The Evil Dead (1981)

Sam Raimi's feature directorial debut, The Evil Dead, is widely considered a classic in the horror genre. On Rotten Tomatoes, it boasts an approval rating of 85% from the critics, with an average rating of 7.8/10, and, not that this matters to me because the RT audience are the biggest bunch of idiots on the cinematic planet, that percentage is nearly matched by an audience score of 84%. Therefore, on both sides of the movie-going aisle, The Evil Dead is a success. While it brings me a degree of joy to shave against the grain of popular opinion, it mostly brings disappointment to say that, of all the critically acclaimed horror classics I've currently seen, The Evil Dead is hands down the worst and most nearly insufferable piece of tripe, a phantasmagoria of gore, decapitations, and bodily decompositions. It has the unrestrained feel of a young, inexperienced filmmaker who just got prematurely released from his film school, purchased a camera, gathered a few friends in a cheap wooded location, and threw anything and everything at the lens without concerning himself about whether any of it stuck. Spoiler alert, very little of it actually did. 

As a splatter/horror/comedy, The Evil Dead accomplishes only the first aspect of its multi-genre ambitions, earning its NC-17 rating with some of the most extreme bloodshed ever splattered on celluloid. Beyond the gore, however, it's thoroughly boring, seemingly interminable, and never for a split second scary, suspenseful, or darkly amusing. The acting is atrocious across the board, the makeup effects could be matched or bested by those in a Halloween store, the sound effects are irritating, the score is forgettable, and the characters are uniformly unengaging and unintelligent. 

A quintet of young adults -- Ashley Williams (Bruce Campbell), his girlfriend, Linda (Betsy Baker), his single sister, Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss), his best friend, Scotty (Richard DeManincor), and Scotty's girlfriend, Shelly (Theresa Tilly) -- drives to a remote cabin in the rural forest of Tennessee, whose owner has agreed to rent it to them for the weekend for a cheap price. While exploring the cellar, Ash and Scotty discover the Naturom Demonto, a Sumerian version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, along with an archaeologist's tape recorder. Their curiosity piqued, the five friends gather around and listen to the recordings, on which the archaeologist reveals that the book's cover is made from human flesh and its writings inked in human blood. As the disembodied voice recites a series of incantations, a demonic entity named The Kandarian Demon awakens from its longtime slumber in Hell and swiftly takes possession of everyone in the cabin, beginning with the most vulnerable, Cheryl. Once possessed, the only way to vanquish the demon is to dismember the host. 

From a narrative standpoint, debuting writer-director Sam Raimi doesn't put much flesh on the bones of his screenplay so much as he spends the entirety of his 85-minute runtime cooking up ways to disintegrate the flesh of his non-characters. The plot is a supernatural rip-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a boring, exhausting, generic, and repetitive mishmash of teen horror cliches. As in Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel's legitimately boundary-pushing and insanely terrifying 1974 masterpiece, the protagonists are a quintet of young adults, one of whom is the sibling of the last one standing and the only member of the group not paired with a lover. They're vacationing in a place only a group of horror-movie friends would want to vacation: a dingy, rundown cabin in the middle of fog-covered woods. There, some of the more intellectually impaired daredevils accidentally resurrect a demon from its previously peaceful sleep below the ground, which proceeds to possess them one by one and force them to slaughter each other in the name of survival. The one car they drove in initially refuses to start. The characters behave irrationally to enable horrible things to happen to themselves. 

Raimi appears to be having so much fun with his go-for-broke story that he neglects to conform to his own set of internal rules. It's established that once the demon draws blood from a victim, they become its next host. However, Ash gets his leg clawed and bitten, yet he conveniently manages to avoid possession after. The Kandarian Demon gains possession of Cheryl's hand before the incantations are spoken aloud on the recorder.

The characters are nondescript, unsympathetic, and exasperatingly artificial. According to The Evil Dead's Wikipedia article, they're students at Michigan State University; at no point does the film even allude to this detail. They hardly feel like real friends, showing little concern for or loyalty to each other once the Kandarian Demon begins terrorizing them. They rarely make decisions or behave in ways that align with basic human nature because they're paralyzed by Director Says Syndrome, which dictates that characters in a screenplay must make stupid decisions for no other reason than because the director says so. As Scotty walks up to the front door of their rented cabin, all four of his companions stand still behind him because the porch swing is gently swaying back and forth. Yeah, wind is really scary. While the quintet is sitting at the dinner table, the cellar trapdoor suddenly blows open, and all five inhabitants simultaneously rise from their seats to investigate. 

Cheryl demonstrates the lowest IQ of the group. While drawing a pendulum clock in her bedroom, Cheryl's hand becomes possessed into drawing a picture of a book with a demonic face on the cover that strangely resembles SpongeBob SquarePants 18 years before his conception. Afterward, she joins her companions for dinner and says nothing to anyone about what just happened. Later, alone in her bedroom clothed in a robe, Cheryl hears a demonic voice calling to her to "Join us" from outside, and in response, she wanders outside to confront the source. Walking deeper into the woods, Cheryl hears trees collapsing as the demon pursues her, and rather than screaming her head off and running for the hills, she stands still, making it easy for a possessed tree to wrap its limbs around hers, pin her to the ground, and rape her. 

