The cover blurb calls it the best horror film of the year. The film is really a comedy with some effects of horror thrown in.

Rating: 6/10 (14 April 2007)

The cover blurb calls it the best horror film of the year. The film is really a comedy with some effects of horror thrown in. With children of course it never fails to leave its right impact of morbid horror with its close-your-eyes scenes. But the movie is adults rated, so perhaps Sam Raimi got mixed up with the intended audience. A more appropriate name would be Â— The Comic Dead. So why was it banned ( :-) Ref - the IMDb site in UK and Ireland between 1983 to 1990?) Shot in 35 mm and only 1-1/2 hours long, the storyline contains elements that have been beaten to death in any number of horror movies. A bunch of college youngsters, males and females who are in relationships, proceed toward or get stuck in a lonely cottage somewhere around Tennessee, where one by one each one of them falls prey to demons / ghosts / evil spirits or other inhabitants of the nocturnal, hidden world of spirits. The entire action takes place on a single night, so that daybreak heralds the end of horror and beginning of normalcy.
The background to the action evokes interest. An archaeologist has spent his life away from the "myriad distractions of modern civilization" to research an ancient Sumerian burial and discovered a book - the book of the dead. He leaves behind an account of his experiences in a tape recorder subsequently discovered by the college vacationers. The Sumerian demon lying dormant gets a new lease of life when the tape recorder with evil chants is played back. The film remains silent on the nature of the spirit and all one gets to see are camera shots zooming onto victims. The spirit appears to lurk in trees and vegetation who then tend to come alive and attack the victims.
The comic aspects of the film lie in how the dead victims, with white, morbid faces and distorted voices, go around trying to attack the rest of the group, though never really making an attempt to do serious harm. Their main intention appears to be only to scare - and that works well on children, but fails on adults after a while. Some of the background music actually tries to create comic effects. The makeups though do evoke and generate feeling of horror and revulsion. The main protagonist, well played by Bruce Campbell, supports the action throughout the film.
While watching the film, the reviewer compared the dead creatures come alive in the film to office workers and thought they were quite similar, the latter being more scary than the former. The reviewer first saw the film at a young age and considered it to be the epitome the horror. Recently, a waiter at the local restaurant requested him to get the film, saying his entire family wished to see this film. Such is the popular hold of this film, which on closer scrutiny is really more of a comedy than horror.
From the film:
Ashley (Bruce Campbell) - Is there something in the woods that did this to you?
Cherly - No, it's the woods themselves.
First published on my blog at: www.myvoice.in