Popcorn Kernels: Hell Hath No Fury

As we continue to clear out the wreckage of Halloween, let’s take a couple quick jaunts into the depths of Hell and see what we can dredge up.

Drag Me to Hell

Year: 2009

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Ruth Livier

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

An enterprising young banker denies a gypsy woman her loan and is cursed to be tortured by the Lamia then dragged to hell.

Like most horror icons, Sam Raimi has done all in his power to not actually direct horror movies. After helming the unforgettable Evil Dead trilogy, he moved on to projects like the Kevin Costner baseball treacle For the Love of the Game or the Spider-Man trilogy, all three of which are superhero flicks, but one of which is inexplicably a musical. After years and years of this nonsense, Raimi finally stepped back into the ring with Drag Me to Hell, and the really surprising thing is that it’s freaking awesome.

It pretty strictly adheres to the Evil Dead formula of invoking an ancient evil, being tormented in grotesquely hilarious ways, and then facing an unrelenting denouement, but from the perspective of an older and wiser director. He’s no longer 21 years old, and while in his maturity he has somewhat lost the borderline callous disregard for traditional film language that made his Evil Dead so uncannily kinetic, he has gained a sharper talent for embedding story and character in among his zany showboating.

These characters re still pretty rudimentary, but compared to Ash Williams and his meatbag friends, they’re Chaucer. Alison Lohman’s Christine is set up with a whirlwind flurry in a series of swiftly efficient scenes that paint her personality in bright splashes like Jackson Pollock canvas: she’s timid, eager for promotion, afraid of being branded a country hick, and ashamed of being overweight in her younger years. These qualities come into play again and again throughout the film, so they’re broad but hardly the pointless shading of 80’s cannon fodder that just needs to be differentiated from the next blonde over before she can be exploded into goo.

The dominoes are hardly even in position before the first one topples. Christine is suddenly plunged into an ancient nightmare and for the duration of the first act, it’s legitimately scary. Classic Sam Raimi touches electrify the proceedings (giddily twirling camera, looming silhouettes on faces, you know, the usual) and Drag Me to Hell goes through the motions of an utterly effective horror flick.

That is, until about he midway point. A talking goat and a necrotic mazurka smash the film off its hinges, sending it flying into a classic Raimi fever dream. The subtle and chilling horror jumps screeching into your face, putting Lohman through the Bruce Campbell ringer, smearing her with filth, gore, and excrement, beating her to a pulp with a gypsy corpse, and just generally making a mockery of her attempts at normalcy. It’s buoyantly silly, with enough references to Evil Dead II to be a hearty nod and not a brazen rip-off.

An exquisite blend of gushing camp and bleak fearlessness (they kill a child, for goodness sake), Drag Me to Hell isn’t Raimi’s best film, but it’s certainly a dazzling return to form. Between this and the pilot episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead, I’d say it’s time for the man to ditch the producing game and get back on the horse. And yes, we’re pretending that Oz the Great and Powerful never happened.

Rating: 8/10

Bedazzled

Year: 2000

Director: Harold Ramis

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Elizabeth Hurley, Frances O'Connor 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

An unloved loser sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for wishes, which invariably go awry.

“Starring Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser.” Could a phrase possibly be more early 2000’s? How about “comedy where a lead actor performs caricatures in a variety of zany, vaguely racist costumes?” Bedazzled, a remake of the 1967 movies of the same name, is an effortful, ridiculous comedy that reeks of flop sweat. As Brendan Fraser attempts to channel his inner Jim Carrey, jokes are flung out into the audience like wet fish. They can be funny in a nostalgic “the new millennium was so stupid” kind of way, but that’s the only thing that has allowed itself to hold any vestige of esteem past its demographic’s infancy.

OK, maybe I’m being a little harsh. The opening credits are genuinely fantastic. I really mean that. And there is good in Bedazzled, it’s just sandwiched between a whole lot of “wacky” artifice, Sometimes the film stumbles into thickets of such sublime stupidity, that you let your guard down and it can actually tickle you. You absolutely, positively must be in the right sophomore Stifler mood to watch this movie, but it’s entirely possible to enjoy it all the way through.

