Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Sam Raimi directed some timeless classic horror films a long time ago. However, this is not one of them, as today I’m talking about Drag Me to Hell. Touted as a return to the Evil Dead type of horror/comedy Raimi did with Army of Darkness in particular, this mostly just comes off as a sad attempt to be hip by a middle-aged guy who long since lost the spirit and hunger to make something this pulp and silly.

Director: Sam Raimi

Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long

IMDb

(Review co-written with Michelle and Kevin.)

This supposedly wacky horror comedy got popular back when it came out in 2009, with a lot of people touting it as a return to form for the horror genre. Me, I always thought it was really lame myself, with weak jokes and no good characters or atmosphere to latch onto. Seeing as it's been five years now and people mostly don't talk about this film anymore like they did when it came out, I think that's proof once again that I am right about everything.

We kick off the idiocy with a little Spanish kid getting taken by the devil. I guess the devil saw his future and tapped him as a Fantasy Football player, wanting to get a hold of him early before God could.

Apparently Hell has a lot of golden lights emanating from it. Sort of like a really expensive Hollywood movie premier event. On second thought I guess those things aren't that different.

Also, I love how shallow the Earth really is – apparently hell is just right below the surface of the Earth. Whodathunkit? We could’ve discovered this digging into the ground for oil or something even! What were we wasting our time with all these theology and religious-based debates for? The answer was, quite literally, right beneath our feet.

But enough about that. It’s time for bank politics! Main character Christine, played by Alison Lohman, is vying for the assistant manager position at her bank. Only problem is, she’s surrounded by assholes like her boss and the sycophantic idiot who’s also in the running for the position. Because this movie is a piece of shit with no clever writing whatsoever, of course everyone is a total dick to Christine with no redeeming factors. Her boss and the other guy order her to go out and get them sandwiches, then bitching when she doesn’t get the right ones. What a bunch of douchebags.

"Heh heh...we devour goodness and purity like starving cannibals."

Her boyfriend’s mom, who she overhears on the phone, says she isn’t good enough for her son because she can’t advance his social status or career at all. What the fuck is this, the fucking 1950s? Who talks like that in what’s supposed to be 2009? It's not like she's a fuckin' cashier at Walmart! She's a loan officer at a bank!

Oh yeah, look at how lowly she is compared to him. She only works at a bank, has her own house, can support herself financially and has something to eat every day. Truly this is the low class of American society!

Yes, I know some people probably do have parents this pushy and asshole-ish. However, the way the movie does it is totally one-sided and lacking in humanity or depth. We don’t know the characters – Christine, her boyfriend or his mom – well enough, so it just comes off like shitty writing where the writers didn’t know how to create real drama. Don’t know how to create a compelling conflict or a real dramatic scenario? Just have everyone be assholes to one another! Easy fix!

While it would be hilarious if the entire movie after the opening was just bank drama without anything related to dragging people to hell, we do have to get on with the main plot. This old caricature of what gypsy women look like (seriously; one eye, wrinkled face, hooded head, shawl around her neck, ratty old robes, the whole package) comes in and asks for an extension on her mortgage payment, saying she can’t work because of an eye infection. Apparently she’s already had two extensions and Christine doesn’t seem to think it will help her promotion if she grants another one. The movie treats this like Christine has done something awful that deserves punishment – really, why though? Because some old lady can’t pay for her house and denies all the other options available to her?

Yeah, seriously – Christine tries to help the old lady find other options, like staying with her daughter or at an assisted living home. But the old lady refuses all of those options, gets on her knees and shouts and begs to her, and then says Christine has shamed her.

Uh, pretty sure SHE didn’t make YOU get on your knees and start screaming in the middle of the bank, you psychopath! If that’s not enough, she then breaks free of the security guards’ grasp and tries to strangle Christine. That usually works to make loan officers finally change their minds and help you. Why didn’t it work this time?!

Outside in the parking garage, Christine gets jump-scared by a blanket that apparently has the power of thunder in it:

Jump scared by a little piece of cloth - I think this is a new low for wimpiness in horror movie main characters.

