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 the financial success of Evil Dead in 2013, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell knew that there was still an audience for the world of Evil Dead, even if the fanbase hadn’t really gotten behind Fede Alvarez’s more serious approach to the material. So, Raimi and his brother Ivan began working on screenplays that could serve as direct sequels to Army of Darkness.
The problem was that Army of Darkness had flopped at the box office, despite its dedicated fans, so raising money for a new film along those lines was going to be difficult. Rob Tapert suggested taking the idea to television, where the economics were much more favorable in the age of prestige TV. Tom Spezialy stepped in to help develop the series and before too long, Starz stepped up and gave them free reign to bring an unrated and unrestricted vision to the small screen. The show would ultimately run ten half-hour episodes for three seasons before finally being cancelled.
The only hang-up was that due to rights issues with Universal Pictures, they couldn’t mention anything that happened in Army of Darkness during the first season. Tapert was then able to iron out a deal for seasons two and three.
On October 31, 2015, Ash vs Evil Dead premiered with a second season already greenlit.
The first episode is entitled “El Jefe” and picks up approximately 30 years after the original trilogy. Ash now works as a stock “boy” at Value Stop after having spent the past three decades drifting from town to town, drinking heavily, womanizing, and keeping the Necronomicon under lock and key. Well, in a box, anyway. Sam Raimi directed this opening salvo and within moments any fears I might have had that they had lost a step were wiped away.
“El Jefe” opens with an action montage of Ash getting himself into a truss while listening to Deep Purple’s “Space Trucking” so he can go out and nail a drunk depressed woman in a dive bar toilet. A mid-coital appearance of a Deadite possession is almost enough to put him off finishing, and the look on his face as he goes back to work while expecting demons to burst in at any moment is priceless — and kind of sums up what we’re in for: cheap thrills, exploitation, and exuberant fun.
And what triggered the return of the Deadite threat after 30 years?
In truly classic f-Ash-ion, after a night of smoking weed, Ash tried to impress a young lady by reading from the Necronomicon Ex Mortis.
In the meantime, police officer Amanda Fisher (Jill Marie Jones) has her own run in with the Deadites and ends up losing her partner, her job, and maybe her sanity, in a violent extended sequence that hearkens back to The Evil Dead for pure visceral scares and gore. It seems the Deadites know who Fisher is and have a bit of a grudge to settle. Luckily Lucy Lawless shows up briefly later in the episode to reassure her that she’s not going crazy and that sometimes “what you think you saw, is exactly what you saw.”
But back to Ash…
After his hot night in the bathroom, he decides to leave town, but not before fellow stockboy/clean-up boy Pablo Simon Bolivar (Ray Santiago) adds a little more to the Evil Dead mythos, by positing that Ash may be the chosen one, “El Jefe,” who will battle and defeat the demonic forces that are building all around them. But he can’t do it alone, so Pablo and new hire Kelly Maxwell (Dana DeLorenzo) are “recruited” and by the episode’s end, are bonded as a team and ready to go out and kick some Deadite ass.
The second episode, “Bait” recruited the extremely underrated contemporary horror director Michael J. Bassett to run things behind the camera and he commits entirely to the splatterstick mentality that is necessary with this material as we are treated with two of the bloodiest, nastiest, most hilariously over-the-top Deadite kills you’re going to see on TV.
The pacing on this show is damned near perfect. The runtime is filled with action, comedy, horror, and more gore than you can shake a stick at, all while moving the plot forward at breakneck speed. We even get character development thrown in as an added bonus as Mimi Rogers guest stars as Kelly’s recently deceased (or maybe not) mom.
Rogers is delightful, playing the mystery with just the right amount of conviction to keep viewers guessing right up until Ash punches her in the face at dinner (in a laugh-out-loud moment). By the end of the episode, Kelly is fully on-board the Ash train, and Pablo has, if nothing else, gotten himself one step closer to her affections. Even if he had to lie to Ash to do so.
