrible all along, particularly as Ash dons demon-hunting gear and leads the professor's daughter "on a witch hunt" in a burst of testosterone-laden bravado not to be seen again until 1995's From Dusk Till Dawn.

Ironically enough, Raimi's bigger budget here worked against him in places, especially concerning the possession makeup. There are some disturbing shots of the witch in the cellar cackling madly in the dark, but in other places, rubber masks and body suits only succeed in startling us, rather than scaring us. Most of the same techniques are used as before--monster POV shots speeding towards the characters, fog rolling all over the place, and spinning camera angles are all tricks used to success in the first film, and they work just as well here too. The movie, incidentally, is funny as hell. Overall, all of this adds up to the kind of experience you're not likely to find in other rentals, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Raimi, unlike many of his contemporaries, knows how to mix the outrageous with the scary so that you're cheering as much as you're wincing. Enjoy them both.
 

--Long
 

Pretty damned goofy

Nevertheless, there is still something to be said for mixing these genres without being too self-conscious about it. Campbell can still play the Everyman kind of badass--someone who's completely out of their element and knows it, but is still believable when he delivers haymakers to rotting demons and corpses. Raimi went a little too far with Campbell's wiseacre action lines ("Give me some sugar, baby," etc.), but only a little, and even such hyperbolic witticisms tend to agree with the rest of the picture. Raimi supposedly shot an alternate ending (available on DVD) that conforms more with the original Evil Dead horror style, but the American ending to Army of Darkness helps make it a movie in and of itself, and not necessarily part of a sequel. There's a lot I would have had Raimi do differently, and this is one of those rare movies that begs to be remade, but if divorced from the previous films, it does manage to stand on its own two feet, albeit dubiously.

--Long