Evil Dead 2 Review

EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN (1987)
By Chris Ward

Often (falsely) considered as a remake of the first movie, ‘Evil Dead 2’ is one of those rare things in the movie world – a sequel that is often lauded more than the original. Coming along in 1987, about five years after the first, this movie is very much a product of it’s time, and, alongside other genre favourites ‘Re-Animator’ and ‘The Return of the Living Dead’ is one of the very few examples of successfully blending horror and comedy to great effect. As the eighties is generally considered to be the decade of the ‘horror comedy’, many of these movies tend to date very quickly, so can ‘Evil Dead 2’ still hold up to today’s scrutiny?

Well, yes – sort of. A quick story run-down before the nit-picking…Ash (Bruce Campbell), the sole survivor of the first movie, is still stuck in the cabin high up in the Tennessee woods. After a brief recap of events in the first movie (re-shot due to ownership issues of the original film), we are shown Ash flying through the trees, having been hit by the invisible force that roams the woods. After realising that he is becoming a victim of the demonic forces, Ash retreats back to the cabin where he is subjected to torments and hauntings by the unseen demons. After an attack by the headless body of his girlfriend and a descent into madness involving a mirror, Ash’s hand becomes possessed so, as anybody would, Ash uses the trustee chainsaw to rid himself of his uncontrollable body parts. On top of all that madness, Annie, the daughter of the man who owns the cabin (whose tape-recorded voice conjures up the demons from the woods) is on her way with the missing pages from the ‘Book of the Dead’ and looking for her parents.

Sound mad enough for you? Madness is a good word to describe this movie, as there is a real underlying sense of hysteria running throughout. Where the first movie had a ghoulish sense of black humour underneath it’s exploitation tendencies, this one goes for all out belly laughs. The slapstick comedy on offer is obviously inspired by The Three Stooges, especially the scenes with Ash fighting with himself for control of his own body, and the quickfire camera angle changes add to the sense of delirium. Bruce Campbell gives probably his defining performance here, as Ash becomes a more conventional movie hero, his one-liners delivered with the obnoxiousness that has become Campbell’s trademark and a physical performance that would exhaust Jim Carrey.

There is also a more defined sense of style with this movie. Director Sam Raimi purposely injected more humour into this movie, an attempt to steer away from the controversy generated by the first movie, although there is plenty of gore on offer. The scenes of Ash chopping off his own hand with his chainsaw (onto a copy of Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ – geddit?), along with the dismemberment of Annie’s resurrected mother’s corpse, provide plenty of multicoloured moments, whilst Campbell’s suffering for his art reaches new heights with the amount of blood that is thrown his way. Whilst not an all-out spoof, there are plenty of references to other movies – Ash’s transformation into one-handed action hero neatly parodies Rambo, his severed hand crawling scrabbling around and going for his throat echoes ‘Attack of the Helping Hand’ and is also reminiscent of ‘The Addams Family’, whilst Freddy Krueger’s glove from ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ is clearly visible in the tool shed (an ongoing joke with director Wes Craven, who used footage from ‘The Evil Dead’ in that movie), and, of course, the already mentioned Three Stooges slapstick. The ending also seems to nod in the direction of ‘The Wizard of Oz’! This isn’t to say that ‘Evil Dead 2’ lacks any originality. Raimi knows his audience and provides these references as a homage to the movies that inspired him, all the time knowing that the core fans will lap it up and that it will go over the heads of mainstream cinema audiences.

Although the movie succeeds on a fan appreciation level, mainly due to Bruce Campbell’s performance and, again, the fast and fluid direction of Sam Raimi, the movie’s bigger budget also meant that some of the low-level charm of the original was lost. In an attempt to obtain a more lenient rating, a lot of the blood and gore was, for want of a better term, ‘watered down’ and mixed into various colours, adding to the comedy feel, as does the animation during the opening credits. Another criticism is that, at times, there just doesn’t seem to be much of a real plot. Just a series of gore/comedy scenes stuck together because they look good. It’s credit to Sam Raimi’s direction style that everything moves fast and the pacing rarely seems to lapse, it’s just that amongst the relentless blood-soakings, amputations and one-liners, a little bit more thought to plot progression would have been nice. That said, the ending leads nicely into ‘Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness’.

And that’s really what this movie is all about. A fun segue from the gritty blackness of the first movie to the humourous actionfest that is the third installment. The movie does hold up over twenty years later, especially when paired with it’s more streamlined sequel. Yes it’s over the top, yes its nonsense, and yes it has more than its fair share of production and editing errors, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Too much scrutiny of this movie does it a disservice, and even though fans of some of today’s more ‘intelligent’ horror movies may wish to deride this type of movie, put in the context of when it came out, and the amount of competition it had, it still stands up as one of the best of its era.