That fanboy vacuum which so often begins with “Well you’re not a real fan unless…” should be taken with an iceberg-sized grain of salt. But all things being equal, I’ve never understood why Evil Dead fans champion the series’ bookends and forget about the best entry in the trilogy, Evil Dead 2.
Sam Raimi’s 1981 original, The Evil Dead, seems to forever earn a place in Halloween movie marathons, while Army of Darkness gets all the midnight screenings, and both are certainly excellent in their own ways. Even 32 years later, The Evil Dead remains endearing through the collective effort it puts in its jump scares and demonic possessions, horror tropes that were hackneyed even back in 1981 but feel genuine inside a low-budget, team spirit-sized production. Likewise, Army of Darkness takes Evil Dead’s tired scares and rather than improve upon them, edifies the Cult of Campbell to new heights while hugging the cheesy one-liners close as it closes out the trilogy.
Army of Darkness is a grinning extension of star Bruce Campbell’s cinematic machismo, but you’re not likely to find much kinship with the original film. There’s little connective tissue beyond mentions of the Necronomicon Ex Mortis (the “Book of the Dead” for any non-Deadites out there), and because of its medieval re-focusing, Army of Darkness has always felt a tad out of place. In fact, it’s the criminally forgotten Evil Dead 2 that balances the camp while never straying too far from the horror — and it does so in brilliant fashion.
1987’s Evil Dead 2 was written by Raimi and producer Rob Tapert while on the set of Crimewave, and its iffy unofficial subtitle Dead by Dawn, much like Die Hard 2: Die Harder, betrays its existence as another half-sequel, half-rehash. The first ten minutes are more like a facelift than a continuation, improving many of the unfinished attempts by Raimi and Campbell in the original. Evil Dead 2 begins by canning a great deal of its predecessor’s underdeveloped plot, ditching Cheryl and Scotty altogether and centering its opening around a comi-tragic prologue: Linda’s romance with Ash and her subsequent decapitation with a shovel. If not an outright admission from Raimi that The Evil Dead’s strengths weren’t always in its script, it’s at least a tighter re-imagining that embraces the franchise’s mythology for what it is, an endlessly fun series of double standards, rubber masks and pig latin.
None of the rules really matter, short of making us squirm and often laugh at the same time, and Evil Dead 2 knows this. Why do holes in the cabin walls suddenly erupt in fire hoses of blood? How does Ash come back from spiritual possession when nobody else can? Lionsgate’s Evil Dead 2 cover inexplicably sports a grinning skull with human eyes, despite nothing of the sort showing up in the film. Even as a superfan, I couldn’t tell you what the hell a Candarian demon is, and I’m not sure Raimi could either. But to pick nits is to miss the point, because it’s the feeling that matters, baby. And so much of Evil Dead 2 feels so pure.
A lot of that is indebted to a significant budget hike, up from The Evil Dead’s $350,000 to a more accommodating $3 million. The rubber masks and bright green blood splatter are still here; they’re just no longer from a Halloween outlet store. Everything has more of a crunch this time around the toolshed, too. What makes the “Groovy chainsaw” so great — apart from Bruce Campbell’s triumphantly arched eyebrow — is the sound design: the creaking screw turns and the tightening of a leather harness. Ash’s sawed-off shotgun cuts the air like a whip as he spins it into its makeshift holster. Even the low gravel of his voice is affecting. In a film that culminates in a battle with a gigantic “Evil Head,” the sound design provides solid grounding and at least some semblance of reality.
Raimi also explores parts of The Evil Dead we did care about. Ash’s cheeseball grooviness and sex appeal are just shy of overload here, where women are first repulsed by his crassness and then swooning over his charm. The cabin itself gets some real personality, too. Mounted animal heads snicker as they roll eyes back in their sockets, and the furniture bobs and weaves to some inaudible stygian melody. Evil Dead 2 brings the demons but doesn’t check its personality at the door; even the dutch angles feel infinitely more “dutched,” especially in the days before Vince Gilligan was affixing cameras to the ends of anything he could lift with two hands. The Evil Dead’s tree rape scene looks ridiculous but is, admittedly, a terrifying thing to imagine. Evil Dead 2 tell us to forget the tree, because it’s bringing the whole damn forest.
Between the extremes of horror and comedy, Evil Dead 2 nails that all-too rare, all-too-Raimi balance. When Ash’s right hand takes on a life of its own, smashing dinner plates over his head and dragging him across the floor through sheer will of force and fingernails, Army of Darkness takes over. It’s only when Ash skewers his possessed hand to the floor with a knife that we realize where Evil Dead 2 first spawned from. Its horrific realization of body horror, as The Man Himself lops off his hand with a chainsaw, is tempered by his insane, blood-splattered laugh. When Ash traps his former appendage under a trash can, he weighs it down with a copy of A Farewell to Arms. Because of course he does.