The biggest setback to the comedy is the smokin’ hot Elizabeth Hurley as the Devil, who gets the film’s funniest lines but delivers them with the nuance and vivacity of a mailbox. I bet she and Rachel Ward are having crumpets in some fantasy realm beyond our understanding, because they share the same vacant, pouty stare. The lines are humorous enough a la carte that they still work, but Hurley does everything in her power to vacuum every last crumb of comedy from them. She is the knife in Bedazzled’s back if you’re not attracted to women, because otherwise she has absolutely zilch to offer.

It’s not like the movie needed help sucking the air out of itself, what with its preponderance of offensive stereotypes. In one fell swoop, Bedazzled knocks down Latinos, gays, and wise old black men. In the fantasy where Fraser becomes a basketball player, I’m legitimately surprised they didn’t put him in blackface. I’m grateful they showed a modicum of restraint, although the hulking albino beanpole he becomes is pretty unsettling just the same. I forgive that scene’s woeful makeup for providing a pretty hilarious lampoon of less-than-erudite players in post-game interviews.

But Bedazzled isn’t finished with us quite yet. We still need to talk about the way it treats the women. Oh, the women! There are brief specters of progressive values here (merely being rich and powerful can’t win someone’s heart, etc.) but the love interest here is never treated as anything other than a vapid, mercurial prize to be won. [SPOILERS] Even once Fraser realizes that he just wants her to be happy and accepts her rejection, he is rewarded for his morality with an exact twin of her. I hate to get too political on movies that are irrevocably from a certain time period, but it’s not exactly on message.

So, here we are. Bedazzled is palatable if and only if you can manage to completely unscrew your brain. It’s problematic and its narrative is nothing more than a sequence of sketches, but if you’re in the mood for a juvenile time capsule flick, look no further.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1173

Beat It, Essay: The Book Of The Dead

So, it turns out that even though I'm the TA for the Horror Class this semester, I still have to do all the work and write the essays. What a relief! I was worried I would have to do them recreationally!

All kidding aside, I really do love this class. Because it's just another excuse to write about horror movies, something I'm clinically addicted to. Anyhow, the first one is due on Monday, so here we go. This is what the onslaught of Evil Dead reviews this week was building up to. Prepare yourselves!

The Prompt

Compare and contrast Army of Darkness (1992) with The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead 2 (1987), and Evil Dead (2013). Cite elements in common and discuss how the undead are portrayed in each.

Very few people have had more influence on the modern horror genre than Sam Raimi, the idiosyncratic and deranged auteur behind the Evil Dead franchise. Each successive movie has brought something new to the discussion and, in a nigh on impossible chain of events considering the current state of film studios, Raimi has had a personal hand in each of the films, directing all three of the main franchise and producing the 2013 remake.

Raimi's immense dedication to the beloved cult franchise has resulted in some of the most perversely unique and phenomenally innovative horror films in modern cinema. From his days as a fresh-faced auteur with something to prove to his tenure as a grizzled genre veteran, his lunatic vision has fueled the delight and nightmares of generations of audiences, starting all the way back in 1981 with the infinitesimally low-budget production The Evil Dead.

The story of The Evil Dead is a simple one, almost like something you would hear around a campfire. Five paper thin characters (two men, three women) spend Spring Break holed up in an abandoned cabin in the woods and accidentally unleash a horde of angry Candarian demons from an ancient book known as the Naturom Demonto. As the spirits begin to possess the flesh of the living, so begins a long and harrowing journey for perennial hero Ashley J. Williams.

The original film is utterly unique, breaking open the craft of cinema and turning it inside out. Although it is more or less a straightforward horror film in terms of genre (and an incredibly tense one at that), the campy excesses of the gore sequences, the zany twirling and zooming of the camera, and the boisterously overproduced sound design all work in tandem to create an heightened reality entirely separate from our own. Camp and terror freely intermingle as the fleshy melodrama plays out.

