October 7 - Evil Dead 2

It's one thing to discuss the older classics, starring the likes of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, but it's another thing to watch one of the truly good cult classics, like Evil Dead 2. This movie launched the careers of such greats as Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, who apparently co-produced this movie, and is truly a pleasure to watch. Or, err, maybe pleasure is the wrong word. lol

The movie starts out with Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend heading up to this deserted cabin in the woods to have a weekend alone together. Ash is playing the piano for his girlfriend, who is dancing around the cabin, and then Ash decides to grab some champagne. He finds an old tape recorder and plays it, and the voice on the tape describes a find by an archaeologist and his family of an old book, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, or the Book of the Dead. Apparently they'd recovered it from an old castle, and transported it to the cabin to decipher it. Then the archaeologist reads the words directly from the book, and that apparently summons some ancient evil to the cabin. Apparently the archaeologist and his wife were taken by the evil, because they aren't in the cabin, and the voice on the tape reading the book summons something to the cabin, because Ash's girlfriend is taken through the cabin window with a crash! Ash runs into the other room and out into the woods, looking for his girl, but she has been turned into a demonic zombie! :-o She attacks him but he manages to behead her with a shovel, and buries her in the woods.

Trying to flee, he is attacked by some demonic force that slams him into a tree and turns him into a demonic zombie as well, but the rising sun turns him back into himself as the evil spirit flees back into the shadows from whence it came. Ash passes out in the woods, and wakes up near sunset, knowing he has to flee the woods before dark, but the only bridge into the area has been destroyed as if by the hand of god, turning it into a twisted mass of charred metal. Ash panics as the sun sets, driving back to the cabin and trying to flee the demonic spirit chasing him.

As Ash hides in the cabin from the spirit in the woods, he hears the piano playing in the other room, and looks out the window to see the headless body of his dead girlfriend climb out of her muddy grave and begin to dance around in the forest, her head rolling along to join up with her body. It turns out to be just a nightmare for Ash, but when he wakes, he is attacked by the head, and then the body, and is finally forced to dismember the rotting pieces of his dead girlfriend with a chainsaw while they continue to try and attack him and simultaneously begging him to stop with the plaintive voice of his dead girlfriend.

Elsewhere, the archaeologist's daughter arrives at a nearby airport with the missing pages of the Necronomicon, intent on heading up to the cabin to help decipher the book with her father. She runs into a snag at the destroyed bridge, where she and her boyfriend meet a helpful hick and his girl who known a backwoods trail up to the cabin. They set off in the dark to find it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... erm, cabin... Ash is finally caught by the spirit and it inhabits his hand, turning it into a demon possessed limb out to destroy him. Ash fights his hand, but trying to fight a possessed limb with one hand proves too much. After knocking him unconscious by slamming dishes into his head over and over, the hand drags Ash's unconscious body across the floor towards a meat cleaver, but Ash wakes up, grabs the chainsaw he used to dismember his girlfriend, and lops off his evil hand, probably inspiring the movie Idle Hands (with Jessica Alba) some years later, and forcing him to turn to "the stranger" for comfort for the rest of his life, no doubt.

In shock from blood loss and the continuous attack on his sanity by the events of the past day, Ash is in the den for one of the scariest and yet funniest scenes in the entire movie. As he darts his gaze this way and that, looking for the source of the next demonic attack, an elk's head trophy on the wall turns to him and begins to laugh. Ash, his sanity already tottering along the knife edge of lunacy, leaps headlong into the abyss of despair and begins to laugh himself, triggering laughter from everything in the room.. lamps, cabinets and books begin shuddering with uncontrollable guffawing, and Ash, unable to control himself, laughs along with them. I can't even describe how insane this scene is, and yet I began to laugh along with it, perhaps stepping over that line into madness myself, if only for a few brief moments, at least hopefully...

I'm not going to give away the rest of the movie, but suffice it to say, they all meet up at the cabin to do battle with the shadowy evil unleashed in that forest, and Ash survives to star in the sequel, Army of Darkness, also an excellent movie. There's no nudity in this movie either, but dammit, it's good enough without it, and for me to say a movie is good enough without nudity, well, that's goddamn saying something! This movie was not only one of my favorites, but I don't think i will ever forget the first season of the show Charmed, where there's a pair of detectives on a stakeout watching the three witches who starred in that show, and one of them turns to the other detective and asks "What was your favorite movie as a kid?" and the other guy says "Evil Dead 2."

I highly recommend this movie, but I had to turn again to my personal library of DVD's to find something to watch. Still, we're a quarter through the month, so between tomorrow night's AMC horror fest a thon, and the rest of the month's horror movies as well as my own personal collection, I should be okay. Hopefully I can review something from AMC's line of movies tomorrow night. I will of course, include science fiction horror as well as monster movies in my reviews. Horror is a broad topic, and one man's bad horror flick is another man's comedy of errors, as in the case of Jason X. :-)