Then she sees the old lady in the back of her car, because I guess gypsies now know how to pick locks and, even more implausibly, know exactly which car belongs to the person they are looking for. Seriously, how did she know which car was Christine's anyway? I guess the movie's theory is that gypsies are actually psychic ninjas.

What follows is a trademark of the film – an overly long, unfunny fight scene trying too hard to be silly. I can’t tell which is true – either the old lady really has a lot of fight in her, to go on this long, or Christine is just weak sauce all the way down to her bone marrow. I’m going with the second one, just because I hate Christine so much.

The old lady eventually stops and decides fighting is for the low commonfolk – instead, she takes Christine’s button from her coat and curses it. Man, I hate when that happens. The old ‘bank lady wouldn’t do what I wanted, so I cursed her to eternity burning in Hell’ scenario. Just one of life’s most unpleasant situations!

"I....HAVE...THE POWER!"

Christine and her boyfriend, played by Justin Long, go to see a psychic – the first random asshole they find on the nearest strip mall. He turns out to be a wacky fat guy who charges them $60 to go back and listen to him recite some dialogue from the South Park episode about John Edwards. “I see you’ve recently lost something” … no shit, Sherlock!

"Right this way to getting ripped off! Not by my fraudulent psychic-ness which we never actually see evidence of, but by the cliche and underwhelming writing."

I also love how Justin Long does nothing but bitch about the cost of the psychic reading, and then they finally go back to do it, and all he does is try and debunk the psychic, debating his faith – seriously, just shut up, you fucking idiot. You paid for the psychic to read her, so let him do it and get it over with! This is yet another example of the shitty writing this movie tries to pass off for something resembling character development. Maybe if you squint. "This almost looks like character development … no, no, wait; it’s actually just complete goddamned annoying hack-work. My bad. I guess they're kinda interchangeable in modern horror films."

This psychic guy pretty much serves as the movie’s exposition fairy. He comes back several times throughout this thing to wave his magic wand and sprinkle exposition on us like glitter at a five-year-old’s birthday party – and I say that because the movie treats us like five-year-olds. The story is pretty banal – so this demon, Lamia, wants to drag her to Hell because she was cursed by the gypsy. However, if she can give the cursed button to someone else, she can pass the curse on and the Lamia will take them instead! I guess the Lamia really just isn’t too discerning. Hypothetically, the gypsies could curse a serial killer and have him dragged to hell for his crimes, but he could just make some poor innocent person take the object he was cursed with, and he’d be scot free. What a gyp!

... Heh heh heh. That joke is enough to make me worthy of going to hell.

All we get after this are a bunch of tired scenes where Christine thinks she sees something in the shadows, which eventually comes out and jump-scares her. That’s pretty much all the “scary” material this movie has – loud jump scares. It’s the horror equivalent to eating at fucking McDonalds four times a week – no substance and bad for you. I don’t think this movie will make you physically fat, but it won’t do your mental processes any wonders – it’s mind junk food. Although I don't think eating the DVD of this movie would be nutritious either.

When you think about it – if this demon is going to spend all this time scaring Christine in dumb ways, WHY NOT JUST TAKE HER TO HELL RIGHT NOW? What the fuck’s the difference?!

This girl can't even handle little pieces of cloth; how will she fare against pots and pans?!

Maybe the Master Hand from Super Smash Bros. is just doing Bunny Ears over this shadow's head...

Oh, but I guess the jump scares are supposed to be funny, so it’s OK that they make no sense, set no atmosphere and have no point. But again – funny! Even if they are about as funny as a hernia. If you think the Looney Tunes would be funnier if they mixed in elements of Happy Tree Friends, or if you think that annoying guy with Down’s on the city bus who spends a 40-minute ride poking you in the arm with his dirty fingers is hilarious, you’ll maybe find some of these scenes funny. But I really don’t.

You want an example? How about the scene where Christine goes to seek out the gypsy for help and finds that she’s dead – but then somehow, through some truly Herculean slapstick antics, the gypsy ends up rolled on top of Christine and vomiting in her mouth:

Or in the garage, when the ghost of gypsy lady appears, shoves her fist down Christine’s throat and then explodes her eyeballs and everything all over Christine’s face:

You really aren't even trying anymore, are you?

