End of my 20s - Evil Dead II

"Groovy."

My next film of the day, after washing up and feeding the cats, has been Evil Dead II, which, coincidentally, is subtitled on some versions as "Dead By Dawn". So I've seen two dawny, deady films today. There's a theme, somewhere...

Anyway, it's a silly film, with a plot that's not terribly challenging. To be frank, it's not much more than an exercise in physical comedy to put Bruce Campbell through his paces. It has some stop-motion puppetry that would have Ray Harryhausen weeping in his muesli. You can see strings, wires, the top of the set and Ted Raimi's bottom hanging out of his posessed mother costume (as he spins like a horror pinada). It's silly and has its faults by the dozen.

But it's just such good fun. Zombies, chainsaws, three distinct primary colours of blood, flying eyeballs, shotguns, posessed hands, laughing zombie deer heads... they're all here. And it's an MTV-attention-friendly 82 minutes so it's all packed in tight and furious. Fab.

My retrospective tale of this film... I first saw this film in Jonathan Nash's flat, whilst I was working at Your Sinclair for a week on the final issue - June 1993. I was knackered and fell asleep after twenty minutes, so he put it on a second time and I finally saw it all. I lapped up the lot. That same week I saw Braindead with him and Andy Ounsted in the tiny cinema in the middle of Bath; that film being one of Peter Jackson's zombie flicks. I was torn between watching Evil Dead II and Bad Taste, Jackson's other zombie flick today, but went for Evil Dead II simply because it's been longer since I last saw it. Either way, there was going to be a Jonathan Nash link, one way or t'other.

And now of course, Evil Dead's director Sam Raimi commands respect for his Spiderman movies, and Peter Jackson did some films with hobbits and limited appeal. *cough* Nice to know ultra-low-budget film makers end up with big bucks in the end.

No links this time because there's far too many already. =)