THE EVIL DEAD
If they called it "The Maladjusted Dead", nobody would come
When I first saw this movie, it scared the crap out of me, which was unfortunate for my shorts. It wasn't until I actually arrived in alt.horror in 1995 that I found out that so much of it was intended as comedy and/or cheese. Also, at the time, that whole "could you dismember your girlfriend if she was possessed by a demon?" angle held some resonance for me, since I believe I was dating my first girlfriend and as such was nicely suckered into that "this is gonna last foreeeeeever" bullshit we all con ourselves into the first time out. These days, I'm much less the starry-eyed romantic I once was, and find myself damn near hollering out "Goddam it, Ash, chop that bitch up!"
Could future viewings of the film possibly remain untainted? Alas, no. Luckily, it remains a killer movie, and hard not to delight in.
Bruce Campbell of course stars as the immortal (well, figuratively) Ash - a young partygoer who zips off to a remote cabin in the Tennessee woods with his girlfriend, another couple, and one single chick. (no, neither of the guys get hot threesome action. Get yer mind out of the gutter.) They find in the basement a recording which recites an ancient Sumerian chant, raising the demons which live in the woods (and which later advises them that the only way to deal with the demon-possessed is bodily dismemberment). The rest pretty much writes itself.
Writer/director Sam Raimi was obviously eager to impress here, trying to make his movie just about everything except forgettable. His camera swoops up and down, over and under, over the hills and through...ah, you know what I mean. With a meager budget of about fifty thousand bucks, the man has crafted a fun, fast-paced, amusing, atmospheric, extremely gory and occasionally frightening little wonder of cinema.
The cast does their minimal duty (except for Hal Delrich playing Scott, he's annoying) to step aside for Raimi, Campbell and the effects; it?s their show all the way. Campbell doesn't quite ham it up to a degree that he does in the two sequels, but the Ash that we all know and love is definitely there; he's just more of a demon-victim than a demon-fighter.
The gore takes just about every form you could imagine: blood-gore, slime-gore, stop-motion gore, creature gore, human gore - ah, the good ol' days when people could get away with just not even submitting their films for an MPAA rating. His direction is fluid and energetic; one wonders how it took so long (8 years) for him to get a comparatively big-budget job [Darkman].
The demons themselves aren't really anything special - there's something we never get to see (it's probably invisible, even though that poor girl has the good sense to run away from it) that knocks down trees and doors in its path as it just kinda roves inexorably all over the place. Other demons are just possessed cast members sporting monster makeup. And what's with the demons chanting "Join us!" so much that you half-expect them to jump into a rousing rendition of "Hell Awaits"?
There are lots of shots of the moon being blotted out, for some reason (you'd think that this wouldn't have to happen three times, and that the demons could pull it off in one try), and that tape recorder has those icky old-style earbud headphones. Sorry, I just find them distasteful, far moreso than Ash having his girlfriend's headless body fall on him, or a chick getting raped by a tree.
There has been some speculation that Ellen Sandweiss, the actress who plays Cheryl, is really Ellen Barkin before a substantial nosejob. While this sure sounds like a good story (if you were Barkin, would you really want one of your first acting credits to be "chick raped by tree"?), I just don't think that's the case (and indeed, since writing this, I've been told otherwise by someone who sounded quite sure about it). Sandweiss lacks Barkin's distinctly frog-like, so-far-apart-they're-almost-on-the-sides-of-her-head eyes.
Barkin/Sandweiss identity complexes aside, I'd enthusiastically recommend The Evil Dead - really, I think I might even like this a shade more than (the almost universally favored) part 2; it just seems a little more fresh, less like a retread. Watch it, and bring your grandparents, if you want to heart-attack them into an early inheritance for you, you sick bastard.