This just isn’t funny – I know there are people out there who will disagree, and that there are many, many different senses of humor. I know all that, but this just isn’t funny. But if you want something that is funny, how about Christine murdering her own cat when the psychic guy tells her she can sacrifice an animal to stop the demon from dragging her into hell? So that’s what she does!

New camera style: murdered cat vision! I foresee this having a lot of opportunities for use in future movies!

Cat murder is hilarious! If you're a complete psychopath I guess. It’s not like it even works, anyway – maybe burying it outside was what Christine got wrong. Oh well. You're a cat murderer now! How do you feel about that, Christine?

I thought so.

We get a dinner scene with Justin Long’s parents, who look down on Christine because they think she’s a bank teller – Justin Long actually has to tell them she’s a loan officer. Wow. So they looked down on her for something that wasn’t true and even went through the trouble of goading Justin to break up with her to enhance his social circle. What a bunch of idiotic wastes of air these people are.

"When I'm not judging people incorrectly, I'm voting in elections without knowing most anything about the other candidate or my own!"
"...Mom, you're the worst!"

At least things start to turn around when Christine says her mother is an alcoholic – prompting Justin Long’s mom to say she can relate because her own mother was also an alcoholic. You know, ‘cause working in a bank is just something to be ashamed of, but alcoholic moms - you know, a clear sign of the low class behavior this character stated she didn't want around her son earlier - are A-OK. That totally makes sense with what we know of the mom's character, right?

Oh no, the audience is thinking too much about the phoned-in writing! THROW IN SOME MORE GORE AND COMEDY ATTEMPTS!

This actually isn't the demon's work at all; Christine's home-made cake just had eyes mixed into it FOR REAL!

Complete with Christine throwing a glass at the door and screaming at the demon to go away, thus looking crazy in front of her boyfriend’s parents. Voila – no one will be able to take any of this seriously now, and thus no one will criticize the obviously awful parts of it! Our work here is done, gentlemen.

Next we get a scene where they finally try to get rid of the demon hunting Christine. Fat Indian psychic guy appears again to wave his wand and make exposition fall from the sky: apparently they can transfer the demon into a goat and then kill it to make all of this stop. Gee, if it was that easy, why didn’t you do it before? Oh well – I guess they called in this old Spanish woman who was related to that kid who got snatched in the beginning. She acts as the ‘medium’ to get the ball rolling. The only problem is, she sucks at it.

"BE GONE, YE INFERNAL DEMONS!"
"Uh...so, are the demons gone now?"
"What demons? I was just auditioning for a Broadway production of The Exorcist! I'm not actually an exorcist at all!"
"....dammit."
And then they all died because the demon killed them!

That’s right – she sucks ass at this job. Why? Because the demon pretty much immediately possesses her. Apparently it transfers bodies if they touch one another – which is really just convenient to make a bunch of silly jokes where it goes into the goat and starts talking, then into some other guy and starts doing a dance … it’s really just goofy slapstick. I guess there are worse parts of this movie though.

It's the new vocalist for The Mountain Goats!

Wow. Talk about a movie going down in flames - literally.

The medium lady dies afterward, and I’d sorta feel bad, if it wasn’t her own incompetence that made this happen – seriously, she’s the lowest-rent exorcist I’ve ever seen! Somebody send her back to the unemployment line. At least in other crappy exorcism scenes they at least get it right!

Then psychic guy tells Christine she can transfer the button to a dead person, which means she can go dig up the gypsy lady’s grave and give the button back. I’m just glad it only took a dead medium before the psychic told Christine about this much easier idea!

Before doing that, she does sit alone in a diner and ponders who to give the button to. At first she thinks about giving it to some old guy with an oxygen machine, because hey, he’s gonna die anyway! What’s the difference whether he BURNS IN HELL FOREVER or not? This character is awful – who can really empathize with her? Apparently because his wife comes over, she changes her mind. Great – that’s sort of like planning to kill someone but then stopping because you like the color of their hair. While it’s good you didn’t kill anyone, your reasoning is not necessarily something deserving of praise.

She also tries to blackmail the Asian guy from the bank to give the button to him. It turns out he’s actually been betraying the bank by giving their clients to a rival bank for months now. That would actually be a good reason to send him to hell, but I guess Christine has an attack of conscience again and doesn't do it – oh how pesky that conscience is.

