EVIL DEAD II And the Art of Doubling Down

The balance of risk versus reward is a wildly volatile one to even out when it comes to doing a sequel.

Creating a successful artistic follow-up requires the ability to fully and fairly evaluate the work you are trying to follow up on, and then determine possible ways to improve upon it. The task becomes exponentially harder when the work you’re evaluating is your own. It requires an incredible amount of honesty and vulnerability, assuming you’re actually in the position to be able to call a plurality of the shots on the follow-up project at all.

What things really worked the first time around? What things did you wish you had possessed the knowledge or experience to do? What did you want to avoid? Most of all, how can you provide your audience what they want without just redoing the same things you did the first time?

As discussed last week, THE EVIL DEAD was a perfectly functional, gnarly little stand-alone feature all on its own that managed to stand out mostly for its willing audacity to be gross and off-putting, but through the prism of a cartoon. Sam Raimi was able to make a name for himself off that independent feature, and then moved on from the property for about half a decade. He promptly got to work on his next feature, CRIMEWAVE, which he wrote with another up-and-coming pair, the Coen brothers. The movie ultimately didn’t go the way he wanted, a result of an overly ambitious tone and constant interference from a demanding studio. CRIMEWAVE has since fallen into relative obscurity.

However, it seemed to have strengthened the bond between Raimi and his previous leading man, Bruce Campbell, who was barred from being the lead of this film after being forced to screen-test for the part. As the hands of fate would have it, this shared lack of artistic catharsis brought the two back together with the property that worked so well for them the first time: THE EVIL DEAD. Raimi decided to make good on an offer that producer Irvin Shapiro had made upon the first installment’s release, and got to work on a sequel treatment. The road to EVIL DEAD II had officially been paved.

Here’s the thing about the original EVIL DEAD: the surprise of it all had already been established. Although it would constitute an understandable route, it wouldn’t truly be enough to just throw red goop all over the camera and the actors again and call it a day. There would need to be new surprises in store.

So where to go from here?

From my observation, EVIL DEAD 2 is kind of known as “the good one” amongst the film aficionados in my friend circles. ARMY OF DARKNESS is probably the most well-known of the three, possibly because its name is extremely metal, as well as because it sounds like a stand-alone film (it seems like many people may have initially seen it not knowing it was the third installment to a franchise). But the middle entry of the original EVIL DEAD trilogy, pound for pound,seems to have the most praise heaped on it. Therefore, I had a lot of expectations for this thing going into it.

I’m happy to report it lived up to the hype! It’s a clear improvement over the already pretty good original, and it does it with a particular secret sauce: it infuses the bloody horror with a legitimate comedic sensibility that was already sitting around the fringes of the original.

In short, it trades in some of its blood in exchange for belly laughs. And it rocks!

EVIL DEAD 2 (1987)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley

Written by: Raimi, Scott Spiegel

Released: March 13, 1987

Length: 84 minutes

To kick things off, it should be noted that I have an affinity for movie trilogies where the main character winds up dealing with three films worth of inciting actions, character arcs and denouments over an insanely compressed timeline. For instance, everything that happens to Marty McFly in the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy appears to take place over the span of like four nights or something (that’s an estimation; please don’t make me research this). No more significant time jumps between movies in your trilogies, people! Just let your characters go through the worst weekend ever!

Here, EVIL DEAD and EVIL DEAD 2 seems to take place over no more than two nights, constituting quite the weekend for Ash Williams (Campbell). To my immense surprise, given how the first movie ended, EVIL DEAD 2 picks up immediately where the first one leaves off. Well, maybe not exactly. In one of the little quirks that define this series, the opening five or so minutes is actually more of a streamlined remake/recap of the original film (the reason for this apparently being that Raimi and co didn’t have the rights to the first movie, eliminating the possibility of just using old footage to serve as a recap. Ah, the biz!).

In EVIL DEAD 2’s retelling of the original events at the cabin in the woods, it jettisons pretty much every character from the narrative except Ash and his girlfriend Linda (here played by Denise Bixler). But otherwise, it’s all there; the getaway to a cabin in the woods, the playing of the audio cassette, the evil forces, the decapitation of Linda and, of course, that infamous and chilling moment (and tracking shot!) at the end where Ash seemingly gets possessed himself.

It’s at this moment that EVIL DEAD 2 truly begins. It’s also at this moment that it begins to separate itself from the original by striking an immediately different tone. It turns out that Ash isn’t getting possessed per se, so much as merely being thrown through the forest by the evil demon spirits that roam the cabin.

I knew EVIL DEAD 2 was going to be different when Ash starts zooming past the trees, his body spinning around the camera like a member of the Looney Tunes.

To be clear, the movie doesn’t skimp out of the bloody carnage that the original had; there are at least two moments that rival Johnny Depp’s death in the first NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET for “most outlandish use of Red Dye 40”. But there’s this gleeful sense of humor that cuts through the guts of it all that I think makes this follow-up more palatable to the average person than the first one.

