Very similar to the original, but still great entertainment.

Rating: 8/10 (4 December 2004)

The opening of Evil Dead II consists of mostly a montage of shots of the Necrinomicon 'the Book of the Dead' and a spoken narration that goes, "legend has it it was written by the dark one, Necrinomicon Ex Mortis roughly translated Book of the Dead. The book served as a passageway to the evil worlds beyond, it was written long ago when the seas ran red with blood. It was this blood that was used to ink the book. In the year 1300 A.D. the book disappeared." Ashley 'Ash' Williams (Bruce Campbell) along with his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) are traveling by car deep into some woods to a remote mountain cabin. After some brief romantic shenanigans Ash finds a tape player. He decides to have a listen, the tape recording was made by the cabins owner Professor Raymond Knowby (John Peaks). He talks of traveling to a an ancient castle and discovering the Book of the Dead. Professor Knowby continues and explains that the Book of the Dead spoke about passageways to another world and contains demon resurrection incantations. Ash continues to listen, Professor Knowby begins to translate aloud the incantations which awake the evil spirits within the woods. All of a sudden Ash hears the sound of breaking glass and when he investigates he finds Linda has disappeared. Ash goes outside and starts to look for her, she turns up and is possessed. She attacks Ash but he chops her head off with a shovel. Ash buries Linda and quickly finds out he is trapped as the bridge he used to get to the cabin has been destroyed. He heads back to the cabin where he must try and survive to the morning and the safety of the sunlight. Meanwhile Annie Knowby (Sarah Berry) Professor Knowby's daughter and Ed Getley (Richard Domeier) have landed at a nearby airport with the missing pages from the Book of the Dead and decide to head straight for the cabin. They soon find out that the bridge has been destroyed but hire Jake (Dan Hicks) and Bobby Joe (Kassie DePaiva as Kassie Wesley) to show them to the cabin via a trail through the woods. Once there they find the cabin in a bad state, blood on the floors, a blood stained chainsaw, no sign of Annie's parents and Ash covered in blood holding a shotgun. They lock him in the fruit cellar. As the night draws on it becomes apparent that Ash isn't alone in the cellar and as the group start to be reduced in number by the evil spirits the survivors start to realize that the woods contain evil that wants to kill them all, Dead by Dawn! They must try to find a way to defeat the evil and try and save themselves. Co-written and again directed by Sam Raimi with a much improved budget, who like the original has a small cameo at the end as a medieval soldier. This is another great film, again full of cool camera tricks and angles and memorable sequences, it's no surprise Raimi has gone onto great success in Hollywood with Spider-Man (2002) and it's sequel Spider-Man 2 (2004). The script by Raimi and Scott Spiegel moves like a rocket, just the way it should but I couldn't help thinking it was a little too similar to the original, in fact I'd sooner call this a remake rather than a direct sequel. Lots of great scenes and cool one liners in this, like when Ash puts Linda's decapitated head into a vice and tightens it up, as Linda's head laughs and taunts Ash he points at it and says "your going down!" just before Linda's headless body bursts into the work shed and attacks Ash with a chainsaw. Or when Ash is looking at himself in a mirror after he had just killed Linda and says "fine" his reflection suddenly jumps out, grabs him and says "I don't think so, we just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw, does that sound fine?!", the shot ends with Ash's reflection strangling the real Ash but the camera zooms out to reveal Ash's own hands around his throat. A sequence where the possessed Linda is dancing as her body spins around independently of her decapitated head, which remains in the same position looking towards Ash throughout the spin. A funny sequence where Ash's own possessed hand beats himself up, smashing plates and bottles over his head and punching himself in the stomach! Ash goes onto cut his hand off with a chainsaw and puts a bucket over his still alive possessed hand and puts some books on it, one of which is Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms! A really nice touch of black humor. Or the getting tooled up scene in the work shed where Ash fixes the chainsaw to his wrist and saws the barrel of his shotgun off after which the camera zooms in on his face and he quips "groovy!". A short dialogue scene where Ash thinks he heard a noise in a bedroom and wanting to take a look he says "we'll all go in together" to which Jake answers "hell no! Your the curious one". Or the shots of a stag's head over the fireplace that comes alive, turns to Ash and starts to laugh at him, and a rocking chair in the corner of the room that starts to creepily rock on it's own. Again Raimi goes overboard with the 'dead cam' point-of-view shots, and continuous unbroken shots where the evil spirits follow Ash around the cabin breaking doors down and the like, I could probably carry on but hopefully you get the idea. Acting is much improved over the original and Campbell is still great as Ash. The effects are also much better this time around, according to the booklet supplied with my DVD no less than three FX groups were brought together to make Evil Dead II work. Having said that rather disappointingly there isn't much on screen gore. When anything graphic is supposed to be happening it's usually off screen or rather tame, Ash's hand amputation is off screen, when Ash kills Linda it's in shadow, when he kills 'Evil Ed' with an axe it's mostly off screen, Bobby Joe's death isn't seen and Jake death is just a ridiculous amount of spurting blood from cellar that looks like red water. Some of the effects look dodgy particularly the stop motion animation and living severed hand sequences. The ending in which the evil is turned into a physical being I thought was a bit over ambitious and a turned out a little flat. Overall another great film, I was just a bit disappointed by the restrained gore and violence when compared to the original, by comparison in the original when Ash decapitates Linda with a shovel and her headless body falls on him, a large amount of blood from the wound squirts out all over his face. In the sequel when Ash decapitates Linda there is not a single drop of blood spilt and when Ash dismembers 'Evil Ed' when his blood splashes over the walls it's green and looks more like washing up liquid. However, I highly recommend it to horror fans and is still one hell of an entertaining horror film that's great fun at the same time. Watch it, as soon as you can.