So then it’s grave-diggin’ time!

It's also 'cater to mud wrestling fetishists' time.

So that’s what she does – she digs up gypsy lady’s grave on a night where rain is falling like a leaky faucet with no plumbers in sight, and attempts to give back the button. The movie can’t just let this be a short scene though – no, we need even more scenes of dumb slapstick with the dead gypsy lady in the flooded grave. Jesus, this is annoying. She just won’t die. If all dead people put up THIS MUCH of a fight, I doubt we’d have funerals at all; we’d just adopt cremation as the official practice.

You really can't even fight off a fucking corpse? Is the dead body in a grave really your equal match in terms of fighting skills?

Yes, kill her, kill her, KILL HER.
...I don't have a problem. I swear!

After that, Christine thinks it’s all over. She goes to a train station to meet Justin Long and go away on vacation. Seeing a new blue coat in a store window, she asks the store clerk to buy it even though the store isn’t open yet. Even though it would be totally OK for the store clerk to refuse her, somehow spoiled brat Christine gets her way:

"If you don't give me that coat even before your store opens, I will whine and cry like an annoying Hellspawn. And trust me, you don't want that fate!"

And this is the final straw for the Lamia, who decides bullying shop owners at train stations is just too much. So he drags her down to hell!

Was that what she really looked like under the blush and eyeshadow? Man, modern medicine can do wonders.

Actually this is because Christine never gave the button away after all – it was actually one of Justin Long’s coins from his coin collection sealed in an identical envelope. Because I guess checking whether you’re giving the right thing is too much work, especially when it’s just your mortal soul on the line! Fuck it, she deserves to go to hell.

"NO! I lost four previous girlfriends this exact same way!!!"

This whole movie was weak. Overall I’ve seen worse, and there’s nothing here that struck me as absolutely god-awful, but it’s still not good either. It’s more annoying than either funny or scary; there are really only a few jokes that get a chuckle here and there. Raimi seems to have lost his touch for these sorts of films. He aims for comedy and hits ‘sloppy’ instead. The characters aren’t good, and the story is boring at best and filled with holes at worst. There’s no real atmosphere set here, and the jump scares are all incredibly cheap and phoned in. I mean, come on, she gets jump-scared by a little piece of cloth. That's horse shit so rancid you can smell it from space.

You could argue that that’s the point – the film is supposed to be bad – but once again that is a cop-out argument, and really just a transparent shield for hack artists to make substandard work. Just because something is supposed to be bad doesn’t shield it from criticism, and it doesn’t make your movie magically good. You can’t just make a shitty movie and defend it by saying it’s supposed to be that way – it’s still a fucking shitty movie and that’s that. If you want to make a schlocky, silly horror film paying tribute to the genre classics, you still have to put in real effort and make a good movie.

Sigh. So what did we learn this week again? Not paying your mortgage is OK as long as you can curse the bank employees to hell for just doing their jobs. Cat murder is also OK as long as you have a good reason. Uh huh. Alright. We’re learnin’ big stuff now!

Images copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.

REVIEW: Evil Dead (2013)

SPOILERS ahead!

Remaking a movie like Evil Dead was never going to be easy, but Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and some other guys backed up relative newcomer Fede Alvarez in making this revision of the storied gore-horror classic from over 30 years ago. Honestly, I don’t think this is too bad. But I do have a few big problems with it, which I’m going to address thusly – you know, because that’s what I do, I guess…

Director: Fede Alvarez

Starring: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez

IMDb

First off, holy shit, it’s been 33 years since the original Evil Dead came out. That really puts things into perspective. It shows us that horror is eternal, that what scared us back then can still scare us now, and the same for entertainment in general – the days of old aren’t really so far behind us like some people claim. While ‘retro’ has been the big thing in the last few years, this movie is of a more genuine stripe than whatever Exorcist rehashes are coming out these days, and there’s a certain feral energy about this film that works to pay tribute to the horror of old, rather than simply ripping it off (Midnight Meat Train) or parodying it in an asinine way (Raimi’s own Drag Me to Hell). There’s a thin line between shameless hackwork and a genuine attempt (even an imperfect one, which this film is) – and Evil Dead ‘13’s blood-soaked trail of horror decimates the line.

