Director: Sam Raimi
Year: 1987
Country: U.S
Language: English
Believe it or not Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II was a staple in my childhood. Growing up, the films in my home were quite limited. We had Titanic, Evil Dead Trilogy, Star Wars and a whole hell of a lot of Disney films. Given that I felt I was growing too old for animation and I had seen Kate Winslet's boobies far too many times, I decided to sink my teeth into Evil Dead II. My first viewing left me horrified and unable to sleep, perhaps the surreal images were too powerful. However the more I watched it the more I laughed and really enjoyed the film.
Evil Dead II is about a young man named Ash (Bruce Campbell) who takes his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixter) to a secluded cabin in the woods where he plays back a professor's tape recorded recitation of passages from the Book of the Dead. The spell calls up an evil force from the woods which turns Linda into a monstrous Deadite, and threatens to do the same to Ash. When the professor's daughter and her entourage show up at the cabin, the night turns into a comic battle of good vs evil.
After seeing those awful Spiderman films and watching the trailer for the Evil Dead reboot, I am convinced that Raimi didn't intentionally create a hilarious film. Rather his script and direction was so terrible that it somehow worked to his advantage. Take the character Ash for example. He is the stereotypical masculine hero, who will do anything to save the damsel in distress, however the masculinity of this character is so exaggerated that he is a mock of society's view of masculinity. If this is intentional then the credit goes to Bruce Campbell's brilliant acting, though given his and Raimi's filmography the "brilliant acting" does not seem so.
The film is incredibly gory, but so gory that it's outrageous. It is hard to forget the scene where the wall spews gallons of watery blood at the hero. Any attempt at coming off as a "psychological thriller" also comes off as campy. The camera work is pretty neat though, the demon as the camera quickly moving toward Ash is both creepy and incredibly inventive, I have not seen that done in any film before or after Evil Dead II. For a film that's essentially about a man stuck in a cabin, it's pretty exciting.
In conclusion, Evil Dead II is either a film so bad that it's good or pure genius disguised as a "B" movie. Legendary Director Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) once said "Why does nobody like the sequel? Evil Dead II is better than Evil Dead I no?" Indeed Evil Dead II is one of the few examples of a sequel that is much better than the original. However the film is not flawless, I find that the last 20 minutes get a bit tedious and sometimes I just want the film to end. Still the majority of the film is entertaining/ Praise it! 4/5
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