Released theatrically on March 13th, 1987, Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn is the sequel to Sam Raimi's 1981 acclaimed horror film The Evil Dead. The first time I watched it was during its initial VHS release on Vestron Video, and subsequent years, even to this day, have shown the titles in the franchise to be some of the most released ever on home video, with fourteen unique listings on amazon.com for just dvds alone. Over the last two decades it has become a veritable cult classic among horror film buffs and zombie movie afficionados, often ranked among Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead as one of the most influential modern horror films of all time, and it currently holds a 98% fresh rating at rottentomatoes.com. With a budget of nearly four million dollars, ten times that of the first film, it would be stating the obvious to say that Raimi set the bar pretty high. Set almost entirely in a remote cabin in the woods, watching the film there is no doubt where all the money went. Zombie animations, severed arm animatronics, gallons of blood pumping and spewing, a swirling vortex in the sky, and trees that come to life cash in every last dime, where The Evil Dead was content to slowly build towards a climax that featured only one of those effects. But the budget isn't the only place the two films differ. Evil Dead 2 relies almost completely on comedy, relegating its horror aspects to over-the-top oogie boogie scares and shocks that are far too ridiculous to be gruesome. But that is its agenda. It establishes itself as a horror-comedy within the first few minutes and never once betrays itself throughout, pretty smooth sailing for those who are on board from the beginning.
Unfortunately I was not on board. The first film, The Evil Dead, has no such genre-crossing ambitions, preferring a straight-up horror approach, and I admired it for its simple economy. The quintessential cabin in the woods formula has been done to death, but it never gets old with horror fans, because within its sheer simplicity and budgetary restrictions is where the best directors are able to shine, and deliver something truly original and occasionally terrifying. When a bunch of friends get together in a remote cabin and get murdered one by one the script pretty much writes itself, which shifts emphasis to the visual style. Some directors would go for scares, but Sam Raimi makes it a forum to revisit his wealth of cinematic influences. The scene where Ash gives Linda the necklace, innocuous enough at the time, almost seems over-directed as Raimi cuts back and forth between close-ups of their eyes, like Hitchcock by way of De Palma, while the swelling score recalls Pino Donnagio. Over-directed, that is until the necklace becomes Sam Raimi's "Rosebud," the key prop at the film's emotional core, and the crosscutting a leitmotif that makes a return appearance towards the end. The Evil Dead may be full of zombies, but it is alive with the brio of a passionate, young, cinematic auteur. Evil Dead 2 trades in that singularity for pure spectacle.
Right at the start Evil Dead 2 announces itself as not just an ordinary sequel. In the first five minutes the entire first film is rehashed and condensed, a montage of crucial plot points minus three of the film's main characters. With this retroactive continuity adjustment the film avows that it is not beholden to anything previously seen or believed, allowing it the freedom to indulge in any flight of fancy it desires, but at the expense of audience investment and suspension of disbelief. It wants to establish its characters in a cabin in the woods, without really establishing anything, or any set of rules by which it would need to follow, including continuity. This means that anything goes, and Evil Dead 2 does not waste a moment. What the film amounts to is a series of vignettes, each based on some sort of battle with an evil spirit, whether with a severed hand, a tree, a zombie, or an inanimate object in the room, without any sense of building towards a conclusion, or building towards anything at all, until some random, last minute plot device involving the pages of the Necronomicon comes out of nowhere for the final push to the end. The entire first hour of scenes could be edited together in almost any order with no loss of story; and I would even venture a guess that some of them were, as Evil Dead 2 remains the worst offender of continuity errors involving blood I have ever seen. Sure part one had its share of disappearing bloodstains and splatter, but nothing like here, when a female character is literally doused in gallons of spraying blood, which she then crawls through, and then stands up, completely free of any stains. But unintentional laughs are far from the majority, as every scene is played for actual laughs, with Bruce Campbell overacting to the extreme as some sort of cross between Jim Carrey and Clint Eastwood. And yes, I know Jim Carrey was not a huge star in 1987, but in this case I feel I can speak retroactively. Carrey's Once Bitten pre-dated Evil Dead 2 by two years, but I did not see the similarities twenty-five years ago. Campbell's performance might have been fun then, but in the wake of others who have done it better, today it is just too much, unable to be a foil for all the crazy stuff that occurs in the film, because his acting is just an extension of it all.
Audiences today complain about Hollywood's penchant for throwing money at the story in its blockbusters in hopes that the visual aspects will outshine any flaws in the screenplay. I submit that Evil Dead 2 is no different, except perhaps for the fact that the effects are not even that great. Four million dollars was nowhere near enough money for what Raimi tried to do; zombie faces are sometimes completely different from one shot to the next.
There is no reason to watch this film outside of a curiosity for what could possibly follow the previous ridiculous scene, and yet somehow, by the time the credits roll, the film surprisingly still works in spite of itself. The last twenty minutes contain the forward momentum sorely missing from the first hour, and hint at just how great this film could have been had it just rearranged its priorities. Even though I wasn't invested in the film throughout, there is a consistency and certain courage of convictions that pays off during the final moments in its cliffhanger ending, a segue into what would ultimately be the third part of the trilogy, Army Of Darkness, the absolute worst of the three, which surrenders completely to comedy but is never once funny. Evil Dead 2 treats The Evil Dead as a mere prologue, but then it too becomes a prologue, pointing ahead to a real showdown once and for all between Ash and the evil spirits. The Evil Dead will always be the better film, the record of a new filmmaker hungry to show what he can do with a shoestring budget, while Evil Dead 2 is basically a visual inventory of its budget. Thankfully, throughout Raimi's career his films seem to have much more in common with the former than the latter.
EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN *** out of *****
THE EVIL DEAD **** out of *****
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