I’ve already gone over my personal history with the Evil Dead movies in my
Evil Dead: the Musical review, so I think I’ll stick more to the technical aspects of the flicks here and let my personal biases and anecdotes drift to the wayside for now and focus instead on the ultimate experience in grueling terror, okay? Glad you agree.
It’s your typical horror story: five friends (who have apparently never watched a horror movie in their misbegotten lives) go out to the middle of nowhere for some quality away time. Not content with the usual college kid debauchery like staying at a hotel or going to a massive kegger/beer bash/stein hoist, the quintet opt instead to stay at this rundown little cabin that they have on good authority as being unoccupied at this particular time of year. That, and I know that any time I’m looking to spend a nice relaxing weekend with my girlfriend, nothing says “privacy” like being stuck in a rundown cabin with other people…
After settling into the place (and narrowly escaping an early roadside death that would have really shortened the movie), these nosey young lads and lassies find a few items of interest in the cabin’s fruit cellar: an old school reel-to-reel and a book that looks (and likely smells) like the previous owner bound it in beef jerky. Playing the tape recording reveals that the book is actually an ancient tome of bad juju known as “Necronomicon Ex Mortis” (or “The Book of the Dead” for those of you who slept through your Lovecraft linguistics courses) and it’s chock full of handy-dandy demon summoning, ghoul raising incantations for the would-be necromancer in your home! The kids aren’t down with ancient Sumerian, but that won’t deter this recipe for mirth and mayhem, because included in the “Introduction to Your Necronomicon Ex Mortis” instructional tape is a track on proper Sumerian spell chanting and pronunciation! Yep, the professor to whom this cabin and black magic artifacts belongs to apparently translated some of the book’s text and has read it aloud and put it to tape. Of course, when these words are replayed via the recorder, it’s the beginning to a very painful end for all involved… well, except for Bruce Campbell, cuz he’s the hero and the hero’s gotta live!
Not only did The Evil Dead become a launching point for a number of promising genre personalities and talents, but it’s actually a really good movie! Sure, the story wasn't the most creative nor the dialogue anything special, so if epic storytelling is your thing then you might hobble away from this one disappointed. Despite the lack of budget and the unbelievable bullshit these people had to wade through in the making of this movie (as chronicled in the now classic “If Chins Could Kill” and as repeated by the cast at conventions and panel discussions), the final product is one face rocker of a feature. The makeup and gore effects were beautiful (the stop-motion decay sequences and giant monster puppet hands of exploding torso doom are personal favorites), the direction and cinematography are both creative and amazingly done, and the actors perfectly portray the pathos, terror, brutality, hopelessness and eventual madness of their situation without missing a beat. I gush over a movie’s cast about as much as I admit to any organized religion making a convincing argument on the origin of the human race, but I think everybody here has this shining light of ass kicking power inside them and it only took the tortures of Sam Raimi and the unforgiving weather of a late Tennessee autumn to rip it kicking and screaming out of all of them. Kudos boys and girls, I’m sorry the experience left you all so emotionally and mentally scarred for life.
Maybe Sam will give you all cameos in Spider-Man 5…