Second, let’s just get the good points out of the way first: The gore. That’s really about it. If you want nothing else but insane, disgusting gore attacked with the zeal of a mental patient on crack going after a dog on a leash. I mean this thing is PACKED. WITH. GORE. To the goddamn brim. Some of the stuff in this movie made me look away from the screen, and if you’ve kept up with this blog at all, you know I’ve seen some shit.

Not only is the gore rampant, but it also touches on the age-old mantra of gore in films that modern films seem to have forgotten in their quest for the bottom of the barrel – if your movie isn’t some kind of serious, real-life meditation on social problems, MAKE THE GORE ENTERTAINING. Make it over the top, make it goofy, make it extreme! While the gore in this film is brutal and extreme to the max, it’s also done in a very wry way – it’s so over the top that it becomes entertaining in its own twisted, perverse way. The pacing is quick and exciting, too, which aids the entertainment factor. Overall there’s a big feel of classic 70s and 80s splatter-horror about this, although done up in a slick, modern package, and the effect is that Evil Dead 2013 is a nicely done bridge between the old and the new.

BUT – and there is a but – the writing is pretty stock, and the acting sucks. Now, the acting in the original wasn’t exactly Shakespearean either, but the original didn’t focus on the acting as a big point of concern, so much as the actors’ bodies getting torn apart and destroyed in horrific ways. This movie tries to have more of a story behind it, rather than the occult mayhem hack-n-slash of the original, which is a fine idea…if you can get a good story.

This…well, it certainly tries, I guess. They’re trying to say that the five characters are going to this cabin to have a sort of drug intervention for Mia (Jane Levy), the sister of main character David (Shiloh Fernandez). In the first 30 minutes or so, there are some pretty decent moments where it almost seems like the things going on are all in Mia’s head – of course, everyone who knows anything about this movie KNOWS that isn’t true. But it’s a nice red herring and, if handled with more wit, could have blossomed into something really interesting.

However, the film just focuses too much on the characters’ drama between one another, and with the acting being so terrible, almost universally so, it really gets pretty stupid after a while. The focus on the whole brother-sister dramatic plot is just weak as hell, and the writing for that is about as sappy as it gets. Evil Dead was cooler when it was just about gore, gore and more gore. This movie just comes off like the awkward ‘tween’ years where Evil Dead tries to ‘branch out’ and find itself in new social circles…awkward…

And, really, even when you take out that bullshit, how stupid is the main character? It’s not uncommon for horror protagonists to make stupid decisions. But dude, seriously! If your sister was possessed a minute ago and then just starts talking to you out of nowhere like normal, RIGHT WHEN YOU’RE ABOUT TO FINALLY KILL HER…maybe she’s still possessed and is trying to trick you! Just a thought, pal. It wouldn’t be so bad if it happened like once, but it’s all the goddamned time in this movie, and after about five minutes of this kind of stupidity, it will make you want to hit your head against a wall. Repeatedly.

The reason the writing sucks is because these characters’ reactions to everything are so subdued. They see a possessed person vomiting black bile and cutting their own tongue in half? They barely raise an eyebrow. They see a loved one come back from the dead after being buried alive? Doesn’t even raise their pulse one bit. It’s lazy and comes off as more funny than anything, demeaning the gleeful evil of the rest of the movie. Also, one final nitpick – what is up with how invincible the characters are in this? They barely seem to feel a damn thing. If they were possessed, sure, but this all happens before they ever get possessed…they get arms cut off, they get stabbed repeatedly, get nails driven through multiple parts of their bodies; all kinds of shit, and they just keep stumbling on, only ever-so-slightly wounded. It’s a minor nitpick, as it doesn’t really hurt the movie, but that kind of silliness does become noticeable eventually.

Evil Dead 2013 is enjoyable, and I didn’t regret seeing it. The gore is great, the lighting and atmosphere is killer and everyone involved seems to be having fun. But the attempts at making it a more serious and mature film than the original don’t work because the writing isn’t good enough to sustain them. I think this is a great ‘turn your brain off and drink beer’ sort of movie to watch with friends, preferably around Halloween, but is it as good as the original? I wouldn’t say so. Recommended for Evil Dead fans, and for those of you who really dig modern horror movies.

