Evil Dead a scream! - Splendid new three-disc set brings campy cult classic back to life

December 29th, 2007 | by admin |

Original Post here: Snikkkt!

It was all a horrible mistake. But now The Evil Dead is celebrated as a hilarious horror movie legend.

Despite its crappy special effects, the low-budget splatter film is beloved for its own sake and renowned for launching the careers of Spider-Man director Sam Raimi and cult superstar Bruce Campbell, high school pals from Michigan.

“The whole thing was torture!” the famously cleft-chinned Campbell tells Sun Media about shooting the movie. He punctuates his declaration with a rueful laugh that crackles over the phone from his Oregon home.

We are talking because of the splendid three-disc DVD set, The Evil Dead: Ultimate Edition. It is newly released as the final word on the first instalment of the Evil Dead franchise.

There are full and widescreen versions of the movie plus four hours of new extras, including unseen deleted scenes, a commentary by Raimi (with producer Robert Tapert) and another by Campbell.

The freshest DVD treasure is the third disc, Ladies of The Evil Dead, devoted to Campbell and his trio of femme co-stars: Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker and Theresa Tilly. That femme trio used to deny its involvement in this trashfest but now embrace it with a girlish enthusiasm that turns the documentaries into camp entertainment, like the movie.

The Evil Dead was released sporadically from 1981 to 1983, although filmed in Tennessee and Michigan in the winter of 1979-80. It was followed by Evil Dead II in 1987 and Army of Darkness in 1992.

“Look,” Campbell says of the humour that fans now see in the cult-crazy original, “we were not sophisticated enough to be winking during The Evil Dead. That movie’s a melodrama. It’s a failed melodrama!”

Campbell, playing Ashley (Ash) J. Williams, remembers uttering , “We can’t bury Shelly. She’s a friend of ours!” as straight dramatic dialogue.

“Ridiculous lines like that were never meant to be camp,” Campbell says. “I should go on the record saying that. The approach on the first Evil Dead movie was dead serious. There were basically zero jokes in the whole movie. What happens throughout the Evil Dead series is a slow build of becoming more sophisticated filmmakers.”

Evil Dead II had deliberate gags, Campbell says. “That’s where we started doing what you could call splat-stick — horror comedy. Then, if you want silly, comic-book gore, you go to Army of Darkness.

“But part one is for purists who just want carnage and mayhem and a simple little story. On that first one, it was the only movie where we had complete and absolute creative control.

“You’re supposed to have your first movie taken away from you and then you later fight for creative control. For us, we had it completely the opposite.”

At the same time — as Raimi, Campbell and the Ladies reveal in the commentaries and documentaries — shooting The Evil Dead for a meagre $400,000 in dreary, disorganized conditions during a cold snap in Tennessee was a nightmare.

Food and lodging was insufferable. Cast and crew would suddenly disappear. In a strange phone call from his father, Campbell heard about his parents divorcing. He later suffered a painful leg injury that Raimi and friends aggravated by poking with a stick. Other actors were also hurt in action scenes.

“It’s funny now,” Campbell tells Sun Media. “It wasn’t really funny then. It was like a miniature Apocalypse Now. It wasn’t until three or four movies later where we went, ‘Oh, that’s how you make movies! Oh, that’s a schedule!’ ”