Fantastic Lunacy!

Rating: 10/10 (6 March 2005)

While the original EVIL DEAD was genuinely a horror film, this one went completely the opposite direction and decided to amp up the gore factor to make it basically a demented cartoon show. EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN is really a re-telling of the same events from the first story, but in this case, only Ash and Linda (Bruce Campbell and Denise Bexler) come to the cabin and less than 10 minutes into the movie he has played a recording from a professor who mouths the infamous lines from the Necronomicon and unwittingly brought his girlfriend to an untimely death, though she herself becomes re-animated and returns to torment him as a severed head and a body with a chainsaw in its hands who unwittingly slices itself in two.
And this is only the beginning of a movie that will not let down the zaniness, as the professor's daughter makes an appearance with her partner and two locals and get sucked into the madness that ensues. Raimi uses a hyper-kinetic editing to make the essentially silly story even sillier -- the POV of an eyeball flying into the screaming mouth of a woman is a (pun intended) scream -- and distorting the dead into stop-motion figurines only adds to the lunacy. Looney Tunes gone berserk (even the furniture becomes possessed), not precisely frightening, but swiftly paced and with great use of Bruce Campbell's over-the-top acting and slapstick humor. Hilarious, entertaining stuff.