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: A Simple Plan (1998)

Director: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120324/

Sam Raimi is an odd character, isn’t he? You can’t fault him for not branching out. I think his best work will always be The Evil Dead (the first one), but most of the other stuff he’s done is admirable as well.

Well, OK; MOST of what he’s done is creative and has merit to it. But in between the creeping horror/comedy of his early works and the mainstream-friendly work he did with Spider-Man, there lay another movie – a dark and tense drama about two brothers who find a crashed plane with a dead guy and a bag with millions of dollars in it, in the middle of the snowy woods.

Starring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, this is one of those movies that is certainly dramatic and gripping, but at times takes the dramatism a bit far, and sometimes lapses into a comic book-like melodrama. Mainly the focus is on the two brothers and the decay of their worlds around them as the money destroys them. Yeah. Money is evil! In this case, it’s pretty easily understandable – it drives several characters to murder, for Pete’s sake. The acting is well done. Thornton gives the most emotionally vulnerable performance, and his status as a poor, downtrodden and weak-looking guy gives him a lot of potential for empathy from the viewers. But Bill Paxton does a good job playing a snooty, opportunistic schemer too, as he double-crosses and backstabs his way to keeping the money for his wife and kid.

The story unfolds pretty smoothly, rolling through each conflict and gradually escalating to the chilling and tragic climax. Lou (Brent Briscoe) is a rude, crude lout who also discovered the money with them, and through the film he gets progressively more irate about Paxton’s suggestion that he (Paxton) keep all the money at his house until they’re sure they can get away with spending it, finally ending in a shoot-out where Lou ends up dead. There’s another scene where a farmer is killed, too. These are not murderers; just average people in possession of a lot of money. That kind of power makes people susceptible to things they might not do otherwise. This is pretty much the movie’s main theme.

But a lot of the time even that gets stretched beyond the limits of credibility. When Paxton’s wife (Bridget Fonda) sees the money for the first time, she automatically – like literally, in a second – starts plotting and scheming ways to keep the money for themselves. At first I thought this was just a little silly, being that she had changed her tone so fast, but when she started advocating murder and telling Paxton to turn his brother against Lou, I couldn’t believe it anymore. It’s just too comic book­­-esque. How would this seemingly normal looking woman be able to come up with all of this shit so fast, and with so much certainty? Is she some kind of secret agent, or terrorist? It’s just too over the top.

And then at the end, when Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and the sheriff (Chelcie Ross) are out in the woods and the ‘FBI agent’ they’re with turns out to actually be the brother of the guy in the plane who was trying to steal the money to begin with when it crashed. He kills the sheriff and holds Paxton at gunpoint, and I don’t know, this also just seems way too comic-book-like, way too fantastical for such a gritty story like the film was going for. I can’t help but think that moments like these take away from the very realistic and poignant drama that some of this film has. I don’t mind comic-book-like, over the top and melodramatic scenes in movies – sometimes they can be entertaining; these are still movies, mind you, and I don’t pretend everything has to be scaled down to a realistic level. But when a movie like this one has some really good, touching drama and tension, over the top moments like the ones I’ve talked about here really ruin the flow.

I think the best parts of this movie are the scenes with Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton together just…talking about stuff. These are the moments when the movie quiets down and really delivers some raw, emotional goodness in the form of solid and relatable drama. Like the part where Paxton finds out that their father committed suicide – that’s good! I wish they had really done more with this idea. There was a lot of potential there. And in general their conversations are always interesting. The two actors work well together and the writing remains strong and down to Earth.

So this movie is good. It’s not perfect and there are moments when the drama is stunted by the over the top nature of some scenes, but it’s worth watching, and never gets dull. Sam Raimi’s works after this weren’t nearly as impressive, but this one’s worth seeing. Go check it out.

Chronicles of the Mighty Chin

...or, The Bruce Campbell Tribute.

