Still great

If there’s a more fun horror movie than “Evil Dead 2”, I haven't heard about it. This is a movie where a director’s true imagination trumps big money at every turn and then proves that’s more than enough.

It would be a low budget follow-up for Sam Raimi and actor Bruce Campbell, who in the first film demonstrated such a gleeful love for all-out gore combined with “Three Stooges” slapstick. Their sequel is better, more assured of its comic genius and the direction they want to take this franchise.

Campbell has called this a combination recap and sequel. He and Raimi were weirdly not allowed rights to their first movie and so they wound up spending the first part of this film recapping the first, with obvious tweaks.

This has Ash (Campbell) and his girlfriend heading to the Michigan cabin alone together. A tape translating the Latin book of evil is soon played which leads to her possession, eventual decapitation, and Ash being attacked by evil himself, which is where the first film left off.

It’s safe to say evil is nowhere near subdued just yet though which is all the better because Raimi has so much fun with it. A wild claymation scene where the girlfriend comes out of the ground and does a little ballet dance with her severed head is such a terrific way to foreshadow what’s the come.

This movie is madness. Ash ends up fighting his own possessed hand, at one point a mounted deer head and several other objects come to life with maniacal giggling, a monsoon of blood sprays from the walls, heads are chopped off but never really dead.

The monsters themselves are cheaply made (all masks and body suits) but grotesque and snarly and they are just as tricky and creepy when they revert back to manipulative human form.
So many claim that it’s hard to take the movie seriously but I think its greatest attribute is it has balance. It's able to to be so cartoonish in terms of what it throws at the hero but even in the way the girlfriend dances in the moonlight, or another character is swallowed by vines, it puts us on edge and then gives us a sight gag so cruel that it’s all clearly being orchestrated by a master manipulator in Raimi.

And Campbell is about as underrated a comic performer as they come. Coming up in the same era as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson, he should have had a career just like theirs. He’s believable in action hero mode, is a more than capable wise-ass, and his reactions to what goes on around him are classic physical comedy.

“Evil Dead 2” is essentially the movie that made this a franchise. It hones the first one a little bit, gives us all the entertainment we can handle, and then leads us into “Army of Darkness”, which finally got the budget behind it that these films deserve.