As in all my movie reviews, beware of spoilers. If you haven’t invested some of your own precious time to see the damn flick, go do so now, form your own opinion, and then come back here to read the truth. That having been said, I don’t generally disclose the major turning points unless they’re so poorly done as to be worthy of a good slam.

And onto… “Evil Dead”. Good score, I have to admit. On nearly all other counts this movie was a dismal wreck. Okay, let’s back up. I first saw this movie back in college in the mid-80s. I remember really liking it because I’d never seen an outright sick gore-fest before. Maybe a few of those really bad quality old school zombie flicks, but nothing this well done. Well done? Well, time has not treated Evil Dead kindly, to say the least. The effects are excusable of course because they didn’t have a budget and SP/FX back then I suppose weren’t as easy to come by pre-WWW? I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt. But the heart of a film is the script, the style, the acting, the story, and the directing. This film fails miserably on all accounts. The acting is terrible, but that’s excusable given the cast is a bunch of punks. The directing for the majority of the film is listless and predictable (more on that later). The script is just plain dumb. They do every trick in the lame horror genre book. Like splitting up when investigating a disturbance, or even keeping some of the characters sleeping while a loud massacre ensues in the next room. One of the first “victims” who is more spooked early on than anyone decides to go out in the dark cold woods to find out who was lurking about who she “knows was in the cellar”, and although she’s shrieking a few yards from a rickety cabin no one hears her being raped by ferns and lilies and various untimbered woodland hill denizens. I’ll bet she’s all for saving the rain forest after this little ordeal. Not! Of course the bridge is out so they have to stay in the cabin for the night, although heaven forbid they stay together and work things out. Instead they each go off in different directions, some to actually sleep.Later Bruce Campbell’s character Ashley is thrown against a flimsy bookshelf that instantly collapses, yet he is trapped under the cheap faux particle board for quite a spell. Even the director Sam Raimi mentions in the director commentary on the DVD that that scene was pretty lame. Speaking of which, the commentary with Raimi and producer Robert Tapert is limpid, dull and tedious. What was interesting was their disclosure that they took 6 months to shoot this waste of celluloid. I would have thought it was one of those quick studies, which would at least explain some of the wreckage.

On the positive side, finally something strange happened. The movie runs 85 minutes. At the 72 minute mark, almost to a frame, suddenly everything turned topsy-turvy. It was a different movie. And for the better. The sound track, which was fairly good throughout, grew even better. The camera ventured off into wonderful experimental angles, some straight down over the head stuff; really unnerving and different, and, oh, actually interesting! At this point it’s all Bruce Campbell, in that he’s the only non-possessed life form, humanoid, vegetable, or otherwise, within a three state radius. His facial expressions save the movie. Well, save is a strong word. But he does do a great job. Lastly right at the end there were some claymation sequences which were fun. Corny, quite literally, but fun.

As a historical landmark in the fairly annoying early years of modern American horror cinema I can see why some people might give this a nod. But I find the people that swear by this film carry the conviction of a Holy Crusader – you can’t enlighten them to the fact that it’s a load of bile. They’re lost sheep. They’ve taken the leap of faith right off the precipice. I’ll stick with bad gore b-movies that are truly hilarious, Peter Jackson’s early work like “Dead Alive”, and the classics like George A. Romero's “Night of the Living Dead”. Evil Dead is a phenomenal waste of time. That is, once you’ve graduated from middle school.

Bad Man's Rating: 2 out of 10

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