After Linda is stabbed in the ankle with a pencil, Ash puts her to bed instead of attempting to drive her to the nearest hospital. When Cheryl bursts into the cabin after being raped by a tree, her clothes torn and skin cut up, Ash insists that trees can't hurt people and tucks her into bed for a good night's rest. What is with these people thinking that sleep is the magical answer to pencil stabbings and tree rape? Cheryl's kinship to Ash isn't clarified until late into her possession. Prior to a demon telling us that she is Ash's sister, I had no idea what her relationship was to any of the other characters. 

In a way, Scott is the unintentional culprit of their night of nonstop mayhem as it's he who insists on playing the remainder of the archaeologist's recording after Cheryl urges him to shut it off, thereby resurrecting the Kandarian Demon and unleashing it on him and his friends. He's also the quintessential douchebag who abandons Ash at the cabin so he can search for another escape route besides the now-destroyed bridge and suggests that Ash accompany him and send help for Linda, reasoning that she isn't his girlfriend, after all. Soon after, we're expected to sympathize with Scotty when he returns to the cabin battered and on Death's doorstep. Not happening. After disappearing in the cellar, Ash goes to search for him, and Scotty jump-scares him. 

As the last man unfairly standing, Ash is ineffectual, cowardly, and pathetic. He holds an axe, but does nothing meaningful with it when given the chance. He squanders a perfect opportunity to shoot a demonically possessed Linda in the head or go full-on Leatherface with a chainsaw on her, opting instead to drag her outside and bury her in the front yard. He stands still and watches in horror while Scotty is attacked by a possessed Shelly. Based solely on his debut performance in The Evil Dead, it's mind-boggling how Ash has become a cultural icon in the horror genre. He and Scotty are the types of imbeciles who repeatedly assure their friends that everything is going to be OK after any cause for such optimism has been long thrown out the window. The women are just as much to blame. After Cheryl comes down from her initial possession, everyone treats her condition as though it were a bizarre sickness, making no mention of the fact that she just levitated.

Cinematographer Tim Philo uses kinetic POV shots to transfer us behind the eyes of the Kandarian Demon as it sprints through the forest, skulks outside the cabin stalking its targets through windows, spies on the remaining four from the slit of the chained-up cellar trapdoor. Philo overdoses on a fog machine to the point where any attempt at gothic atmosphere-building is smothered by its apparent artificiality. In every single exterior nighttime shot, fog floats across the gargantuan, skinny, bare trees, enveloping any character within. In two of Philo's more innovative visual touches, a cloud of inky blackness gradually consumes the moon to suggest a demonic presence descending on the unsuspecting vacationers. As Scotty hacks a demonic Shelly to pieces with an axe, Philo allows the lens to be drowned in her blood, highlighting Scotty in deep red.

In a failed attempt to conjure a sense of discomforting claustrophobia toward the final confrontations, Philo films his leading man in facial close-ups as he races to shut all the doors. He exhibits a fascination with close-ups in general, filming the eyes of the actors in close-up to show them widening in horror or, in the most unnecessary and annoyingly protracted moment of failed romance, darting to a necklace. In scenes such as that, in which Ash gifts Linda with a necklace, Raimi draws out their duration to an excruciating degree, making the runtime feel substantially longer than what should be a merciful 85 minutes. When Linda returns from checking on a sleeping Cheryl, she finds Ash sitting on a couch with his eyes closed and a jewelry box nearby. Unable to determine that Ash is feigning sleep since he was just awake a moment ago, Linda sits beside him and quietly opens the box to find a necklace. As she examines the necklace, Ash opens his eyes to observe her reaction. Linda darts her eyes toward him to see if he's asleep, and he quickly closes his eyes. Linda looks back at her necklace. Ash opens his eyes again. Linda moves her eyes back toward Ash, but not before he recloses his eyes. Finally, their eyes meet, and they exchange a lighthearted "Aha." 

This stupid scene of unmoving, unadorable chivalry goes on and on seemingly without end, much like the so-called ending, in which it's obvious that Ash is going to reach the Book of the Dead with Linda's plot-voucher necklace and toss it into the fireplace, yet Raimi milks the struggle for every last drop of nonexistent suspense. Once the mission is accomplished, the possessed hosts freeze before collapsing and decomposing. And after all that, the Kandarian Demon is still alive, emerging from the ground, sprinting into the cellar of the cabin, upstairs, and out the front door to ambush Ash. Enough already! 

Philo doesn't stop at his actors, zeroing in on close-ups of the pendulum of a clock as it oscillates at a hypnotically slow speed and the hands of the clock so we notice when both suddenly freeze, reinforcing the tired message that the stopping of a clock indicates the arrival of a demon. Raimi and Philo have a lot of fun with the camera angles they use to frame Ash during the climactic portion. As Ash ascends the stairs in the cellar, Philo films him in a low-angle shot from beneath the staircase. Sneaking up on Ash from behind, Philo turns the camera upside down, glides it over his head, and, once facing Ash, seamlessly positions it right side up.

