Horror Movie Reviews: The Evil Dead

What can I say? The Evil Dead was and still is a classic horror film with a touch of comedy and what made this movie stand out for me was the fact that it had a lead character that was a man who did all the screaming instead of a woman which was kind of the set trend back in the late 70's and throughout the 80's. Bruce Campbell plays Ash a character that you don't think would be alive at the end, but he is after all the freaky stuff he has to go through.

This was Sam Raimi's first ever film and it didn't show, because it brought with it a sense of original and something that would add to the genre of horror that never came before. The story is classic and has been done to death ever since of a group of teenage college age friends all going on a holiday in the woods at an old cabin and the evil dead are awakened by an old video tape that they find in the cellar of someone transcribing the words from the book of the dead, the Necronomicon.

The movie is a roller coaster of a ride, even though Evil Dead 2 Dead By Dawn is considered the best as it had slightly more money poured into it, this one cost around $375,000 and was filmed for over a year, although it took a short film Within The Woods to actually get funding to make The Evil Dead and it incorporated some of the main Evil Dead elements, you can find a really blurry old version on the Internet on YouTube and it hasn't been released with any Evil Dead DVD's because of it's low and rather amateurish quality.

The Evil Dead was one of them films that inspired many films thereafter, including Demons which was another favourite of mine, an Italian movie about people getting infected and turning into demons. In key story progression areas of the movie there are some good solid attempts at stop motion animation which really are good, like at the end of the movie were the book of the dead is burned and the bodies of the dead start to decompose at a fast rate and these are just the beginning of classic movie moments in the film.

One such moment was when Cheryl, Ash's sister wanders away from the cabin and gets raped by a load of tree branches and later she gets possessed by a demon and this is when she gets thrown in the cellar, which mirrors a scene from the sequel in which Henrietta is buried down there after she became possessed by a demon after the dead was first resurrected and she awakens like a mad screaming old hag, which was ace!

Many fans of Evil Dead treat the first film as a sort of dress rehearsal for the second movie as both are similar in story and the way things play out, although at the end of Evil Dead 2 you never see that ending coming when you first watch it. But I guess with a larger budget spent on the second movie, you would build upon the success of the first movie by making it better.

In the UK, The Evil Dead was considered the first film to be classified as a video nasty by Mary Whitehouse, an almost vigilante film and TV auditor who would actually make things better for the horror films that she eventually got banned, because a lot of the movies went underground and became more sought after through word of mouth and people who have already seen the films would recommend them to their friends and so on, thus making films of this nature cult classics and become films to talk about many years after.

If you haven't seen the Original Evil Dead film, then shame on you, go and get a copy on DVD and watch it!!!