The isolation of the cabin suits this tone well, creating a feeling of distinct separation from the "real world." This inventive approach brings the genre into the new decade, actively combatting the serial nihilism of 70's horror. Films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Last House on the Left, and the grindhouse holdouts of the early 70's were grubby and bleak, whereas Raimi's undead tale has a keen awareness of its own excesses and a sense of "Look what I can do!" glee throughout the proceedings.

The film's portrayal of the undead follows along much the same lines. The undead (which, it can be argued, are technically Candarian demons, but it does not do one well to try to impose rules upon a Evil Dead movie) could easily kill Ash if they had a mind to. In fact, three of them spend a large portion of the second and third acts in the same room as him. But the fact that they are content to play with their captive like a cat with a mouse is reflective of the director's approach to the film and the concept of cinema in general.

Despite the film's darker tinges like the brutal forest rape scene and some intense tactile gore, for the most part Raimi wants to play. The simplicity of the story allows him to push the envelope of cinematography, shot composition, editing, performance, effects, and just about every single element that makes a film a film. From a man who spent a decade watching increasingly downtrodden horror films, The Evil Dead provided a shot in the arm to audiences, inoculating them from nihilism and preparing them for the campy explosiveness of a decade that would come to a crux with films like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Raimi's own Evil Dead 2.

A lot can change in six years, and such was the case with Evil Dead 2. As the decade went on, horror films became increasingly silly and inconsequential, expanding on Raimi's own campy premise with delight but pushing it too far into the realms of fluff. There were still classics of the form around the time of the Evil Dead sequel, but it acts as a course correction for the woebegone majority of horror films in the late 80's. The truly Raimiesque quality of the film is that it does so by amplifying the genre even further, becoming what is essentially a parody of the first film - a perfectly balanced combination of outrageous campy comedy and gross-out gory horror.

Taking a cue (and a Necronomicon) from H. P. Lovecraft, this film explores even deeper and darker themes in terms of horror while simultaneously engaging in slapstick pratfalls and Bruce Campbell mugging, all wrapped up within the loopy and revolutionary aesthetic of the original film. The undead in this film are even more playful and comedic, but the loose rules governing them makes them absolutely manic and unpredictable, highlighting the terror of the film as it gracefully dances upon the line between two disparate genres.

At one point, Ash even becomes a demon himself, exemplifying Raimi's no-holds-barred, over-the-top approach to his own story, a reaction to both the state of the genre and the increasing seriousness of American affairs at that time. This time around, the demons aren't the enemies, merely playthings to distract the audience (and Ash) from the darker activities swirling around the edges of the frame and in the backs of the audience's minds.

Another five years after that genre-bending stone cold masterpiece, Army of Darkness came barreling out of the chute. Raimi knew he wasn't going to be able to replicate the success of his earlier films if he rehashed the same plot for the third time so he lifted out the slapstick elements of Evil Dead 2 and married them onto an effects-driven swords and sandals action flick. This also had the effect of satisfying the censors, who had started tightening the reins on gory horror around 1989.

Army of Darkness ended the original trilogy and, as such, continued to utilize the traditional filmic elements of the franchise as it progressed naturally to a more overtly comedic register. Ash's mugging and physical comedy reach their absolute peak in this film and Campbell's Jim Carreyesque performance tamps down the horror to let the comedy shine. Toning down the gore and horror of the earlier installments in the franchise allowed this concluding film to explore the consequences and results of the previous two, acting as a personal exploration for Raimi as well as a loving sendoff for the series that made him a household name.

In between the always fresh and clever Three Stooges recreations and slapstick vignettes, Army of Darkness spends more time exploring Ash's character than any of the preceding films. After having lost his girlfriend no less than three times and had two sets of friends ripped away by the Deadites, he is left a bruised and scarred survivor, closed off to the world and uncaring about its inhabitants.

