Evil Dead!

Many times, you learn to regard the fads and enthusiasms of your youth with disappointment and disillusionment. What was this crap that I once loved? you think. Didn't this used to be awesome?

Retrospectives are seldom kind.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I rented Evil Dead II, the Bruce Campbell altar at which I worshiped as a teenager. (The consummate B-movie actor played Ash in the film.) At the time, it seemed so funny, so gruesomely lively. It was slapstick before I had ever seen Keaton or Chaplin, undead horror before I'd heard of Romero. Frankly, I wasn't sure that it would stand up without a sixteen-year's sense of humor.

[Warning: The following discussion will give away the major plot points, if you can call them that.]

So it was no surprise to find that the dialogue was cheesy (but then, I knew that it was cheesy eight years ago) and that there were plot holes you could march a Deadite army through. The animation was claymation and they apparently ran out of buckets of red gore midway through the movie - having to switch to green and then blue.

In short, the movie was fucking great. I realized while watching it that it's really hard to make a good B movie. I mean, making a bad movie is easy. We learned last weekend that it's the easiest thing in the world to make something incoherent and boring. (See also: Manos: the hands of fate) However, making an unashamedly bad movie that nonetheless holds your attention and entertains you is really hard.

I think it might be impossible to be bored while watching Evil Dead II. There were a few things that worked really well. First, the camera work is actually really excellent. It holds your attention - the director, Sam Raimi, appears to be a master of the suspense-filled pan (to say nothing of the monster cam - if you've seen it you know what I mean).

Second, the blend of slapstick and horror is fantastic. At crucial moments, the film switches between the two, meaning that it avoids both horror and comedy tropes. The decapitated, reanimated girlfriend is a great example - Ash runs to the window, sees her grave tremble and a hand emerge. In a conventional horror film, this would lead to a ghoulish nightmare scene - in Evil Dead II, a claynimated corpse dances a ballet. (Still creepy.) Ash wakes up in horror - it was just a dream, just a dream. Her decapitated head drops into his lap - a switch back to shock horror. A slapstick scene ensues, as he attempts to beat her into unconsciousness while stumbling around in pain.

Then the infamous head-in-a-vice-corpse-attacking-with-chainsaw-dead-girlfriend-pleading-for-mercy scene ensues. The shed light is splashed with blood, casting the scene in a ghastly night.

Third, the movie has a serious undertone of mental disorder - midway through, we are wondering whether Ash is under attack by demonic forces, or just crazy and murderous. He decapitates and saws up his girlfriend, cuts off his own hand, and is just laughing maniacally when the owners of the deserted-cabin-in-the-woods trope come back. After he shoots at them, it's easy to see why they would want to imprison him in the cellar.

Fourth, and perhaps most, Bruce Campbell. He is a totally magnetic personality: whenever he's on screen, he's all you want to watch. His face is constantly entertaining - Anne noticed that I seem to have acquired a few of his expression somehow - and he's constantly at war with his body or surroundings in some sort of weird physical comedy. He plays this sort of overly-curious simpleton who is unaccountably comfortable with guns, axes and chainsaws. Bruce Campbell is like a black hole of campy entertainment: everything in his vicinity is drawn into him, captured by his topsy-turvy logic.

Finally, Evil Dead II delivers a fantastic selection of cheesy one-liners, from "Groovy" to "I'll swallow your soul!" At the end of the movie, when Ash has arrived at his destiny, the camera pans out, showing a man getting smaller in his surroundings. And he's screaming, protesting this fate, crying out: "NOooooOOOOOOooOOOOOOO! NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

At that moment, I realized why Shine Ning and I got into the habit of screaming "NNNNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!" to indicate displeasure, existential angst, or general existence. I guess there's this: Sometimes the things of your youth seem terrible in retrospect; sometimes they mystify you. And sometimes they make your life make more sense than it has in years.