Michael J. Bassett also directs the third episode, “Books from Beyond,” and maintains the high level of action, comedy, and over-the-top gore. The CG effects are a bit wonky here and there, but when they cut to the practical effects there are gallons of blood and the Deadites look every bit as horrific as they should. And this episode we meet a new creature: the demon Eligos (Ben Fransham).
This opens up the mythology of the show in a way that hadn’t really been attempted before and I like it. Also broadening the narrative is the return of Lucy Lawless as Ruby. We don’t know a lot about her just yet, but she’s known to the Deadites and has apparently been tracking the Necronomicon for a while. She also has no qualms about torturing and brutalizing the Deadites to get the information she wants.
I like the fact that Ash vs Evil Dead is embracing Ash’s inherent hyper-masculine idiocy without simply blowing it off as a joke. Sure, he’s a dickhead and is directly responsible for the impending end of the world, but he’s also heroic when he has to be and has even developed into a more complicated character in just these first three episodes. He’s never going to stop being an insensitive jerk, or an insufferable sexist ass, but he’s so damned charismatic that when he does the right thing, all that stuff just falls to the wayside.
The fourth episode of Ash vs Evil Dead was directed by David Frazee and written by James Eagan. Frazee is a reliable workhorse of a TV director, having a strong background as a cinematographer before moving solely into producing and directing over the past five years. Eagan is a writer with more of a comedy background, but has been a staff writer for Ash, contributing to the first three episodes before getting full credit for “Brujo.”
The script is pretty strong as our heroes arrive at Pablo’s uncle’s (Hemky Madera) Deadite-proofed compound. The main focus of the episode is on Ash, as is to be expected, who undergoes a hallucinogenic spirit quest to discover the secrets that he’s just too dim to find on his own — in his own mind.
The episode isn’t entirely focused on Ash, though. Kelly, after smacking the demon Eligos into dispersion last episode with the Necronomicon, has come down with a small case of DEMONIC POSSESSION! And her possession gives Eligos a chance to kill Ash once and for all, by entering his hallucinatory vision quest and trapping him inside his mind forever.
Meanwhile, Ruby teams up with Amanda and claims to be the long-lost sister of Annie Knowby (from Evil Dead II) and blames Ash for the murders of her entire family thirty years earlier.
Episode 5, “The Host,” opens with Ash gagged and bound as Brujo prepares to perform an exorcism, thanks to Kelly/Eligos claiming that Ash has the demon in him. It’s pretty standard fare, but I have to admit, Ash’s running commentary (muffled through the gag in his mouth) as Kelly accused him and Brujo explained the pain that was on the way was hilarious.
The episode’s climax is what I’m looking for in this show. Ash’s zen demon-killer moment, “Shoot first, think never!” is clever and the end of Eligos is suitably gross. Not as gross as it could – or maybe should – have been, but it does the trick and before long our heroes are back in the Delta 88 and on the road again, and Ash has been supplied with a new robotic hand scavenged from game system parts.
The most impressive things that the show did over this first half of the Season One was introduce new characters that are not only charismatic, but actually serve as a fantastic balance to the numbskull antics of Ash. Ray Santiago brings just the right balance of innocence, idealism, and good intentions to make sure that Ash doesn’t veer entirely off into pure self-preservation. And Dana DeLorenzo provides an energetic enthusiasm as Kelly, and sometimes surprises even Ash in her bloodthirsty drive to avenge her lost family.
The world-building is also very nicely done, expanding on the normal, everyday Deadites and their wickedly intelligent hostility (remember, Deadites love to fuck with their victims before killing them and claiming their souls), to include full-fledged demons and monsters. At the same time, there are multiple references back to the original films that are seamlessly interwoven with the plot as Ash is forced to confront the events he barely survived all those years ago.
There’s just a lot that can be done with Ash vs Evil Dead that hasn’t really been explored before in the franchise. Show developers Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, and Tom Spezialy and showrunner Craig DiGregorio had a great opportunity to make something special: a horror comedy that doesn’t skimp on either the horror or the comedy.