Before we begin unpacking this horror classic, an anecdote.
I read a lot. It has become an obsession, a strange badge of honour, and a somewhat humorous main characteristic and cornerstone of my image to friends and family. I was once asked how I became so well-read. There was the usual reasons: my mum’s bookcase, movies I loved being adaptations, an uncommonly brilliant library in my home town (use your libraries, people), and, of course, there was also the intellectual need to show off as a pretentious teenager.
Then there was Evil Dead 2. Because of a very silly pun joke involving Ash Williams severed hand, a bucket and a pile of books that happened to have Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms on top, I immediately read it. So, even in the blood, bile, and laughing stag heads of this horror comedy tour-de-force, some high culture is on offer, too. The irony is that I would watch Evil Dead 2 every day for the rest of my life and only grab a Hemingway book if one of my own limbs was attacking me, if I had to choose.
Anyway. Evil Dead 2 is a brilliant film surrounded by confusion. After the failure of Sam Raimi’s Crimewave (co-written by the Coen brothers and nuked by the studio), the young director, with the help of Stephen King, decided to have another crack at his cabin in the woods story.
Is Evil Dead 2 a sequel or a remake? Well, it’s sort of both. While there is a prologue that introduces the Book of the Dead, there are some aspects of the story that rely on familiarity with the original. This is mostly to do with set pieces since, due to Raimi selling the rights to Evil Dead, the recap of events featured in the first ten minutes are a miniature version of the first film if it only featured Ash and his girlfriend Linda. No little sister, no other couple, just the end of the first film resolved with Ash becoming possessed then unpossessed when the sun rises. Dead by Dawn is explained as both a threat and a time limit for the Deadites.
Everything about Evil Dead 2 is bigger and gnarlier than the first film. Thanks to an actual budget, Raimi has the toolkit to build more elaborate set pieces, soak the cast in oceans of goo, and use that camera to stand in for the Deadite spirits like never before. The visual energy of this film is second to none, but without a compelling character to build it around, it would be just an exercise in formal control. Enter Bruce Campbell.
Is there any main character who has had such a consistently bad time across a movie franchise than Ash Williams? I can hear all the Ripley fans in the gallery but she went back to fight the Xenomorphs in Aliens. Ash has no such choice. In comparison to the first film, in which he has to either kill or nearly be killed by everyone he loves while ultimately losing in the end, the Ash of Evil Dead 2 might have it a bit easier, but not by much. Linda is dispatched relatively quickly, thanks to an inspired chainsaw fight between Ash and her headless body. From here, until the cannon fodder shows up with some lost pages of the Necronomicon de la morta, we get about forty minutes of the Bruce Campbell show.
Campbell’s strength as performer is defined in his role as Ash. While in the first film Ash was of a more sensitive disposition, Evil Dead 2’s version is closer to what the cultural version of Ash would become; something that reaches fruition in Army of Darkness. He’s a little macho in an old-fashioned matinee star kind of way, but that is no match for the horrors to come. Never have felt so bad for a character in a horror movie while also laughing my ass off at what they are being put through. And that’s all down to Campbell who, for half the film, has to fight his own hand while his sanity slowly ebbs away.
That balance of old-school leading man and contemporary splatter sensibilities is balanced perfectly in his performance, and it’s right that he’s become as iconic as he has in the role – one of the only horror heroes to earn such a following, with villains usually getting most of the focus. He’s a hoot from start to finish, and only slightly disappointing when the other characters show up at the cabin, though this does cement the theme of Ash, though he is the de-facto hero of proceedings, being seen as dangerous or ridiculous by people (except for Pablo) new to the situation.
Evil Dead 2 has a good claim to be the best in the franchise, but to be fair, all the others could make that claim too. What it does do is establish Evil Dead as the most off the wall and creative horror series that, if anything, is going to get even weirder. Join me next time, as we follow Ash and that cursed yellow car through the portal to battle the Army of Darkness.
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via IMDB)
No But Listen 