a gruesome pleasure of a classic gross flick of gore

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2011)

Late at night. A cabin in the middle of dark woods. Strange growling noises outside. Blissfully oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark, one couple passes time playing piano and dancing. An idyllic image is pretty quickly shattered as some ghost or other monster (most likely, the one lurking in the dark) shatters the window glass and kidnaps the girl. After literally several seconds, the poor and innocent creature is transformed into a zombie and throws herself at her frightened-to-death boyfriend. Fortunately, playing the piano is only one of many of his talents. The guy takes a shovel and cuts off the zombie-girlfriend's head. (That is a razor-edged shovel, mind you.) Then, before the evil force also turns him into a zombie, the sun comes up and drives the evil away in an almost cleansing-the-soul moment. The guy is safe for one scene.
This atmospheric opening is but a taste of what follows. What's in store for us is lotsa incantations, otherworldly monsters, screaming chicks, zombie-mothers and ghost-fathers, and, on top of that, like a cherry on a cupcake, there is a chainsaw! When the couple from the opening, Ash (Bruce Campbell) and Linda (Denise Bixler), play a weird recording, they hear incantations read by a Professor Raymond Knowby. The recording summons up some evil creatures from another world/dimension/afterlife (choose the correct). What the professor reads are the passages from Necronomicon (rings any bells, HPL fans out there?). Any child knows you never read from Necronimicon out loud, dah! And you most certainly don't record it! (The professor should be renamed Knownot, not Knowby.) By the time things start to make twisted sense to Ash, there enters another four characters. Only one of them is important: the professor's daughter Annie (Sarah Berry). The evil possesses different inanimate objects so our characters are pretty much in a deadly trap inside the cabin. Going outside is no good either since the evil also possesses the trees and the woods. They only thing left — to fight back.
(...) The rest of my review's on my movie blog. Check it out: http://queenofthegrubs.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/verve/