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Evil Dead 2
(***1/2)
What Raimi touched on in Evil Dead he has perfected here. This is a film which truly lives up to the quote "The Mother of all sequels" (Bruce Campbell).
While Evil Dead had some truly legitimate scares, it needed some touching up in other areas. Evil Dead 2 has in its grasp a perverse glee; splatstick has matured. There are very few movies that can invoke a laugh as easily as here, when Ashe says "groovy."
The story is sort of a remake, and sort of a sequel. It was intended as a straight sequel; to start where the cliffhanger of Evil Dead left it. However, the sets were gone and most of the cast was unavailable. So Raimi took Campbell and started from scratch. The difference is, the sequel only glances at the first night, and instead concentrates mostly on the next evening.
After seeing his girlfriend Linda taken by a demon, Ashe (Campbell) pretty much goes insane. He had to bury her, and the next night he watches. He watches her get up. He watches her dance. And then he watches her bite his hand. What follows is the most bizarre send-up on comedy I have ever seen, with Ashe's hand fighting the man, and eventually an insane Ashe lops off the hand at the wrist.
Meanwhile, Dr. Nobi's daughter is coming up, aided by some local bumpkins. The demons in the forest closed off the road, and they're going up by a trail. When they get to the cabin, they see blood everywhere and assume Ashe has killed her parents. Of course he hasn't; and this gives way to a freakish witch type demon.
As with Evil Dead, there isn't much to be said about it besides the horror and the comedy. There's a lot of blood, gore, and icky creepy demons. But Raimi (and especially Campbell) are having a lot of fun throwing blood all over. Gravity be damned, they wanna see blood flowing up.
Therein, of course, lies the strength of Evil Dead 2. It's missing from the first one in a sense. It's the comedy of it all. Sure, it's scary and there's lots of blood and death. But it's so macabre; it's so twisted. But all that dark gloomy stuff is given a sort of madcap "3 Stooges" feel. Imagine a man fighting with his hand, then hacking it off with a chainsaw? You can almost hear the stooges blooper going throughout it all, and Campbell's face as he's laughing at the hand is priceless.
It's extremely straight forward, and that's the power of it as well. There are no twists and turns. The humor is present, but it shares the stage with the horror; the mistake of letting comedy take precedence was made in the third Evil Dead movie, titled "Army of Darkness." But who doesn't want to laugh, especially at things as screw-loose as this?