For what it is worth, it works...

Rating: 7/10 (5 March 2005)

In a nutshell, Evil Dead 2 is what happens when you take the original Evil Dead, chop it into parts, put the parts in a bag, and shake. The film recaps the ending of the original by bringing Ash back to the mountain cabin with a new girlfriend, who is shortly chopped up with a chainsaw before the spirits of the dead come calling after Ash. As Ash struggles to fight off the dead, a new group of unlucky adventurers, one of which is related to the archaeologist on the tape, come calling. Little Miss Archaeologist just happens to be carrying a series of new pages from the book that detail more recitations, and a prophecy about a warrior destined to destroy the evil spirits.
If you were just after a description of the plot, you can stop reading now, because that was pretty much it. At a mere eighty-five minutes, nobody is going to confuse Evil Dead 2 with the epic machinations of horror maestros such as Stephen King, who once described the original Evil Dead as one of the funniest and most original films he had ever seen. And therein lies one of the franchise's essential problems. Like the child raised in a violent environment who just wants to be loved, the Evil Dead sequels progressively attempt more and more to endear themselves to a teen or family audience. This is not so obvious in Evil Dead 2, thanks to a smattering of fairly mild gore, but the third effort just dumped all pretense and might as well have called itself Teenage Mutant Ninja Ash. Heaven help us fans of real horror if the fourth Evil Dead actually sees completion.
Getting back to Evil Dead 2, what makes it work is a sense of cruelty carried over from the previous film. Hands are severed, heads are knocked off, corpses dance around, and the forest comes to life once more, though not as notoriously as previously was the case. In fact, a lot of what goes on in Evil Dead 2 reads like a cleaned-up version of what happened in The Evil Dead. Which makes the short running time all the more frustrating, giving the new story little, if any, chance to develop. Not that Sam Raimi has ever been big on story, or anything that requires more than a pair of brain cells.
What rescues Evil Dead 2 from being just another inferior clone is some truly creative gore. While the setup, as previously described, is unoriginal, the execution is fairly spectacular. While the idea of eyeballs popping out of heads and flying into mouths might not seem particularly original, this is the film where such creative nuances of gore entered the public consciousness. There is nothing here to compare to the red shower that occurred at the end of the original Evil Dead, but some points are won for variation. Unfortunately, restricting Ash to only using a chainsaw reduces the scope for variation to some degree. I realise that the chainsaw is supposedly a Raimi trademark, but it does get a little boring when reused too many times.
All in all, I gave Evil Dead 2 a seven out of ten. It is a competent retread of the original, but little more. This puts it well ahead of the third entry in the series, which basically dissolves into an LCD version of the original. In the end, the series should have ended here. The film certainly ended on the right note of irony.