Evil Dead
Featuring: Bruce Campbell, some evil trees
Directed by: Sam Raimi
The setup is classic now. Perhaps it is even trite. A bunch of college kids go to have fun in a house in the middle of nowhere just to be slaughtered by dark supernatural forces. Evil Dead is, in nearly every way, the granddaddy and master of the genre.
The normalcy of the vacationers does take its toll. Two of the three female characters at times feel mundane to the point of being lifeless. The insanity escalates quickly to severe and reaches outlandish territory by the climax. This is not a movie for the squeamish.
At the end of the day, however, Evil Dead is a wonderful and imaginative film worth viewing at least once. Even if you intensely dislike it, Evil Dead will give you just cause to thoroughly skewer the current crop of horror movies about kids in a deep rural retreats.
Weighted Score: 8/10. Evil Dead is remembered not just because of its popular sequels and not just because it was at the forefront of this genre. Evil Dead is a great movie made by talented people trying to get their starts in the industry.
Whatever they did after, they put their best into this one.
Other Thoughts:
- Evil Dead 2 is my favorite of the series. Regrettably, I do not own Evil Dead 2 on DVD. Sorry. There will be no Evil Dead 2 review.
- Army of Darkness was, in my opinion, a farce of a horror movie. Along with Scream, this movie set a standard for a decade of terrible horror-comedies. The one redeeming quality is that the filmmakers refused to call it “Evil Dead 3.” This is why there was no Army of Darkness review.
- This movie felt a lot of extra love in Michigan during my impressionable teenage years, seeing as there are many connections between the movie, the filmmakers and the state. There is even a nod to Vernor’s Ginger Ale in the credits of Evil Dead II. Urban legends ran wild among local horror fanatics and film buffs.
I am currently attempting to review every horror dvd I own in alphabetical order. As we leave the letter E, regrettably without Evil Dead 2, we also come into two back-to-back disks directed by one of my favorite figures in modern horror. Watch out — next up is the Fair Haired Child.
