You're goin' down. Chainsaw. (Movie Only) (Evil Dead 2 (DVD))

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Evil Dead 2 (DVD)
Date:	04/05/07 (229 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brilliantly made horror flick.

Disadvantages: Low budget means less than impressive sfx at times

With the third movie in the Spiderman franchise now on general release in the UK, fans of the director, Sam Raimi, may choose to wind the clock back and reflect on his earlier directorial days when he was cutting his teeth on low budget, horror exploitation movies like those in the seminal Evil Dead franchise. Having directed the watershed “Evil Dead” released in 1981, the sequel - “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn” - remains as popular today as it ever it was and provides an insight into the creativity of a man now widely accepted as a innovator in his field. Evil Dead II was released in1987, directed by Sam Raimi and written by Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel.

Ashley Williams (Bruce Campbell) heads out to a cabin in the woods for a romantic weekend with his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bickler). Stumbling upon a tape recording of old archaeology professor Knowby, Ash plays a recorded incantation that unleashes an evil force. The recording is of passages from the Necronomicon or Book of the Dead and is a mechanism to set free evil spirits. Following Linda’s possession by a rather nasty entity, Ash beheads his girlfriend only to be subjected to a torrent of terror by both her possessed body and a malicious head. Not only that but an invisible force in the woods and some particularly frightful types in the cellar also get in on the act, terrorizing poor Ash. With our hero struggling to fend of the mischievous but deadly harpies, the professor’s daughter returns to the cabin together with her research partner, Ed, and after eventually realizing that Ash isn’t the villain of the piece, the group battle the forces of darkness in an desperate attempt to avoid being dead by dawn.

The single biggest difference between the first movie and the Dead by Dawn sequel is the humour running throughout the second movie. Largely inspired by the involvement of Ed Spiegel, the movie never takes itself too seriously and Campbell’s decent into madness is underlined by his camp, over-the-top theatrics that makes the film so unique in its end product. Having established himself as Ash in the first movie, Campbell goes to town in Dead By Dawn riding a gamut of emotions, usually wide-eyed and often borderline crazy. With some iconic scenes that have forever framed the Ashley Campbell character in a perpetual computer-game sponsored Hall of Fame, Ash dramatically clamps his possessed girlfriend’s head in a vice ready to mete out its fate with a chainsaw, dismembers his own hand and ultimately equips himself in a make-shift body harness to insert the chainsaw in place of his missing hand and carry a sawn-off shotgun in the other. Images subsequently worth millions in the world of PC gaming. Raimi’s direction is the other big reason to celebrate. With a roller coaster ride of different camera angles and an imagination that takes the movie onto a different level, there are so many scenes that stand out. Take a bloody-faced Ash laughing maniacally as a stag’s head, a lamp and a rocking chair build into a crescendo of hysterics, Ash crawling along a glass-strewn floor to stop his possessed hand from reaching a meat cleaver and a shoot out between Ash and a giggling mouse-like rogue hand taunting the main character from the safety through a mouse hole and the other side of a plastered wall and you have a rogue’s gallery of insanely inspired scenes.

Where the movie suffers is in some of the special effects used. A scene shot where Ash is driving a car across a bridge spanning a ravine is very obviously a model and the stop motion animation featured at times is pretty clunky. Quite how Ash’s dismembered hand manages to squeak when it hasn’t got a mouth is anyone’s guess and the walls gushing red blood looks for all the world like the colored water which it probably was. With so many sequences relying on a plethora of various effect types then it was always going to be a challenge making them all seamless and, in this respect, the movie looks the low budget movie it clearly was. None of the rest of the cast really get a look in beyond Campbell’s amazingly over-the-top performance and the typecast Hillbillies that provide the trail route for Knowby’s daughter and male friend to get to the cabin are distinctly understated and fairly unconvincing. Notwithstanding, many of the special effects are legendary and Raimi’s camera mounted on rails together with a disturbing, onrushing sound affect, pushed by hand to create the effect of the invisible entity closing in on the cabin is the stuff of movie folklore. The controversial tree-rape scene from the first movie gives way to a sinisterly active haunted forest that closes in on the cabin as the movie reaches its conclusion, providing the setting for the closing reels and the film’s climax.

The script is choc full of cheesy one-liners endearing the muscle-bound lead to an army of fans and leading to a third film that leads directly on from the second. Typical of the dialogue is Ash looking into a mirror after another lunatic sequence of events. As he stares at his reflection Ash utters “I'm fine... I'm fine“ only for the Ash in the mirror to jump out, grab his alter ego and reply “ I don't think so. We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw. Does that sound "fine"? At one point as Ash is preparing to separate from his hand, a pile of books fall onto the floor with the top book flying open to reveal its title - “A Farewell to Arms” - and it’s in-jokes like that that infiltrate the final movie on a much bigger scale.

I’ve seen the Evil Dead 2 movie numerous times now and always enjoy it for it’s black humour, innovative special effects and for Bruce Campbell’s amazing one-man show. Whilst very much an 18-certificate and a run time of 85 minutes, "Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn" is generally more accessible than it’s predecessor and more viable than the third movie, "Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness". Sam Raimi engendered a whole new dimension to horror/fantasy flicks that still resonates today. For horror aficionados it’s a classic movie in every sense; for first time viewers then it’s a must-see and a movie that you will probably never forget!

Thanks for the read

Mara

More info at: http://www.deadites.net/
DVD available from Amazon from £5.97

Summary: Overview of Evil Dead 2