Because of this more careful exploration of character, the nature of the demonic menace is quite different. Instead of an intimate selection of prancing demons, he is facing a vast army of the undead led by his own shadowy doppelgänger. As he struggles to overcome his selfishness and learn to care about his fellow human beings enough to save their town, he literally battles the darkness within himself and a skeleton battalion representing each and every corpse he left behind in that cabin, eventually coming out on top, renewed in spirit and more heroic than ever. The perfect ending to a stellar franchise.

Of course by now we have all learned that Hollywood is incapable of leaving well enough alone, so naturally a high budget remake was slated for 2013. Fortunately, the modernization incorporated many of Raimi's classic elements including the hurtling POV camera, the American gothic cabin design, upside down shots and the like. His ever fresh repertoire of film tricks is an essential element at the core of Evil Dead's being.

Evil Dead suffered somewhat from a lack of necessity, but returning the franchise to its roots as a straightforward horror film did it well. Evil Dead is again a harrowing survival tale, this time populated with characters that are fleshed out (save one or two who are merely, shall we say, fleshed apart) and recognizable to any modern audience member.

The introduction of the drug addiction concept to keep the young men and women in the cabin and unaware of the initial horrors that are occurring was nothing less than genius and more than validates the film's reasons for existence, at least in terms of being a well-shot and gory horror movie for the 21st century crowd. And the film does capture some of the energy of the original trilogy, although it is diluted through the tamperings of a big budget studio.

The undead here are merely beings of pure evil, a bane of the overly simplistic remake culture of the late 2000's. Thanks to landmark films of the decade like Saw and Hostel, the demons are more focused on grossing out their prey (and the audience) than psychologically tormenting them, and while the film does succeed in bringing the themes and ideas of The Evil Dead into a modern setting, perhaps that isn't necessarily the best place for them.

Although it is certainly the weakest of the entire franchise, Sam Raimi's limitless abandon in approaching his material (even as producer) sends it across the finish line in fairly good shape. That same indefatigable enthusiasm is what made the Evil Dead films as important and influential as they are today and will remain for many years to come.

Each film uses Raimi and his boundless enthusiasm as the glue that holds them together as well as the unlimited supply of fuel that provides them with the power to explore deeper and deeper aspects of character, society, the horror genre, and cinema itself. The characters of the undead constantly bend, snap, twist, and break, allowing themselves to be the skeleton (pun intended) upon which a fantastic tale of cinematic imagination and intimate inspection of ourselves and the world around us can hang.

Their nature is formless and adaptable, crossing genres, decades, and bodies, all to further the one thing that propels his work - the deep love and respect he has for his craft and for bending the rules to create bigger and better universes. Everything in The Evil Dead comes from a place of joy and giddy childish glee at the sheer act of cinematic creation. This reason, more than any other, is why these films have survived the test of time despite the limitations of their budgets and technology.

They resonate subconsciously with audiences across the globe, all of whom can feel the depth of the creator's passion and his sense of the limitless opportunity of the medium. That, more than consistent story or character or even genre, is what links the individual films of this zeitgeist franchise. You don't need to have the best equipment or actors or makeup around to pour your heart into a story as long as you have the sheer nerve and gusto that Raimi instills upon everything he touches. And Hollywood would do well to recognize that.
Word Count: 1991

The Dark Ages

Year: 1992

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz, Marcus Gilbert

Run Time: 1 hour 21 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Army of Darkness is a hell of an odd little movie. As the five-years-later followup to the smash comic horror masterpiece Evil Dead 2, it had some big shoes to fill. Instead of even trying, it cut its own feet off and rolled around on the ground with the shoes to make a nice little dismembered dirt angel.

For the first time abandoning the "cabin in the woods" angle, Army of Darkness takes place in a nonspecifically British medieval past after Ash (Bruce Campbell) has been transported through a demonic wormhole, apparently getting a personality transplant along the way to turn him into a massive dickbag.

Like, a complete bag of dicks.

Ash's experiences in that forlorn cabin have turned him into the sort of gruff manly action hero that earns him movie poster poses that look like they come from a bad romance novel. He's full of grumpy grump one-liners and ice cold badassery. This changes the genre entirely. 

