Silver Screen Resolution, Take Two: The Evil Dead

The Evil Dead

For my 2018 Resolution Project, I decided to take a page out of Lane’s book and do my own Silver Screen Resolution (hence the Take Two part of the title). There are a lot of movies out there I haven’t seen but feel like I should have, or movies that I’ve simply wanted to see and have yet to get around to it. With a deadline of some kind, now I’ll have to finally make a point to find them, get them, and watch them. My rules for the resolution are slightly different in that:

1. They must be spec-fic (this has not changed).
2. The movie will not be one that is in theaters or that would be part of a Sound Off!
3. They don’t have to be popular – or even something folks have heard about.

But I’ve decided to take my resolution to the next level as well, since I had more than 12 movies on my list that I wanted to see. And since we’re in “Take Two” mode, I might as well up the ante: I will instead be seeing two spec fic movies per month rather than just one. It’s October, so you know what that means — Halloween and scary movies! This month, both films feature a group of friends visiting cabins with horrible consequences. Starting things off is the quintessential cult classic, The Evil Dead.

Boy am I going to disappoint some people.

Spoilers abound below!

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Before I go into detail, I’d like to point out that I had no idea what to expect from this movie. All I ever knew of this particular universe was from Army of Darkness and Ash vs. the Evil Dead (which I haven’t even watched all of). I knew the general concept, but I didn’t know what kind of movie it would be. Straight horror? Comedic? I knew a lot of people loved it and lauded it as something special in the world of horror, so I feel like I can’t be blamed for expecting a lot. Instead, I was left feeling bored and kind of hollow.

The plot is basic enough: five friends (Ash, Linda, Scott, Shelly, and Cheryl) go out to a cabin for a nice time in the woods. However, something evil is lurking in the forest, and when Scott plays a recording of the previous tenant reciting an ancient demon-calling chant, the evil is finally able to party. And not in a good way. Our main hero is Ash (which I never realized was short for Ashley), played by the one and only Bruce Campbell, but he doesn’t exactly have it easy. Especially since the end of the movie and the simple fact that a second film exists after this one (and a third) shows that poor Ash isn’t out of the woods yet. And yes, I totally made that joke.

Look, I’m going to say that right now all my problems with this movie are because I’m in 2018 looking back on a film from 1981 with horror films like The Ring and Silent Hill under my belt. I’m not a horror aficionado — far from it — but I’m going to notice certain things, and those things are going to drive me nuts.

For one, I don’t care in any way about these people. It doesn’t help that there is zero character development, I didn’t know anyone’s names for half the movie, and they make some of the dumbest, most clichéd horror movie mistakes in existence. Hear something spooky outside? Let’s go investigate it! In the dark. In a bathrobe. And walk really far from the cabin. And shout “Hello?” into the woods like a moron. Or let’s walk away from an area, prompting friends to yell the name of the person and they never respond in order to make things tense, which it doesn’t, because the other person is just stupid and/or an asshole and isn’t responding on purpose or for literally no reason at all. I can’t tell you how many times I sat there talking to the screen.

“Are you really going to….?”
“Why would you….?”
“What moron would do that?”
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?”

And of course, there was also this moment:

“Did….did that tree just rape her?”

Yes. Yes, it did.

*sigh*

I’ve seen my share of atrocious B and even less than B-movies (trust me, if you’ve seen Rooster Teeth’s Theater Mode series, then you’d know). And for whatever reason, a bare breast has to make it in there. Or some rape. Why this is, I don’t know, but it sucks and it’s garbage. I guess because it’s “shocking,” but seriously, it’s just weird and uncomfortable. Yeah, demons are evil and blah, blah, blah, I get it. But for a moment they made it look like she was enjoying it and you know what? I’m done. Let’s move on.

The only time anyone does anything with immediate sense is when Cheryl demands that Ash take her away from the cabin. Even though everyone is acting like she’s just had a bad dream or something despite being covered in cuts and bruises (and, you know, being raped by a goddamn tree branch), and Scott is being an asshole. She is unrelenting and — color me absolutely shocked — Ash does. Or at least tries to until, surprise, surprise, they reach the bridge, which is destroyed. It’s also kind of funny that the bridge being trashed is the only thing stopping anyone from leaving. Normal people with any kind of sense would shout, “Fuck this place!” and ford the not-even-all-that-wide river, climb up the other side, and continue on down the road until reaching civilization. Would that save you? Hard to say. But I sure as hell am not letting an old rickety bridge stop me.

The dumb decisions didn’t stop throughout most of the movie. At one point Ash chains up his possessed girlfriend Linda after she’s incapacitated from being stabbed and braces himself to dismember her. But he can’t bring himself to do it and instead opts to bury her. Despite having recently seen Shelly stabbed in the exact same fashion and still come back to life — why he ignored this fact is beyond me. Or attempting to make sure all the cabin doors are closed — even though several windows have already been broken. You’re not stopping anything, dude. Cheryl leaves the cabin through a side door in the wall but tries to go back in the front door, which is locked. By the way — what was the point of that weird skull knife Shelly and Linda got skewered with anyway? It looked like a special type of knife that was made to kill demons…but then nothing ever comes of it. So why the heck did it even exist?

I just got annoyed after a while because it was clear everyone was going to die, nothing was actually scary, and everyone was stupid.

At this point you might be wondering whether there’s anything positive I can say about this movie. There are a few things at least.

I appreciate the acting on the part of the women when they were in official possessed deadite mode. Linda sitting on the floor giggling like a demonic Joker girl was a nice touch. I also read up later on the kind of production the movie had, and kudos to everyone enduring the crap living space, garbage eye lenses for their makeup, lack of medical support, and other things. The effort put into the film to make it work is impressive, from Sam Raimi himself running through the woods in order to get the low-to-the-ground, first-person view style of the evil as it moved through the woods to the ass busting he did to get the film seen by as many audiences as possible. I’m glad it got to be as popular as it did because so many people do love it, I like Bruce Campbell, and I enjoy Army of Darkness, which wouldn’t exist without it. Likewise, without Raimi’s rise in the world of Hollywood, we never would have gotten Spider-Man, though while some people complain about today, I saw it three times because it was the first good superhero movie to come out in a very long time and which I believe is the one that kicked off the world of Marvel that we currently get to play in today.

I have no comment on the gore — not because I dislike it or am grossed out by it, but because for me it’s nothing new. Remember, I have already seen plenty of things that can never be unseen. So the gore, while new and shocking and, as Stephen King said when he first saw it and which is used on the back of the Blu-ray today, “ferociously original,” is nothing I haven’t already experienced in some fashion in a variety of movies and even video games. However, I will say that the grotesque clawed hands that exploded out of Scott and Cheryl were unexpected and a nice, twisted touch. And extra points are always given to anyone willing to go the distance with stop-motion animation. It didn’t add anything for me, but I can recognize the hard work that goes into it.

At the end of it all? Was it scary? No. Was I impressed? Only in certain respects. Was I grossed out? No. Can I appreciate it for what it’s done for the horror genre, among other things? Yes. I didn’t hate this film, but I wasn’t blown away by it either. Maybe I’ll get hate for not loving such a famous cult classic, but that’s what’s going to happen when you put a 1981 low-budget B-movie in front of a 2018 woman who saw Aliens, The Predator, and Terminator when she was 10.

Image credit IMDB.com.