It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
After failing to find an audience (or critical love) for his next feature, the crime comedy Crimewave — a team-up with Joel and Ethan Coen, no less — Sam Raimi returned to the world of Evil Dead with Evil Dead II (1987). Whereas the first film had at least started out more serious before leaning into gross-out gore, Evil Dead II kept its tongue firmly in its cheek from the very start thanks to the suggestion of co-screenwriter Scott Spiegel. As much remake as it was a sequel, Evil Dead II tells pretty much the exact same story as The Evil Dead, but with more money allotted to making the film look better and allowing for more confidence in the comedic storytelling. You can seriously tell that Raimi loves the Three Stooges.
There are changes, of course, including retelling the first film in about ten minutes with only Ash and Linda (recast with Denise Bixler) coming to the cabin and facing the Deadites, but in the end it all boils down to Bruce Campbell’s Ash taking on Deadites (as well as his own possessed hand) in a splatterstick showdown that features more gore than just about any other film up to that point. What really helped to make Evil Dead II stand out was the way it used slapstick humor to help soften the blow of the horror.
Throughout the course of this film, Campbell establishes himself as a brilliant physical comedian, highlighted in his hilarious battle with his possessed hand (a scene referenced in Raimi’s 2022 Marvel movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) There are jokes scattered throughout the film, some hilarious, some ridiculously corny, but all helped to create an infectiously goofy atmosphere that makes the film a joy to watch. At the same time, when it’s gory, it is over-the-top fire hose sprays of blood gory, comparable to the climactic scene in Peter Jackson’s notorious Dead Alive, which clearly found inspiration in Raimi’s approach.
As the film goes on, Annie Knowby (Sarah Berry), the daughter of the missing Professor Knowby, whose translation of the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis awakened the Deadites, arrives with her research partner Ed Getley (Richard Domeier) and locals Jake (Dan Hicks) and his girlfriend Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley DePaiva). Their additions to the cast not only give the story more bodies for the demons to possess, but Annie provides the impetus for figuring out how to survive the night. For the most part. Annie steps up as secondary lead once her mother’s possessed corpse is discovered in the cellar, played to inspired excess by Ted Raimi, Sam’s brother, who coins the iconic Deadite catchphrase “I’ll swallow your soul!”
It is with the arrival of the other characters that we also get the introduction of the iconic chain saw hand and sawed off shotgun with its snazzy back holster, which as I’m sure we all know, is groovy.
In one of the most inspired endings in horror cinema, Evil Dead II concludes by (Spoiler Alert!!) hurling Ash — along with Raimi’s broken-down Oldsmobile (which makes appearances in every Raimi film) — back in time to 1300 AD, where he is confronted by a group of knights before saving them from a flying Deadite and being hailed as a prophesied hero. This time travel concept had been the idea that Raimi had wanted to originally make the story of Evil Dead II, but in order to secure financing from Dino De Laurentiis and the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, Raimi was required to make the film more in line with the first installment.
I have to admit, I am glad that Evil Dead II played out the way it did, because it became an instant classic of splatterific horror comedy. It’s a crime that Bruce Campbell didn’t become a mainstream superstar after this performance. As it stands, even if this had been the end of the franchise, Ash J. Williams had arrived atop the pantheon of horror heroes.
And little did we know it at the time, but Raimi and Campbell’s next jaunt into the world of the Evil Dead would pick up exactly where this one left off, with a few minor revisions.