The Evil Dead (1981) Review

 

This is one of the many great works from Sam Raimi (also did “Darkman” (1990) and “Spider-Man” (2002)), and stars Bruce Campbell.

This movie starts out with Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his friends are off to spend some time in an out of the way cabin out in the woods. While they are out in the woods, they discover down in the cellar a few interesting things the last occupant must have left behind, a shotgun, a tape recorder, a weird knife, and a book that is bound with human flesh and inked in human blood. This book is the Necronomicon (aka. The Book of the Dead). The guys decide for fun to listen to the recorder, where some guy who lived in the cabin before had recorded himself reading the book, these word however have awakened something out in the woods and now it is after Ash and his friends.

This movie is amazingly awful, and I mean this word by word. As in, the movie is amazing and awful all at the same time. When you watch this movie, if you took out all of the dialogue and just had the visuals and the soundtracks and all of the mood sounds, like the over-emphasized creaking of a door opening, and latch being latched, and the dripping of water from a leaky pipe. On the other hand, the story is utterly ridiculous and taken way too seriously, Sam truly tried way too hard for this film to make it into a super-stereo-typical horror film. While I watched this movie I kept saying to myself that Bruce must really be great friends with Raimi for him to allow him to make him have to do some of the things he did in this movie, being splattered some blood-like concoction every 10 seconds in his face, being stabbed, grabbed, and scrapped by some zombie. But truly if you take this movie for cinematic genius it is directorially great, but overall pretty okay and pretty damn good if you take it less serious.

IMDB says 7.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 100%
I say 8.0/10

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