“All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up. See this? This is my BOOMSTICK!”
Watching all three Evil Dead movies back to back is a great way to get to know director Sam Raimi and his muse Bruce Campbell. It’s as if two unapologetic film geeks were given fancy cameras and huge budgets and offered the chance to remake the Super 8 films they made as high schoolers – oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened. You get the sense that with this trilogy, Raimi and Campbell get to make all the kinds of movies they grew up on and loved. They do bloody horror with The Evil Dead, slapstick comedy with Evil Dead II, and in Army of Darkness they get to make their own medieval adventure film (the idea came from Raimi’s potential title for a sequel, Medieval Dead). Army of Darkness is drawn straight from the imagination of two giddy kids who wanted to see what a Cecil B. DeMille epic would look like if you added demons and a smartass with a shotgun.
Once again, the film starts off with a (largely unnecessary) recap of the previous installment, and once again it’s completely inaccurate (say hello to Bridget Fonda, now the third actress to play Ash’s girlfriend Linda). Before long, we’re back in the 1300s, with Ash being marched alongside slaves in stocks. The funniest thing about these films, to me, is that Army of Darkness came out ten years after The Evil Dead, Bruce Campbell has clearly aged a decade, and if you follow the timeline, approximately thirty-six hours has elapsed since the beginning of The Evil Dead. (What I wouldn’t give to see a three-hour cut of all these films spliced together sequentially.)
It isn’t long before Campbell starts playing Ash like the action hero that he’s clearly meant to be. Ash gets thrown in a pit to fight Deadites, and Raimi stages the battle so it’s alternately funny, thrilling, and very cool. My favorite thing about Campbell’s portrayal of Ash is his unflappability, and willingness to adapt instantly to whatever situation he finds himself, be it cutting off his own hand or fighting a small army of miniature versions of himself.
Not all of Raimi’s trademark cornball humor holds up. When Ash goes to retrieve the Necronomicon Ex Mortis (the magic words he needs to utter: “Klaatu barada nikto,” from The Day the Earth Stood Still), he finds himself in a Three Stooges-style fight against reanimated skeletons, and the tripping and eye-gouging is more in line with the humor seen in Evil Dead II; it’s not a great fit for this swashbuckling incarnation of Ash. And the less said of Bad Ash’s quips the better, but I do love that the evil version of Ash is just called simply “Bad Ash.”
The visuals are frankly amazing. (Also improved is Joseph LoDuca’s score, which is leagues better than his cymbal-heavy music for the first film.) Like in The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, Raimi never tries to disguise the fact that we’re looking at a set, which is hilarious because, at this point in his career, he could arguably demand a bigger budget to facilitate location shooting. The Deadite makeup still looks great, which should come as no surprise (The Walking Dead‘s makeup guru Greg Nicotero was partly responsible), but it’s the skeleton army that impresses me the most. Forget their wacky one-liners for a moment, and look at them up close; you’ll see that Raimi hasn’t lost his affinity for ghoulish creations. The way they move, like they’re filmed in stop motion, is a great visual tribute to Ray Harryhausen’s most famous creations, the skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts.
It’s easy to argue that the only scary installment of this franchise is the first one, and while that might be true, it arguably misses the point. The Evil Dead films succeed for the same reason that Little Shop of Horrors does. They’re fun, and scary, and funny, and bloody, and endlessly quotable. There’s a lot of fun with monsters to be had here.
Which is a good thing, because there is absolutely no fun in Evil Dead (2013), director Fede Alvarez’s remake of the first film. Evil Dead is one of the better horror remakes, but the sense of fun that Raimi and Campbell brought to the proceedings is completely gone. Alvarez’s Evil Dead is a grueling endurance test. That’s not a complaint. The movie was billed, in all caps, as THE MOST TERRIFYING FILM YOU WILL EVER EXPERIENCE. I’ve seen scarier movies, but the word “experience” is a more apt description of what it’s like to watch Evil Dead.
The movie makes a lot of smart choices, and the smartest is not trying to cast someone new as Ash (in the early 2000s, when this remake was floated, Marlon Wayans and Ashton Kutcher were in the running for the role). The Ash analogue here would be Mia (Jane Levy), who is taken to the cabin in the middle of nowhere so she can detox. The group finds the Necronomicon, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) reads aloud from it, and you know where this is going.
Evil Dead uses Sam Raimi’s film as more of a framework than a guideline. It hits a lot of the same beats – most notoriously the tree rape scene, which just goes to show how incongruous it is in a largely nonsexual story – but puts its own spin on a lot of the imagery. By which I mean, this movie is really, really bloody (it set a record for using the most fake blood, with 70,000 gallons). Even though not a lot of the characters beyond Mia and Olivia (Jessica Lucas) really register, it’s undeniably disturbing to watch people try to cut their faces off, get stabbed in the face over and over with a syringe, or saw their arm off with an electric meat carver.
Levy does a nice job in what is essentially Campbell’s role (minus the one-liners), and Alvarez stays true to Raimi’s ethos by absolutely shitting all over her for 91 minutes. There is absolutely no vanity in Levy’s performance, and although “brave” is an overused word in criticism, I think it’s applicable here. More than brave, though, Levy’s performance is absolutely go-for-broke; it feels genuinely triumphant when Mia rips her own hand off and mounts a chainsaw on the stump.
Evil Dead, for all its grisly horror, is still very well-made. Alvarez does a good job of building an atmosphere (he won rave reviews this summer for Don’t Breathe, which comes as no surprise), and thanks to his director of photography Aaron Morton, who is also the DP on Orphan Black, the movie looks absolutely stunning. The result is a film that works on its own, but also as a loving tribute to Sam Raimi’s unlikely game-changer.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
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