While it's still full of Raimi's manic camera, silly demons, and plenty of Three Stooges choreography, the franchise had somehow transformed from a harrowing survival tale to a swords and sandals action flick as Ash prepares the medieval village to battle a horde of incoming Deadites in exchange for using the Necronomicon to get him back to his home time.

The plot of Army of Darkness is basically an assortment of medieval-themed slapstick vignettes followed by a massive castle defending battle against a troop of skeletons on horseback. It's insane, is what it is, so it's clear that Raimi and his robust creativity are back in the saddle.

"Robust creativity" and "Shotgun" are interchangeable.

Its biggest drawback is, strangely enough, the film's relatively gargantuan budget - largely because it went to horses and castles and period costumes and extras and Bridget Fonda, not to gore, which is really what matters. I don't think anybody would have minded if Ash spent the entire 81 minutes in that darn cabin again, as long as every cent of every dollar was poured into realizing as much creative and fantastic gore as possible.

Unfortunately it wasn't, and the result is an effects-laden extravaganza that can't rise above the level of hokey and chintzy cheese ball action. But this was the 90's after all, a bleak time to be a horror film. So let us never underestimate the impact such a shot of energy could have on the genre in general, resulting in the last and strongest wave of eternal Evil Dead fanboys.

And with shots like this, could you blame them?

There are still some brilliant and entirely new Raimi touches like S-Mart and the Boomstick (watch and you'll understand), but the fact remains that the entire film is pretty thin overall compared to the dense deranged intensity of the two stone-cold classics that it follows.

Hence the thinner review. I miss the Deadites. But holding Army of Darkness up against such leviathans as The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 is enormously unfair and I recommend that everybody who hasn't seen it take a moment and bask in some of the corny glory.

Because it really is an enormous success in the bogs of rough-hewn 90's horror. A beautiful maiden (Embeth Davidtz), a surly hero, and an ocean of post-Harryhausen skeletons pratfalling and exploding in glorious fiery infernos is certainly enough to keep anybody entertained. Let us not neglect the joy of this film simply because it's not worthy to be on the pedestal with its brothers.

TL;DR: Army of Darkness pales in comparison to its predecessors, but is still a solid, clever, and creative Sam Raimi feature.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 629
Reviews In This Series
The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)
Evil Dead 2 (Raimi, 1987)
Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)

Dead By Dawn

Year: 1987

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Let's get this out of the way first. Evil Dead 2 is not a remake. There has been a long-standing debate over the nature of this six-years-later sequel because it takes place in the same cabin in the woods and opens with a truncated, reshot version of events from The Evil Dead, replacing Ash Williams' (Bruce Campbell) four friends with just one - his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler).

This was shot out of necessity because the company that owned the rights to the original film wouldn't allow them to use footage from it to open their film. Studios are dumb. Always have been, always will be. But that doesn't change the fact that, but for ten minutes in the beginning, this sequel is its own entirely unique movie. So there.

My sentiments exactly, severed hand.

As you can probably surmise from that screenshot, Evil Dead 2 has somewhat more of a sense of humor than its fairly straight-laced precursor (and more of a budget, but that's a different story entirely). The elements of the original are still intact - zooming Steadicam shots, explosively creative and zany editing and performances, and an Amazon sized river of blood and guts. But all of it is approached from the angle of outright slapstick comedy, complete with pratfalls and silly sound effects.

This is where Sam Raimi really hit his stride tonally and discovered his talents for perfectly treading the line between the two genres, making this film the high water mark against which all subsequent cross-genre attempts would be measured. I've included it on my Top Horror Comedies list at the number 3 spot and I always urge anybody who hasn't seen it to immediately find a way to get it onto their TV screens.

But I can never escape the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I just like the original a little bit better. I'm in a staggering minority here, but the lo-fi cheesefest of The Evil Dead is right up my alley, especially in terms of the gore effects which are of course present in abundance in the sequel, but more specifically comedic and less grounded in tactile physicality than the first.