I just love Bruce Campbell. I loved Bubba Ho-Tep and I love all of the movies I'm going to be reviewing here. He's a classy guy. He's over the top, he's goofy as hell and he knows what his fans want. He has great charisma on screen and he always puts 100% of his energy into giving a kick ass performance. Plus, how can you really hate a guy who wears a chainsaw for a hand and also portrays Elvis - although not at the same time, regretfully (that would also be quite cool). He's just great.

Let's dig into the first EVIL DEAD movie, released way back in 1982, when Campbell was naught but a young lad with a bowl cut and a cool head amidst the chaos of the Necronomicon:

"I'm ready for my close-up!"

Truly next year's fashion contest winners.

With as much of a pop culture icon as this series has become, I had all but forgotten just how fucking crazy and unrelenting this movie really was. I mean...sheesh, this just doesn't let up. The fine, thick atmosphere of the scenes where the one girl goes out into the woods are about the finest 80s horror you can find, but then we get into a whole different kind of territory when it just EXPLODES into a frenzy of grueling, grotesque violence and gory special effects that drags the viewer kicking and screaming through a whole hour of poor Ash having to kill off his friends one by one. This is a hideously dark and maleficent film, once you get past the camp value of the over the top gore, and it really took its toll on me as I sat there in the dark at night and watched it. Hard to watch? Yes. Over the top and extreme as hell? Definitely. An all time classic of splattering, grime-caked, filthy Lovecraftian horror? More than you know.

And then EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN (1987) came out.

After the first Evil Dead was such a classic of satanic, demonic filth and grime, where could it go but to a more cleaned up and slightly less evil route? Yes, this isn't as good as the first one, even despite re-telling some of the first movie's story in the first fifteen minutes. Ash is back and he's going insane in the cabin when a group of explorers arrive. Apparently it's one of the girls' parents' cabin, and they're very surprised when they find out that it's under siege by an ancient evil...what, it's never happened to you? This is a really enjoyable flick, but it's not as memorable as the first one, and it really does feel a little too reined in as compared to the absolutely relentless first movie, like they were trying to play it safe for some reason. We get to see more of Ash, and that's good, but I miss the absolutely horrifying and brutal nature of the first, which is tempered here with a more restrained structure, more defined characters and more explanation of what's going on.


It would be a good few years before...

ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993)!

Oh yeah. Now this is the shit right here! Army of Darkness goes full-on kitschy horror-comedy mode, whipping out some really kick ass effects that are so zany you'll be laughing before they even put in any dialogue. I love the wackiness at hand and I love the campy occult leanings with the Necronomicon back story, which is amplified a hundred times in the medieval setting, too, without any technology or doubts to get in the way - they knw this is real, and yeah it pretty much is. Bruce Campbell acts like a goof and does it so over the top that he actually becomes the ultimate horror bad-ass. I mean, how cool can you get? He's got a chainsaw, he's got two heads at one point, he shouts his lines at the top of his lungs...dude, this guy is the man! The women are sultry and seductive and the action is fast paced and full of reanimated skeletons. Man, this is cool. At only 81 minutes it had me wishing for more.

Now, in 2008, he came out with a movie called My Name is Bruce. It was a parodic and self-deprecating work that highlighted his commentary on himself, his fans and most importantly, his movies. And this is my review of it:


For some reason this movie has been getting very lukewarm to even negative reviews, and I can't see why. It's stupid, it's cheesy and all of that, but it's fucking Bruce Campbell, you pussies! This is one of the most enjoyably silly things I've seen recently. It's not Evil Dead-caliber or anything, and it is a bit short, but it's just so spirited and so fun to watch that I'm willing to overlook its shortcomings. Bruce Campbell plays himself as a huge jerk-wad who gets kidnapped and taken to a small country town where he has to help them fight the god of war/protector of bean curd. An interesting fact is that they apparently just got natives of the actual town they were filming in to play the supporting cast. And they did a pretty OK job. I especially liked Grace Thorsen as the main love interest, and Taylor Sharpe as the kid was pretty good, too. This is just a quick, snappy slice of cornball 80s-style shlock. Funny as hell. 


And isn't Grace Thorsen just gorgeous?

Mmm, yeah, that's a great note to end this one on, and I think Campbell would agree with me there. Hail Campbell, and check out these movies if you have a speck of good horror fandom in you at all!