The essence of Raimi

Rating: 8/10 (16 September 2010)

All artists change over time. Their evolution reflects their own personal growth, the development of their skills and the different influences that pass through their lives. If an artist is lucky, they'll produce a work that is uniquely their own. Something that embodies the purity of their own thought and feeling, without being too constricted by external forces or degenerately self indulgent. Evil Dead II is Sam Raimi's unique contribution to the common aesthetic.
I realize that seems a bit pretentious when focused on a horror movie where a corpse dances, a man cuts off his demon-infested hand and a woman swallows a witch's eyeballbut it's true. Evil Dead II is the most honest, purest expression of his own vision. It's the thing that from start to finish, only Raimi could have made. The fact that it's a remake is what's so unusual.
Evil Dead II isn't a sequel to Evil Dead, it's a retelling of the same story but freed from the expectations of others. Both films tell the story of a group of people in an isolated cabin with the infamous Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. Both films feature unclean spirits summoned back into the world by words played from a tape machine. Both movies even feature a young woman who runs into the haunted woods and is molested by devilish shrubbery and the main character in both is a young man named Ash (Bruce Campbell). But there is a profound difference between the two films.
Evil Dead has a great many startling and bizarre elements to it, but it is essentially a conventional horror movie. When he made it, Raimi was making what other people had told him made a movie a horror movie. It has the same dynamic and the same essential nature as other horror movies. When he made Evil Dead II, Raimi made what he thought a horror movie should be. And what Raimi thought a horror movie should be is Man facing terrifying eviland surpassing it.
Evil Dead II embraces the idea that the grotesque is both frightening and silly. That the proper response to the most extreme situations, circumstances where reality itself is out to get youwould look goofy. Raimi's vision was that terror taken to the otherworldly limit would be not even a hair's breadth away from silly. That's what makes Ash one of the great characters in film. Unlike others in horror films, who represent the audience desperately clinging to the real and the safe, Ash is confronted with the outrageous and the insane and he's right there with it all, step for step and crazed laugh for crazed laugh. Oh, he's frightened and he's frantic and he's jumping at shadows. But Ash doesn't reject the horror before and around him. He dives into it. He fights with it, not against it. What Ash represents is the idea that the indescribable nightmare out there isn't really "out" there. We're part of it and it is in acknowledging and accepting that, we can defeat it. What defines Evil Dead II are those moments where Ash is even more inhuman than the hellish monsters in those dark woods.
By the time he did the third film in the series, Army of Darkness, Raimi had lost his purity of vision. There are only moments of the film that are at all scary. Ash become a figure of comedy in a world of laughably over-the-top creatures and situations. If Evil Dead was Raimi making what other people thought a horror movie was, Army of Darkness is Raimi making what other people thought a Sam Raimi movie was. It has all of the style but none of the heart.
Which isn't to say it's a bad film. All three are enjoyable on their own merits, like many of Raimi's other works. Evil Dead II stands out, though, because it wasn't made by Sam Raimi. It is Sam Raimi.