Original Sin

Film: Drag Me to Hell
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

Sam Raimi wants you to know that he’s not playing and Drag Me to Hell is serious. It’s not easy to make a genuinely scary horror movie with a rating lower than R, but Raimi pulls out as many of the stops as he can to give genuine scares in a PG-13 movie. In the first couple of minutes, we meet a young boy who feels as if he is being pursued by a dangerous entity. It turns out that he stole a necklace from a Romani cart. Moments later, we see the young boy literally dragged to Hell—this is a kid, maybe about 10, being dragged down to eternal, unending torture for that crime.

Jump to the film’s present, and we’re introduced to Christine Brown (Alison Lohman, in one of her last major roles before she effectively retired from acting), a loan officer at a bank. Christine is in competition with coworker Stu Rubin (Reggie Lee) for an assistant manager position, and Stu seems to be in the lead, thanks in large part to his ruthlessness. Wanting that promotion and everything that comes with it, Christine decides to be more aggressive herself, and denies an extension to Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver), an old Romani woman who has fallen behind on her loan payments. Offended by this and humiliated, the old woman attacks Christine, something that is repeated much more violently in the parking lot at the end of the day. The upshot of this is that Christine finds herself the subject of a curse placed on her. After three days of torment, a spirit called Lamia will drag her down to Hell.

Ten Days of Terror!: Darkman

Film: Darkman
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

It’s hard not to love Darkman just a little bit. It’s such a completely bizarre collection of parts and performances that it’s almost inexplicable. This is very much a superhero movie that was made in the style of Tim Burton’s original Batman film. It has the same kind of energy, and at the same time, it’s hard not to see this as at least a partial influence on the later Batman films in the original quadrilogy. Darkman is Grand Guignol on a massive scale. It’s also a film that features Liam Neeson and Frances McDormand.

We’re going to start with Dr. Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson), a scientist who is working on creating a new type of synthetic skin. He can’t get it to last more than 99 minutes, once it is exposed to light. At the same time, attorney girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) has discovered that local developer Louis Strack, Jr. (Colin Friels) has been bribing the zoning commission. She leaves the document indicting him at Peyton’s lab. Shortly thereafter, Peyton is visited by Robert Durant (Larry Drake), a mob boss, who is also implicated in the paperwork. In an effort to get it back, he kills Westlake’s assistant and blows up the lab, leaving Dr. Westlake horribly burned and scarred.

Ten Days of Terror!: Army of Darkness

Film: Army of Darkness
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

The Evil Dead trilogy is much beloved by horror fans. There are plenty who would put Army of Darkness at the top of their list of the three. That’s not the case for me. While it is absolutely the easiest of the three to watch, it’s also my least favorite of the three. Now, before you go storming off into the comments to tell me how wrong I am (and yes, you’re still welcome to do that), rest assured that I love all three. On Letterboxd, my reviews for the three films are Evil Dead, 4.5 stars; Evil Dead 2, 4.5 stars; and Army of Darkness, 4 stars. When I say I think it’s the least of the three, we’re not talking a massive drop off.

Honestly, having just rewatched the film, it’s kind of odd that my rating for it is that high. Army of Darkness has serious problems of a technical nature. There’s some truly terrible rear projection work in a lot of places and while the stop-motion and puppet work is impressive, it’s also really obvious in many cases. It’s sort of the curse of having a bigger budget. Army of Darkness had a budget about three times larger than Raimi had for Evil Dead 2, which meant he attempted a lot more, and not all of it worked as well as it could have.

Descent into Hell

Film: A Simple Plan
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

Recently, a few people around the country won a share of the massive Powerball jackpot and have gotten to experience the dream of suddenly finding themselves in the middle of a vast fortune. It’s a common dream. In movie terms, three movies of the last 20 or so years have taken a dark vision of finding a fortune. Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave looked at the psychological aspects of three people who suddenly can’t trust each other when their roommate drops dead while holding onto millions. A similar basic story in the hands of the Coen brothers yielded No Country for Old Men. It’s the movie that falls chronologically in the middle of those, Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan that is perhaps the darkest version of that basic story.

Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) is a fairly regular guy working in a feed store in a small Minnesota town. In fact, the only thing that really distinguishes him from almost everyone else is the fact that he is college educated. His wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) works at the library and is pregnant and due any day. One night, Hank is out with his slow brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jacob’s friend Lou (Brent Briscoe). A fox runs in front in Jacob’s truck, and Jacob steers into a tree. His dog chases the fox and the three men go looking for the dog. What they find is not the dog, but a crashed small plane with a dead pilot. Also in the plane is a large duffel bag holding more than $4 million in banded stacks of hundreds.

Off Script: Evil Dead II

Film: Evil Dead II
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

I had a birthday recently. My family bought me a Nook. The new Nooks are essentially tablets; they still have the e-reader capabilities of the old ones, of course, but the new ones are all about tapping in to that tablet market. The other night, I downloaded the NetFlix app and watched Double Indemnity as a test. It worked great. Today, I thought I’d go with a classic of a different sort. When I saw Evil Dead II appear on the streaming menu, I knew what I was watching today. I have holes in my personal collection. I don’t own Casablanca, for instance. If you pushed me, though, I’d say not owning a DVD copy of Evil Dead II is a bigger miss.