I mean, yes. Here we have a ballet dancing demon, a headless body brandishing a chainsaw, eyeballs flying into mouths, spurts of blood in every color of the rainbow, and plenty of sticky grossness. It's frankly incredible. But it's more glossy and slick than the DIY gore of the glory days. I just don't adore it with my entire heart the same way I love the fleshy tackiness of what came before. 

Although it's hard to hate the goo. I'm not complaining here.

That's a really minor argument and it has no impact on the quality of this film. It actually helps this film achieve its perfect tonal balance, but I guess that tone is slightly off center from the bulls-eye on my own personal dartboard.

But enough about the first one! This is the sequel! And it has more money and more humor, so let's not get bogged down in petty nitpicking.

The entire first half of the film (minus the recap opening) is basically a one man show as Bruce Campbell fights the zombiefied Linda and, later, his own hand and mugs at the camera something fierce. Ash is of necessity more fleshed out in this film, so he really settles into the character and turns him into the zany badass that would go down in history as one of the most iconic horror heroes of all time.

I have his bumper sticker on my car, even.

I don't even remember why I was complaining about this film. Everything pales in comparison to the chainsaw hand.

The second half throws him in with a whole crop of new blood bags. I mean, friends. There's Annie (Sarah Berry), the knowledgeable daughter of the demonologist who owns the cabin; her boyfriend Ed (Richard Domeier) who says about three lines before he's thrown onto the chopping block; Jake (Dan Hicks), their hillbilly guide through the forest; and Bobbie Joe (Kassie Wesley), his skanky girlfriend who is attacked by the forest in a much less rapey scene, presumably to make up for the last film's sins.

It's at this point that the film slows down somewhat as it enters its plot phase. But the film never loses its humor, all the way to the very end. All in all it's a plenty terrific zombie movie, one of the best of the business. This is the film that planted Sam Raimi firmly into the horror pantheon without question and ignited the roaring fire of support many horror fans for his entire filmography.

One of the best horror sequels to ever be released and a perfect example of the horror comedy. A hit in the cult market. Hilarious, groundbreaking, and genre-defining. Not bad for a low budget feature starring nobody you know.

Pictured: Sam Raimi - Actual Magical Witch

TL;DR: Evil Dead 2 doesn't have the grubby charm of the first film, but makes up for it with a perfect blend of comedy and gross-out horror.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 879

Reviews In This Series

The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)

Evil Dead 2 (Raimi, 1987)
Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)
Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)

The Cabin In The Woods

Year: 1981

Director: Sam Raimi

Cast: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In preparation for what is shaping up to be a pretty darn cool essay, I've been rewatching Sam Raimi's quintessential horror series, The Evil Dead. This is a film series that would change horror as we knew it, create a massive moral uproar, and ignite a cult following that pulses steadily to this day.

Way back when, before James Franco the Dumb and , before Drag Me To Hell and Spider-Man, Sam Raimi was a young buck with a couple bucks and the determination to make a movie out of it. That movie was The Evil Dead, a horror film with a fairly straightforward premise - five college students spend Spring Break in a remote cabin in the woods where they unwittingly release a horde of Candarian demons that begin to kill and possess them one by one.

You might raise an eyebrow at the whole "demon possession" angle when the poster and fanbase so adamantly insist that it's a zombie movie. Well, you might as well pluck that eyebrow out because human logic has no place in the realm of Raimi.

Our lovely demon zombie beautician would gladly help you with the tweezers.

The Evil Dead is the story of five young men and women: Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell), his girlfriend Linda (Betsy Baker), his sister Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss), his best friend Scotty (Richard DeManincor), and Scotty's girlfriend Shelly (Theresa Tilly). I listed no personality traits because there are very few discernible personality traits between the five of them.

Scotty's kind of a douche and Ash is the protagonist. That's about it for character development. So, with a bare bones plot and paper characters, what is it that makes this film so dreadfully important?

