Blast from the Past Movie Review: Evil Dead II (1987)

For our podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we decided to watch the movie Evil Dead II, the second film in the Evil Dead series for of our usual horror-themed month of October. It's been a long time since I saw this one--I think I saw it in high school, as part of a Hollywood Video double feature with the original, in the late 1990s. I remember enjoying the film then, especially in comparison to the execrable original film with its gouts of oatmeal-gore. Considering how Starz is putting out a new television series called Ash vs. the Evil Dead, this was a rather appropriate time to do the movie...

How did it hold up? Well, here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda visit a seemingly abandoned cabin in the woods for a romantic weekend, but it turns out a professor of ancient history was using it as a site to translate an ancient evil book bound in human skin. Ash plays a recording of the incantation and unleashes all sorts of slapstick-undead horrors just as the professor's daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple locals show up completely coincidentally. All of them must now survived the murderous (and sometimes hilarious) horrors of the Deadites...

The Good

*The movie avoids the "a bunch of friends go to the cabin in the woods to smoke weed and have sex" cliche of 1980s horror films. Instead it's Ash and his girlfriend basically breaking into someone else's cabin for the weekend and then the actual owners (or at least their relatives) show up, not knowing the craziness Ash accidentally unleashed.

*Ash's first encounter with the undead is a mildly-effective "Jump Scare." Given how inured I am to most horror films, it's probably a lot scarier for most people.

*At times Ash is remarkably genre-savvy. He knows sticking around a haunted cabin where a scientist recited incantations from a book bound in human skin is a really bad idea and at first chance he gets the hell out of there. Or let me rephrase that--he tries.

*There's a fair bit of good slapstick humor in this one, including a lengthy sequence involving Ash's hand getting possessed. Who's laughing now indeed? :)

*Who knew the book A Farewell to Arms could be so amusing? You'll laugh when you see the context.

*I never really thought about what might happen if you soak a room's sole light source in blood...

*There's a nice bit of Reality Ensues when Ash starts blasting around with the shotgun. Sometimes you don't know where the shells will end up.

The Bad

*The first twenty or thirty minutes of the film really aren't that entertaining. To be blunt, a lot of the film just isn't entertaining, although there are certainly some good moments.

*Ash's first killing of a possessed character could be played for either horror (it's a brutal necessity that traumatizes him) or comedy (slapstick violence, hammy overreaction to the deed). It doesn't really work as either.

*The film's sense of time is wonky. It doesn't take long for Ash and Linda to get to the cabin from the Scary Ominous Bridge (TM), but Ash leaves the cabin the morning after they arrive and arrives there just in time for the sun to set?

*In the scene where Ash sees a character reanimated after having been possessed and killed, they've only been dead a day or two, if not just a few hours. It would have been better (and likely much cheaper) to have the original actor wearing zombie makeup reviving and misbehaving rather than having a mediocre claymation monster.

*For someone who starts out showing some intelligence, Ash displays some fairly stupid behavior at times, especially later in the film.

The Verdict

Not as funny as I remember and it hasn't aged very well. I wonder if the remake is more technically adept, although a friend of mine tells me it's really, really gory. Unless you really like 1980s horror, 1980s comedies, or combinations thereof, don't bother with this one. 5.0 out of 10.

Some More Thoughts on "Camelot"

The more I think about the trailer for Starz's upcoming new show "Camelot," which I included in my last blog entry, the more I think about how well-thought-out some of the stuff depicted in the story is.

Firstly, Arthur's speech about how he will rule for the sake of the people.  One could argue this is some anachronistic proto-democratic attitude intended to create a more sympathetic protagonist (realism be damned), but there is another part of the trailer depicting Morgan dismissing Arthur as being "from common clay" and not from royalty.

If Morgan, despite being a woman, has the support of much of the nobility, Arthur appealing to the common people of the land makes sense.  The Byzantine emperors tended to support the peasantry against the aristocracy to keep the aristocrats from threatening the monarchy, even though the Byzantine Empire was a divine-right dictatorship.

Secondly, Morgan is depicted as being publicly Christian, wearing lots of crosses on her clothes.  Although she was raised in the royal court and is probably more politically savvy and well-connected than Arthur, the fact that she is a woman in a patriarchal pre-modern society makes her position somewhat weaker than if she were a man.  Public religiosity would make her more popular, especially with the commoners, and strengthen her political position.

Thirdly, Morgan is also depicted as getting freaky with someone, although I don't know enough about the supporting cast to make a judgment as to who it is.  If it isn't Arthur himself (the whole incest-to-produce-Mordred aspect of the story), it might be one of her noble supporters.  Her position as a successor to Uther Pendragon would be strengthened if she had a powerful consort.

Starz's New Arthurian Drama: "Camelot"

The TV network Starz already (at least to me) capitalized on the success of HBO's Rome by releasing Spartacus: Blood and Sand and its upcoming prequel Gods of the Arena.

Now it seems they've got another entry into the "historical drama with lots of sex and violence" sub-genre with Camelot.

Here's the trailer:



This seems to take place in fantasyland Britain (think Excalibur or First Knight) and not historical post-Roman Britain (King Arthur).  I liked King Arthur and would like to see more historically-inclined Arthurian stories rather than Malory-esque fantasy, but that's no reason to prejudge this one.

From a casting perspective, it looks impressive--Morgan is played by Eva Green, who was Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.  Joseph Fiennes, who played The Bard himself in Shakespeare in Love, plays Merlin.

Arthur looks a bit young, although at least he's not 12 like he was in The Sword in the Stone.  Perhaps that is important to the plot--the trailer has some enemy of Arthur claiming that Merlin has installed "a child in a ruin" and Arthur's courtship of Guinevere seems like a major part of the storyline.

It looks like they've expanded Morgan's role--rather than making her some random witch who seduces her half-brother in order to bear his eventualy destroyer Mordred, she's a rival claimant to the Pendragon throne. 

I wonder how they'll manage to incorporate that aspect of the Arthurian story if the two of them end up at war with each other?  The trailer and some of the promotional material indicate Morgan attempts to use evil supernatural forces against Arthur and The Once and Future King does depict her seduction of Arthur as being facilitated by sorcery, so maybe she'll try that if open war doesn't work.

It premieres April 1.  I'm not going to get Starz just to be able to watch it on TV--if I want to shell out for any premium channel, it'll be HBO so I can watch their adaptation of A Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and True Blood all at once--but I'll certainly try to snag the DVD.