"Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn" (1987)

Evil Dead 2 is one of the most purely fun films. This is a film brimming with ideas, imagination, ambition and style to spare. By the time our ever faithful protagonist Ash lands himself back in medieval Europe we have gone through an exhausting amount of plot, furiously burned through with savage delight. That ending is unimaginable when initially Ash appears with his girlfriend in a beaten down old yellow sports car. But writer-director Sam Raimi and co-writer Scott Spiegel go for broke testing out every last weird, interesting and wonderful idea they can come up with. Evil Dead 2 isn't so much a story so much as it's a series of stolen moments. The first third especially is fragmentary moments that only loosely connect to one another. Let me foolhardily attempt to describe it briefly: Ash arrives at the abandoned cabin, his girlfriend is taken over by evil spirits, beheaded and buried, Ash is possessed, saved by the break of daylight, drives away only to find the bridge home destroyed, chased by spirits, and goes raving mad, his possessed girlfriend rises from the grave and he kills her with a chainsaw, and finally he fends off his turned-demonic hand. Mind you that the film is only an hour and twenty-four minutes long, but it moves along with a measured clip and packs so many inventive and fun things into that brief time. The film is ostensibly a sequel to the original Evil Dead and in another sense a remake. The film borrows the basic horror premise of the original but it only uses it as a jumping off point. Evil Dead 2 diverges tremendously from its predecessor; make no mistake: Evil Dead 2 is not a horror movie. It's a comedy. For much of its runtime, it's essentially a one man show for Bruce Campbell. Campbell is a huge part of the film's appeal. He does some fantastic Three Stooges slapstick. But it's also in the expressions and microemotions that Campbell conveys that really sell the film. There are moments that are so funny and endearing merely because the chiseled face of Campbell pauses to give a goofy grin or shoot off a one-liner. Then there's the glorious amounts of blood spewed out from the walls and evil spirits; it's so over-the-top and so clearly not real blood that its excesses become hilarious. The special effects are some excellent designs. Some superb low-budget technical craftsmanship is on display; a homage to old B-horror movies and Ray Harryhausen.

Grade: A-