The Kandarian Demon is a generic, unformed supernatural entity portrayed by POV shots and the quartet of characters it possesses. Raimi limits exposition of the motivations and limitations of his demon to a couple audio recordings of an unseen archaeologist sharing his experience with accidentally conjuring the Kandarian via incantations and revealing the solution to be the dismemberment of its hosts. Ash and Scotty are tossed into walls and shelves ad nauseam by their possessed female companions, which is chaotic, repetitive, and embarrassing rather than exhilarating or hilarious. 

The makeup effects and puppetry used to signify the characters' possession by the Kandarian Demon are cheap-looking, resembling exactly what they are: puppets as indistinguishable as the characters they're replacing. Every post-possession character looks identical: grayish, treelike complexion, cuts on their faces, bloody eyeballs without pupils, blood pouring from their mouths. In the one bizarre distinguishing detail, Linda's transformation is augmented with red blush on her cheeks. The demonic voice of the Kandarian and cackles of the possessed women are corny, shrill, grating, and conspicuously mechanical. Ash's repeated backhanded slaps across Linda's face sound nothing like real slaps. Of the four characters who become possessed, Linda poses the least threat, doing nothing except sitting crisscross on the floor, smiling and giggling tauntingly, and repeating the sinister nursery rhyme, "We're gonna get you. Not another peep. Time to go to sleep."

The Evil Dead has nothing to offer beyond an avalanche of tiresomely unrestrained, gratuitous, over-the-top gore and viscera. In the cellar, a light bulb fills with blood until it explodes. Blood seeps through the outlets on a wall. The blood from a headless neck sprays Ash in the face. It's overwhelming but never once scary. However, Raimi does earn a few cringes of authentic shock in his more morbidly inspired set pieces, of which there are three that stand out: Cheryl stabbing a pencil into Linda's ankle, which is the most gruesome, unforgettable, and original visual served up; Ash decapitating Linda with a shovel; and Ash gouging out Scotty's eyes with his thumbs and removing a tree branch from his stomach, releasing an outpouring of blood. Naturally, all of these injuries are captured in delectable, impossible-to-miss close-ups. 

Editor Edna Ruth Paul cuts so rapidly between gory images throughout action scenes that it's often impossible to keep up and discern who's doing what to who, who's holding the dagger, who just stabbed the dagger into who. For example, it's hard to tell whether Shelly's hand reaching for the dagger on the floor is severed or still attached to her wrist. Paul interrupts physical confrontations between the living and the undead with unconvincing reaction shots of Ash and Scotty gazing in gob-smacked horror at the demons' mutilations and decompositions.

Among the quintet of young actors and actresses, The Evil Dead contains nary a single convincing performance. Bruce Campbell's line delivery is flat, and he fails to project the conviction and desperation in either his manic eyes or voice to sell Ash's predicament. The only reason that Campbell was gifted the lead role, or more specifically, the role of the sole survivor, is because he and Raimi grew up together and became best friends from an early age. That would account for Ash's inexplicable ability to withstand gruesome injuries that would kill and possess anyone else. Likewise, in his supposedly tragic final scene, Richard DeManincor fails to elicit pity in his expression of fear of death and desperation not to be left alone in his dying moments (even though, moments earlier, Scotty was ready to abandon Ash and Linda to try to save himself).

Where Campbell goes below the bottom, Ellen Sandweiss goes over the top, running her hands through her hair, throwing her head back toward the ceiling, and screaming "Shut it off!" like the three-year-old Scotty validly accuses her of behaving like. Somehow, amid this sea of performative mediocrity, Theresa Tilly is the most forgettable and "just there." Shelly is nothing more memorable than "the girlfriend of the final guy's best friend." You can't go much lower on the totem pole than that.

45 years after Sam Raimi enjoyed the time of his life making his first feature-length horror movie with his lifelong best friend/partner in crime, Bruce Campbell (despite forgetting to transfer that enthusiasm to me as a viewer), his misguided debut earned the praise of 74 out of 87 film critics and inexplicably spawned a franchise that continues to endure, having just released its sixth installment, titled Evil Dead Burn, only 25 days ago. Combined, the franchise boasts an average approval rating of 77% with an average quality rating of 6.9/10, making The Evil Dead one of the most -- if not the most -- critically successful horror franchises with nary a single generally failed installment to its legacy. 

To date, I've only seen two installments: the 1981 original and 2013 remake. Though a marked improvement over its source material, thanks to better acting, professional production values, and a more serious-minded approach with subtext of drug addiction, Fede Alvarez' Evil Dead is still an overall terrible horror film that continues to prioritize bloodshed over genuine atmosphere and horror. At least it's certainly more tolerable than this overrated, over-caffeinated, shoddily crafted, poorly acted, and underwritten explosion of cinematic gutter sludge. If two installments are any indicator, The Evil Dead is one near-unanimously beloved horror franchise that doesn't have the brains to match its bucketload of entrails.

3.6/10