Back to the cabin in the woods...

Rating: 3/10 (14 November 2017)

Director Sam Raimi's over-the-top recap of his early low-budget horror flick "The Evil Dead" from 1981 is an improvement over its grainy, ghastly predecessor, a demon barf-fest which was made for about $400,000 and sparked a cult-following on home video with slacker teenagers. Raimi's budget on this one was a little over $3,000,000 and it shows. Bruce Campbell reprises his role as Ash, a university student taking his girlfriend to a cabin in the Tennessee mountains while the owners, a professor and his wife, are away. Things are just starting to get cozy when Ash comes across an ancient book in the professor's study, the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis--or, the Book of the Dead--along with the professor's taped thesis on the archaeological find in which he unwisely recites the incantation to resurrect a demonic spirit (it works). Raimi shows off a wickedly imaginative sense of gruesome glee (not apparent in the first film), as well as a film scholar's eye for classic movie references, visual jokes and an audacious talent for breathlessly-paced mayhem. Buckets of red, green and black guck get sprayed all over the screen, with prime recipient Campbell taking the brunt of it (he's a good sport rather than an actor). While Raimi has since proved in his mainstream films that he is more than adept at a solid narrative flow as well as a kinetic visual style and a keen sense of editing that sets the pace for his pictures, these techniques remain out of reach for him here (as well as a talent for handling actors). All types of cinematic tricks are brought out of the toy-box (everything that three million dollars could buy in 1987), but the picture is merely made up of episodes. It's a showoff piece for the filmmaker; he's in the process of developing his craft--and having a grand old time--but the set-ups have no follow-through, and the whole doesn't equal the parts. Followed by "Army of Darkness" in 1992. *1/2 from ****