Like watching a horror movie do standup comedy.

Rating: 8/10 (30 June 2004)

I saw an interview with Raimi about Spiderman 2 where he said he's always learning how much is too much, that he's never sure when he's gone too far.
He didn't have to tell me twice. I already watched more than ten seconds of The Quick and the Dead. A crazy steadicam followed by a crazy zoom, steadicam, zoom, dolly, pan, thrust! And all this within three seconds of celluloid. There's no other way to put it: this isn't clever, its ridiculous! Its so too much it hurts your eyes!
Same here, if not quite as bad. Raimi has a bigger budget this time, so he decides to throw away all the credibility of the original. Like the worst sequels, he takes it that because there was a first movie, then absolutely no buildup is necessary in this one: we can have zombies within the first ten minutes, people cutting up their girlfriends and hardly seeming surprised, etc. There's just no lead-in! Maybe at a drive-in, but even there your audience aren't laughing with you, they're laughing at you.
Clearly Raimi and I have different ideas of what makes entertainment: this, to me, is just too ridiculous. Its like watching a horror movie do standup comedy. Its just constant riffing, a collection of sketches, not a cohesive movie. If that's your thing, check this out. For me:
5/10.