RETRO REVIEW: "Evil Dead II" — cult classic horror flick still brilliant at 35
“I’ll swallow your soul!”
Making a film that lives up to the tagline “the ultimate experience of gruelling terror” is certainly a tough act. What may be even more challenging is, once proven right, making a sequel that someone one-ups that self-claimed title. Fortunately, things worked out for director Sam Raimi when he approached making Evil Dead II (1987). One part sequel to and one part reboot of the original The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II remains a landmark achievement in horror filmmaking and is as delightful and inventive today as it was upon original release. Its indie-movie, low-budget sensibilities provide it with genuine energy that allows it to play so freely with tone and style. On the occasion of its 35th anniversary and subsequent anniversary screenings at local indie theatres, I thought I should revisit Raimi’s phenomenal cult classic and explore what makes it such a uniquely brilliant film.
Evil Dead II — also known as Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn in some of its marketing material — begins with a never-before-seen title card for the enigmatic “Rosebud Releasing Corporation,” the first signs of strangeness inherent to the film’s DNA. Rosebud was a fake company created by Evil Dead II’s true financer and distributor, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG), to allow the DEG to release the film without an MPAA rating. The DEG feared an “X” rating from the MPAA — a rating which a reporter from 1987 called the “kiss of death” — and instead opted to release it unrated. Running at a slim 84 minutes, the film keeps up a ferocious pace from the moment the demonic spells are uttered unleashing the evil to its twist ending.
The film properly opens with a re-shot SparkNotes-style retelling of the original film, albeit excluding three of the first film’s five characters. Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend, Linda (Denise Bixler), arrive at a secluded cabin in the woods for a romantic couples getaway. After about five minutes of peace and quiet, the two learn that the presumed abandoned cabin happens to belong to archeologist Dr. Knowbey and is further the current residence of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, the “book of the dead,” an ancient text with the power to summon a great evil. One thing leads to another and sections of the book’s text are read and the evil force is unleashed into the forest surrounding the cabin. Linda is taken and possessed by the evil turning her into a “deadite,” the series’ iconic monster species that is somewhere between a demon and a zombie. Ash eventually has to choose to kill Linda in the only way deadites can be killed: dismemberment.
 |
| Sarah Berry and Richard Domeier in Evil Dead II. Photo: Rosebud. |
Now, Evil Dead II’s most impressive feat might just be the one-man performance by Bruce Campbell that carries the bulk of the film’s first half. After Linda falls to the deadites and is eventually killed by a chainsaw, the nameless evil force, known simply as “the evil” within the film, has it out of Ash and it will do whatever it can to take his soul for itself. As a new night begins, Ash is left alone in the house of horrors taunted by his runaway hand and laughing moose head. Campbell’s performance teeters throughout the film on the precipice of self-assured badassery and total insanity. He laughs with Lovecraft-like madness as blood flows from the cabin’s walls while in the next moment delivering all manner of one-liners with the suave charm of an 80s action star.
Campbell delivers a fantastic physical performance as well, perhaps borrowed from the heavy influence Evil Dead II takes from the Three Stooges. Campbell’s best work here is in the scene in which Ash’s hand becomes possessed and sets out to kill the otherwise still-human Ash, resulting in Ash having to saw off his own hand. It leads to the brilliant bit in which Ash traps the demonic hand under a pale weighed down by a copy of Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Help finally comes for Ash in the form of Annie (Sarah Berry), Knowbey’s daughter and a formidable archeologist in her own right, and Ed Getley (Richard Domeier), her research partner, along with local couple Jake (Dan Hicks) and Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley). The four new members of the cast thankfully save Ash from having to fight off the neverending onslaught himself, but they don’t prove to be much help. Each member of the film’s short-lived ensemble is a welcome addition to the dynamic of the film, although the audience doesn't get much time with our new would-be heroes before they begin dying one by one. There’s a round of musical possession by “the evil” and a deadite old woman, the iconic Henrietta, in the cellar who transforms herself into a hideous long-necked monster.
 |
| Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead II. Photo: Rosebud. |
The animatronics and makeup work on display here are astounding throughout and makes for a fun trip back in time to the land of visual and special effects past. The transformed, soul-swallowing Henrietta might be the film’s most famous monster, and for good reason, but there are plenty of other incredible moments of design and puppeteering throughout. The special effects team, led by foreman Vern Hyde, gets a lot of time to shine with the pools of fake blood and ingenious practical creature effects. The physical manifestation of the Kandarian Demon is particularly remarkable with its strange design and entirely practical tree-like arm. The headless dancing corpse of Linda, Ash’s free-moving dismembered evil, and even the possessed versions of Ash and Ed are additional testaments to the prowess of the entire visual team.
Perhaps Evil Dead II’s best quality, of the many things that make it such a brilliant film, is that it takes joy in being a horror film. Evil Dead II has fun scaring you. Raimi uses that to his advantage here creating a film that tonally stands in contrast to much of its counterparts in the horror genre. Raimi gleefully blends tones to create a pool of madness and chaos as the film jumps from an iconic one-liner to a demented scare and back again, all the while making the audience empathize just a little too much with Ash’s maniacal breakdown part-way through the film. You can almost hear the filmmakers utter a twisted little laugh as Evil Dead II makes you go as frantically insane as its characters. The only way to survive the cabin in the woods is to find its sadistic sense of humour and go along for the ride. Maybe this cabin will make us go crazy, but at least will all go crazy together.
In the immortal words of Ash, Evil Dead II is a pretty “groovy” time overall.
Comments
Post a Comment