Series: Evil Dead

Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a great horror film. Not an auspicious start to any review. Let’s take it one step further. Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a horror film at all. It’s a madcap comedy, avec zombies – but don’t expect Shaun of the Dead either. This third and (thus far) final film in the Evil Dead series is an amalgam of Three Stooges and Monty Python style comedy antics and groovy Harryhausen-esque special effects, all squeezed into an Evil Dead plot so thin it looks ready to rupture at any moment.(read more...)

Those ghastly deadites are back, and this time it’s comedy. From the creepy, ghost-train opening it’s hard to discern whether Evil Dead II is really a horror film or not. By the time Ash starts chasing his hand around with a shotgun, it’s pretty evident that the film owes a lot to both comedy and horror. Filmlore tells us that The Evil Dead was so over-the-top that many viewers thought it was a spoof. So when director Sam Raimi decided to make a sequel, it became more of a comedy remake of the original. This would explain Ash’s otherwise perplexing behaviour: returning to the house in which he had, one movie ago, almost been killed by things which were evil and, moreover, dead.(read more...)

It's 1982, and amongst the polished studio horror and the repetitive indie slashers, a tiny little film from an unknown director pops onto the scene. At first glance, it appears to be much of the same - it's populated with college students, a nubile woman with not enough clothing runs through the woods, and there's an intense-looking guy with an axe and a chainsaw.

Then again, the college students become the bad guys, the nubile woman was just raped by a tree, and the slightly insane fellow with the sharp instruments is the hero. The tiny little film is, of course, The Evil Dead, the unknown is Sam Raimi (Spider-man), and the experience is unlike anything anybody had seen before.(read more...)