The Evil Dead (1981)

Written and Directed by: Sam Raimi (Spiderman I, II & III; Darkman)
Starring: Bruce Campbell (Army of Darkness), Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor (as Hal Delrich), Betsy Baker & Theresa Tilly (as Sarah York).

Favorite Line: "Join us! Join us!!"

Favorite Scene: Ash gives Scotty a double thumb jammy, resulting in an explosion of gore all over the place.

My love/hate affair with horror movies started when I was five; my sisters were kind enough to let me tag along to the theater to see Jaws, which was no big deal to me until that decapitated head comes floating out from under a boat or somewhere...I lost it at that point. Then it was Halloween when I was nine...I didn't sleep right for a week after Michael Myers disappeared from the lawn after all the knitting needles & gunshots & shit. When I was ten, it was Phantasm...that one freaked out my 19-year-old sister as well...we slept with every light in the house on that night. It wasn't until later on, when a local late night movie guy named The Ghoul started showing horror movies, that I got hooked on zombies. There are two types of movies I watch, regardless of how many times I've seen them in the past: baseball movies and zombie movies...can't get enough of either of them. It really all started for me with Night of the Living Dead ("they're coming to get you Barbara"), and Dawn of the Dead, both of which were remade, both of which didn't live up to the originals. Zombies were just better back then, creepier looking, slower for sure, but persistent. Recent zombie movies are good (The Serpent & The Rainbow, Sean of the Dead), but they lack the innate fear that late 60's to early 80's zombies emit from us.

I wrote in a previous blog about my disappointment over the survivors in horror films, where it always seems to be that at least one human gets to survive, therefore reigning supreme over our primal fears. Realistically, Mortuary (see blog archive) implies no survivors, but in an unrealistic way...a cheap way. The Evil Dead does this with flair, the winner being the unknown. Early horror movies, like The Evil Dead were masterful vessels of the fear of the unknown...not only does it scare the shit out of all of us, it doesn't cost much; a couple of PAs in the woods, shaking the tree, and ooooh, scary! Brilliant is more like it.

As you may have figured out by now, this is not one of my typical blog posts. That's because as shitty as The Evil Dead really is, it's a brilliant trail-blazer film...so this is more of a bad movie tribute review. That, and I'm taking a well-deserved break from Syfy originals...'cuz they suck.

In my opinion, the best thing about this movie is Bruce Campbell. You know you know who Bruce Campbell is, but other than The Evil Dead & Army of Darkness, you would probably be hard pressed to rattle off another one of his films off the top of your head. It's more like, "Hey, that's Bruce Campbell" when you're watching a movie that he just happens to be in. He's one of those bad actors that never got off the B list, but who also doesn't care...nor does he make excuses. He's witty and (at least on screen) charming while being a cock at the same time (think about Spiderman, when he scolds Toby McGuire for having a crappy nickname). In Evil Dead, he's the unwitting recipient of gallons upon gallons of his dying friends' blood & gore, and the only one other than Sam Raimi who really ever went anywhere. He'll put a smile on your face every time you see him in a movie, 'cuz you don't know what the hell he's gonna do...kind of like Chris Elliott...he's just got that look about him.

Evil Dead is less of a zombie movie and more of a possession film, but nobody wants to be in the same category as The Exorcist, so the zombie genre got one of film history's favorite cult classics. It starts off typically enough; five coeds driving out in the middle of nowhere to somebody's uncle's cabin for a weekend of booze & sex & whatnot. What happens when they get there is anything but. For those of you who haven't seen this movie (what's wrong with you?! See this movie!!), here's the basic premise: Scotty and Ash find a reel-to-reel tape deck with a recording of some scientist who found "the Book of the Dead" & proceeded to read incantations from it, therefore not only raising the evil in his time, but also in the time of our friends Ash, Scotty, Cheryl, Shelly & Linda...yes, the recording does that.

Cheryl's the weird one--and the first to go...she hears a sound outside and goes to investigate (no weird girl, don't go outside!), gets violated by the woods themselves, begs for a ride into town (at one point, Ash tells her to stay in the car while he goes to investigate something...but she doesn't), but the bridge is out, and she's forced to stay in the evil cabin. The evil seeps into her wounds somehow, and turns her into some sickly looking, zombified creature that gets locked up in the cellar (and remains a pain in the ass from that point on). Cheryl stabs Linda in the shin with a pencil, Shelly turns (I don't remember how...I really don't think they explain that) and Scotty has to dismember her, then he and Ash bury her in the woods. Scotty then freaks out completely and decides he's gotta beat feet out of there, only to return scarred and cut to shit by the woods. Ash goes to check on Linda, and as he looks at her pencil stab wound, she turns as well...but doesn't try to attack, just sits cross-legged on the floor and laughs really annoyingly. At one point, Ash takes her out to the shed, chains her down on a workbench and picks up a chainsaw. You're thinking "hell yeah...chainsaw", but he can't do it, and buries her whole instead. Well, she crawls out of the ground, and the scene that follows is probably still one of the goriest, most gruesome things I've ever seen, with blood and white shit flowing from Linda's zombie mouth, and ends with Ash decapitating her with a shovel (her headless body falls on top of him, gushing blood into his mouth...yum). Ash then goes back into the cabin to find Scotty possessed and Cheryl escaped from the cellar. He himself goes into the cellar, looking for god knows what, and finds himself in a madhouse situation: blood trickling into a lightbulb, over the lens of a projector (very gross, by the way), etc. He goes back upstairs, has a truly psychotic moment (you can actually see him losing his mind...go Bruce), and the climactic scene is when he figures out that if he burns the book of the dead, the zombies will die as well. And die they do...in a barrage of sound effects, stop action photography and gore that has yet to be rivaled.

You think he's gonna make it...the sun's up...he stumbles out the front door of the cabin...but then you remember that Linda gouged the shit out of his leg during their fight scene...all of a sudden, the evil races through the woods, over the woodshed, through the cabin, and as Ash turns around to scream...end credits.

Boom! Evil-5; Humans-0. Take that.

Like I said, it's a bad movie, but Sam Raimi is a really decent writer/director, and whoever did the camera direction was a genius. There are some really interesting angles, some very stark camera work that lends to the overall spookiness of the film, the lighting is ahead of its time, and the gore is absolutely outstanding. The acting is sub-par, and Scotty is wearing a belt buckle you can toboggan on, but Bruce Campbell carries the whole thing, and although I'll bet he and Raimi were friends (everybody in this film is from Michigan except for Betsy Baker), he pulls off a cult-classic performance that Ed Wood would've been proud of.

If you haven't seen The Evil Dead, I highly recommend you get with the program. It's a cult film that stands alone within the horror cult genre. Don't believe me? Watch the trailer: The Evil Dead