Evil Dead 2 (1987) * * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: The funniest horror movie ever made; a melange of Dario Argento and Wile E. Coyote.
EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN is the result of an unstable fusion of Warner Bros. cartoon slapstick and _giallo_ horror-movie conventions. It's a flick with the mind of a splatter film and the heart of a Mack Sennett two-reeler. In plain, non-fanboy language, it's a ton of disgusting fun. Example: A monster of the undead rises from the cellar, only to have its head smashed in the trapdoor. Its eyeball pops out and flies into the mouth of one of the three screaming girls in the movie. GULP.
The plot, what there is of it, is simple to the point of irrelevancy. A young man and his girlfriend head out to an abandoned cabin for a romantic interlude, and unwittingly unleash the evil undead. The girl dies horribly and the man (square-jawed Bruce Campbell) lives -- but as what? Horrendous mutations strike him like epileptic fits. The dead rise out of their graves and inflict ghastly punishments and tortures on him. His own hand rebels against him (and the punishment he exacts on it is howlingly painful).
The majority of the movie is one long, roaring blast of slime, guts, special effects and ear-drilling sound effects, but it's put together in a way that gets more than a fair amount of good laughs. EVIL DEAD 2 is most likely *the* item that started the whole trend of sly, self-referential horror movies (culminating, of course, in the brilliantly nasty SCREAM), although it's a lot more freakish and far-out.
The film gets a little predictable towards the end, which is kind of sad. If the whole movie had moved with the manic inventiveness of the first thirty minutes, we would have really had something here. But as it stands, it's more than enough to, uh, turn a few heads. And the ending is *really* off the wall, if that's any additional compensation.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei [new email address coming soon] ICQ: 934998 http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device... NEW WEB SITE: http://cablehouse.dyn.ml.org ...and the mandate of heaven you can crush me as I speak/write on rocks what you feel/now feel this truth
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews