With most directors, you need to see at least a partial filmography to get a sense of who they are personally, but with Sam Raimi, you only need one. Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn is his masterpiece, his biggest contribution in technical innovation, and his fan favorite, but it's also the most naked example of his defining attribute as a director, being his cruelty and absolute contempt for humanity. Raimi's put his characters (and actors) through a lot over the years, but with Ash, he found his most agreeable punching bag, and an actor in Bruce Campbell who seems to relish each successive punishment as a great physical challenge. Together, they form an almost perfect symbiosis of sadist and masochist, and Evil Dead II puts that relationship at center stage, sacrificing everything that neither one was ever especially good at (namely plot and subtlety) to bring as much violence as possible to the screen.
Ashley J. Williams (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) go off together for a weekend at the most romantic location imaginable: a desolate cabin cut off from all civilization save for a rickety bridge that threatens to collapse at any moment. There, Ash discovers the tape recordings of Professor Knowby, an archaeologist who speaks of the Necronomicon ("the book of the dead") and read passages from it aloud. The incantation awakens the proscribed ancient evil, which immediately possesses Linda, forcing Ash to kill her, though that's only the beginning of his troubles. Further set-up is ultimately irrelevant, but suffice it to say that leads to him teaming up with the professor's daughter Annie (Sarah Berry), severing his own hand and replacing it with a chainsaw, and coming to a climactic showdown with the Evil Force.
But all of this is ultimately irrelevant to what makes Evil Dead II the movie it is. The summary above has clear precedent in films like Equinox, but its greatest influence may in fact be the work of Tex Avery, a grown man who made his life's work inflicting grievous bodily harm on cartoon animals. Whereas Evil Dead was ostensibly a horror film, Evil Dead II is nearly an outright comedy, with little to no ambiguity as to whether or not we're supposed to laugh at Ash's various ailments. Raimi's employed this tactic before: the abuse visited on Christine Brown in Drag Me To Hell was hilarious before ultimately being devastating, and he managed to milk laughs out of comicdom's most put-upon character before finally giving him a teary resolution. But he seems to feel no such need to characterize Ash, whose only narrative purpose is as a recipient for the various injuries that Raimi conceives, which are so brutal and numerous that they merit comparison to The Passion of the Christ. But like the protagonist of that film, Ash rises and rises again, only to be put down more forcefully.
And nobody gets put down quite like Bruce Campbell. Possibly the greatest star that never quite was, Campbell projects the movie star affability of Harrison Ford, but willingly tarnishes it at every possible opportunity with his panicked screams, physical dismemberment, and other losses of dignity. Evil Dead II might have been a profoundly discouraging experience had he not approached it with such energy, or appeared fatigued at all during its brief run-time, but he doesn't, so we can guiltlessly take the sort of pleasure in harassing him that the director clearly does; most of the time, his perfectly timed reactions make more impact than the bite, stab, or bludgeoning that inspired it. Raimi never had another actor quite like Campbell, but Campbell never had another director quite like Raimi, whose frenetic, abrasive style was able to match pace with whatever the actor felt like doing at the time. Both produced work that can hold court with Evil Dead II afterwards, but neither one ever felt as uninhibited again.
BONUS FEATURES
As this film has been released on home video a number of times, the key here is bonus features, but there's also a lot to draw from. There's an audio commentary featuring Raimi and Campbell, as well as co-writer Scott Spiegel and makeup special effects artist Greg Nicotero. There also no less than three making-of' featurettes that were produced in the interim 25 years, with appropriately colorful names like Swallowed Souls and The Gore The Merrier. There are also a number of home movies taken by makeup artist Greg Nicotero during the production, as well as Road to Wadesboro, a short documentary by Tony Elwood as he returns to the original shooting location. For the purists, there's also the original theatrical trailer and a still gallery. On the whole, it's hard to believe that a production process could be better documented for a film so small.
"Evil Dead II (25th Anniversary Edition)" is on sale November 15, 2011 and is rated R. Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Sam Raimi, Scott Spiegel. Starring Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley Depaiva, Denise Bixler, Richard Domeier.