Evil Dead II is less a sequel of the original Evil Dead and much more a remake with much more slapstick and comedic sensibilities. It doesn’t so much pick up from where the first film left as retell the first story quickly and with far fewer characters and then spin off from there. In this version, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) retreat to a secluded cabin in the middle of nowhere. As it turns out, the cabin was being used by a professor and his wife to translate an ancient book called the Necronomicon. Reading the passages aloud causes a demon to escape and possess the wife of the professor. Ash and Linda know none of this, of course, but when Ash finds the professor’s tape recording and plays it, Linda is possessed. Ash kills here and then is prevented from leaving the cabin, meaning that the terrible events may well play out again.

We're Gonna Get You

Film: The Evil Dead
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Sometimes I am forced to watch a movie before I am prepared to see it. I’ve been really trying to concentrate as much as possible on films that I haven’t seen before for the last several months, and while there are a few exceptions here, most of the films I’ve watched for this blog this year were new to me. However, as a member of the 1001 Must See Movies Blog Club, the weekly assigned reviews plan out some of my viewing. The Evil Dead is coming up, so I figured I’d knock it out now rather than wait. It’s the same reason I watched Citizen Kane last week.

When I first looked through the Tome of Knowledge, I was mildly surprised and disappointed that The Evil Dead made the list while Evil Dead 2 did not. The sequel is in many ways the superior film. Buoyed by the surprise success of the first film and with a better and larger budget, the sequel has better effects, more effects, and more gore. It’s also far less a horror film and much more a parody. Sure, there are scares a-plenty, but it’s an homage to Moe, Larry, and Curly, and it’s campy as all hell. “Why,” I thought, “couldn’t the compilers of the book see that it was a better film?”

Having just rewatched The Evil Dead, I get it. Evil Dead 2 is a better film, but it’s not as important to the genre. Our original film set an interesting standard for low budget horror. It shows that a really good idea, creativity, and invention is all that’s needed to make a groundbreaking, entertaining film. Raimi, because he had to cobble things together and work with inventiveness instead of money, did some truly innovative work.

The story is simple. A group of five people, two guys and three girls, rents a cabin in the woods of Tennessee. While there, they discover a few artifacts from the previous inhabitants of the cabin, an archaeology professor and his wife. Specifically, they find a terrible book “bound in human skin and inked in human blood” as well as a tape recording of the professor talking about the book. They listen to the tape, which contains the incantations to bring terrible spirits into the world and allow them to possess the living. And so the quintet is attacked by the spirits, get possessed, and kill each other off for about an hour before the film ends. That’s really it.

The Evil Dead is, by definition, amateur film, but it’s never amateurish. Like many truly great independent visions of beginning filmmakers, it was made with whatever money Raimi and his cohorts could beg, borrow, or steal. High-interest loans, investments from local dentists, and cutting corners created this film.

Where the film really shines is both in Raimi’s imaginative playing with horror tropes and in his incredibly inventive use of the camera. Our opening shot, for instance, comes from the perspective of whatever it is that lurks in the woods. It skims low over the ground, tipping and swaying. Evidently, this was done by strapping the camera to a 2x4 and running with it through the woods. It’s a great shot, and such a low budget, creative way to do it.

Our five unhappy campers consist of two couples: Ash (Bruce Campbell) and Linda (Betsy Baker) and Scotty (Richard DeManincor) and Shelly (Theresa Tilly) as well as Ash’s sister Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss). Cheryl is the focus of most of the weirdness initially. She gets a few flashes of things to come, but it’s not until the incantations are recited from the tape that we get full-on weird. Things really switch into high when Cheryl wanders out into the woods and is attacked. She’s not attacked by a creature, but by the woods themselves in one of the most brutal and unpleasant rape sequences ever filmed.

Another example of the inventiveness here is Cheryl’s possession. While Shelly and Linda test Linda’s ESP with a deck of cards (Linda fails horribly, but Shelly pretends that she’s guessing cards correctly), it is Cheryl who starts guessing the cards correctly in an increasingly disturbed and disturbing voice. She then turns and has become a vision from hell—makeup that looks like a child applied it to a doll and completely white eyes.

As the film progresses, Shelly becomes possessed, then Linda, then Scotty, leaving poor Ash to battle them all with a found shotgun and a chainsaw. Linda is the most terrible, with her awful makeup and sing-song child’s voice, cooing “We’re gonna get you…” In the process of fighting them off, Ash is covered with more stage blood in varying colors than has ever been dumped on a poor, unfortunate actor before or since (or at least until the sequel).

The effects don’t hold up. They didn’t hold up when they were created thanks to the low budget that went almost entirely to some claymation effects at the end of the film. And so what? The Evil Dead is all about getting as much scare and gore and creeps as possible in a terribly short running time with a cash flow that paid for Karo syrup and non-dairy creamer instead of actual stage blood. And it works. It’s damned effective.

The Evil Dead, if nothing else, exists as a monument to what is possible with some imagination and some real dedication to create something. Thanks to this film, Bruce Campbell has made a career in fun, low budget films and has a huge cult following. Thanks to this film, Sam Raimi has gone on to direct big budget films like the Spider-Man franchise. Oh, and the assistant film editor for this was none other than Joel Coen, who’s had something more than a career in the business as well. Not bad for some guys from Michigan.

Why to watch The Evil Dead: Truly original, low-budget horror and the start of at least three great careers.
Why not to watch: Tree rape.