I'm glad you asked, hypothetical reader.

Behind it all was a young auteur with a lot of talent and something to prove, and from that was born one of the single greatest creative downpours the genre had seen thus far. I'm talking upside down, sideways, crossways camera, I'm talking rapid-fire editing and extreme close-ups, I'm talking zooming improvised Steadicam shots and madcap wall-to-wall sound design.

Sam Raimi blanketed the entire film with his gleeful and energetically creative approach to filmmaking and it's grubby, kinetic, exciting, and unlike anything anybody had ever seen before. The Evil Dead is an unrelenting assault on the senses that is like sweet rain to the genre faithful.

Show this image to any self-respecting horror fan and their pulse will skyrocket. Seriously. Try it.

No, it's not a comedy. That kind of thing wouldn't happen for a while. Although he's frequently lauded for his perfect blend of horror and comedy, Raimi made his start here with a straight genre piece and it is beautiful. And who needs Three Stooges routines when we have unreserved melodrama and geysers of blood?

With this film, Raimi took everything about the increasingly nihilistic horror genre of the 70's and pushed everything to their over-the-top extremes, resulting in a film that is so ebulliently gory and cheesy and disgustingly hilariously bad-good that it transcends its low budget limitations to become something much larger than itself, an utterly perfect genre film.

Because no, it isn't perfect. To be blunt, the film looks like crap. All the Blu-Ray wrangling and color correcting in the world can't change that. The sound is fuzzy and occasionally poorly dubbed. There's a wildly ill-advised rape scene that is almost unwatchable and landed the film on the infamous Video Nasties list in the UK.

[Side bar: I'm not trying to justify this scene at all. Sometimes, there's no accounting for taste. But, to be fair, many first-time horror auteurs will do all they can to shock the audience in whatever is the most depraved manner they can conceive. Wes Craven did it with The Last House on the Left, and Raimi is no different. This leads to some terrible storytelling decisions, but they just need to get it out of their system. Raimi has since expressed his regret at that scene, and let's put a pin in that for now. Rape in horror cinema is about to get its own overlong article, so stick around.]

If you dare.

At any rate, the surface crappiness is heaven for genre fans because it's a filmmaker's playground. Not having to worry about production values allows a lot more breathing room for experimentation, the type of which led to this cavalcade of ingenious and inventive cinematic designs.

And it doesn't hurt that the gore technicians really knew what they were doing. It's impossibly colorful and gooey, fake enough that it doesn't revolt the audience, but real enough to propel the sense of danger through the roof. A scene involving a pencil and an ankle is one of the most memorable gore sequences in my history of the genre and that's before the really good stuff even starts to happen.

Pictured: Good stuff

Raimi's is a world without rules. Things shift from shot to shot, the powers any of the possessed display vary from moment to moment, and whatever is happening in the current scene is sure to be completely divorced in context from the next, all to maximize the disorienting terror of trying to survive the night surrounded by unknowable evil.

The demons could easily kill Ash and devour him chilled with a side of rice, but they instead spend their time playing with him like cats with a particularly fat and delicious mouse. And that's exactly what Raimi does to his audience, poking and prodding us to see how far he can make us bend.

The Evil Dead is my favorite of the franchise for its no-holds-barred low budget mayhem, providing everything I've ever wanted a cult film to give to me. It's no Rosemary's Baby. Hell, it's no Devil's Due. But it revels in its lowly station and provided a jolt of life to horror, paving the way for cult favorites like Re-Animator and From Beyond and inspiring mainstream filmmakers to newer and greater heights.

By pushing the limits of the genre, this twisted little bugger changed it forever. And that was just the very beginning of a long career in filmmaking for one Mr. Raimi. Evil Dead is everything.

TL;DR: The Evil Dead is ecstatically gross, silly, and wonderful.

Rating: 10/10

Word Count: 1068

Reviews In This Series

The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1981)

Evil Dead 2 (Raimi, 1987)

Army of Darkness (Raimi, 1992)

Evil Dead (Alvarez, 2013)