Part of that off-beat sense of fun comes from the movie’s use of stop-motion animation. Stop-motion and EVIL DEAD are almost as synonymous in the popular consciousness as Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, but I had completely forgotten that it was an aspect of these until the first one appeared. That first one, of course, is the resurrected corpse of Linda, which promptly starts dancing around like she lives in Halloweentown. It’s a whiplash-inducing moment coming off of EVIL DEAD 1. In that first film, the possessed start looking really decomposed and gushy, and they emit loud, nasty noises. Here, they look like clay people and they start dancing. We’re in different territory here!

Another stark difference: that opening third of the movie! For a significant amount of time, I thought that EVIL DEAD 2 was going to be a Bruce Campbell one man show. The film is short enough, all of the material is strong enough and, most importantly, Bruce Campbell is game enough that it probably could have worked if they had decided to commit to the direction of “Ash vs. Demons”. It’s unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I envy those who got to see it for the first time in its proper setting (i.e. a teenager renting it blind, going over to their friend’s house, and then just popping it in, joint in hand).

Of course, the movie does eventually kick into another gear. They slowly work in an initially adjacent plot line, as we watch Annie (Berry) make her way to the cabin, which turns out to have been previously occupied by her father, archeologist Raymond Knowby, the source of the voice on the inciting audio cassette. In tow is her research partner, Ed Getley (Richard Domeier) and two others they pick up along the way: repairman Jake (Dan Hicks) and girlfriend Bobby Joe (Wesley).

Once the foursome join Ash, the movie starts resembling the first one in structure. In fact, it nearly threatens to repeat the infamous “tree scene”, although it rounds off its own edges before it gets too rough (a sign of Raimi’s budding maturity at the time?). But, otherwise, it plays out in a way you might expect. Background is provided on the ancient spirits, characters are picked off one by one, blood is sprayed everywhere, and Chekov’s Chainsaw eventually gets to pay off in a glorious way.

So yeah, EVIL DEAD 2 is a supremely satisfying watch, presuming you’re into this kind of thing at all (I’m guessing you haven’t read this far if you aren’t). Like its predecessor, it’s a tight, efficient little thing, clocking in at just about 85 minutes or so. There’s a nice escalation in scale with the monsters; the “final boss” is particularly cool looking and seemed to evoke some of the gnarlier effects in John Carpenter’s THE THING.

Best of all, EVIL DEAD 2 led me to a mini-revelation. This is because it allowed me to finally, truly understand the Bruce Campbell thing.

It took me until EVIL DEAD 2 to really “get” Campbell’s appeal. I never disliked him, but people seem to REALLY love him, and most of the roles I had actually seen him in were playing off of that initial appeal and reputation. And, look, I like that people like stuff. But for a long while, I worried that he was just this cultural inside joke that I had failed to get the context for (I had to be there).

And here he is, covered in blood, eyes bugged out, practically bouncing off the walls of this cabin, yelling and screaming at claymation creatures and cutting off his own damn possessed arm (I FINALLY get why his cameo in DOCTOR STRANGE 2 was so joyful to so many). It’s an over-the-top segment, and it’s played and presented in an equally over-the-top way. But it’s also weirdly justified internally. If we presume the action in EVIL DEAD 2 to be really happening (which can sometimes be a good barometer to judge subsequent performances), how else would you act if you were Ash?

Watching actors just kind of “go for it” can sometimes be an uncomfortable experience; to pull a few examples from this here blog, I’ve never really warmed to Jack Nicholson’s performance in THE SHINING, and I thought Robert DeNiro was completely out of control in the 1991 CAPE FEAR remake. But Campbell never really feels not in control in EVIL DEAD 2. His off-the-wall performance fits the situation, establishes the tone that Raimi is trying to go for and, most importantly, makes for a totally unique movie-going experience.

It also helps that this aspect of Ash subsides as new characters are introduced. He doesn’t convert to a one-liner-spewing action hero by the end, but he does get these weird lines that feel like entire moments. For instance, there’s nothing to him saying, “groovy” on the page, but in the context of the film, it’s practically applause-worthy (it helps that “groovy” has kind of burrowed its way into film culture as a result of this movie).

On a final note, I even loved the ending, which might read to audiences of today as blatant sequel fodder, and I’m well aware that is where ARMY OF DARKNESS picks up. But in the context of just EVIL DEAD 2, it’s the movie’s final dark joke. The almost thrown away setup of “The Man in The Sky” that we get halfway through pays off so beautifully by the man being (surprise!) Ash himself, now thrown back into the 1300’s, that it frankly would have worked just as perfectly if these were the last frames of the EVIL DEAD franchise.

But, as we know now, this aren’t the last frames of this particular IP. It would take another half-a-decade but Ash Williams’ cinematic story would be extended one more time. Speaking of the 1300’s…

Coming Halloween night: ARMY OF DARKNESS!