EVIL DEAD 2 (1987)

HOLY CRAP. How many times is Sam Raimi gonna remake the same story? EVIL DEAD gets remade as the first part of this movie, and this movie gets remade as the first part of ARMY OF DARKNESS. This might be the best version out of all three. It’s way more gory than EVIL DEAD *or* AOD, and still manages to be as wacky and funny as AOD. If not more. There’s a scene where Ash (Bruce Campbell, who is so totally “Bruce Campbell” by this movie) fights off his own hand that had me peeing myself laughing. (Not literally!) As Ash would say, “Groovy!”

EVIL DEAD (1981)

Man, this is vicious. I’d only seen ARMY OF DARKNESS before this, and so I was expecting a kinda goofy comedy horror thing, but this is something else. It’s basically the first few minutes of AOD told movie-length, and it’s a nail-biting experience. A bunch of kids are spending a weekend (I think) in a cabin, find a tape recorder there, and play what’s on it. Turns out the previous tenants were an archaeologist and his wife who had found “the Book of the Dead” and were translating it. In doing so, they conjured up an ancient evil. But he’d read the translation on the tape recorder, so when the kids play it back…

 
The acting is about what you’d expect from a bunch of first-timers (even Bruce Campbell hasn’t become “Bruce Campbell” yet), but it’s the direction that grabs you. It’s a non-stop rollercoaster of zooming cameras, sharp edits, and pools of gore. Horror movies don’t get much more fun than this.