44. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

Sam Raimi, 1987

“Groovy.”

What a great movie. Honestly, there are few movies that are more shameless and fun than this. The film opens in a recap of the first movie, the aptly titled The Evil Dead. Ash and his girl friend go up to a cabin in Michigan. Unfortunately, the basement of the cabin holds the Necronomicon ex Mortis, the Book of the Dead. Ash foolishly reads aloud from the book, releasing all manner of evil into the woods. The evil quickly kills and then possesses his girl friend. Ash has to lop her head off with a shovel. Yeah. It’s pretty awesome already, isn’t it? And this is only like the first four or five minutes. From there on out, the evil sets its sights squarely on old Ash. Ash, by the way, is played by Bruce Campbell. You may remember Bruce as the lead from Bubba Ho-Tep. He is, without a doubt, the finest B movie actor working today. Instantly and effortlessly charming and possessed of both a sharp wit and enough stupidity to get himself in trouble, Ash is the perfect horror film protagonist.

Soon enough, the evil has repossessed and resurrected Ash’s dead, and headless, girl friend, resulting in a very eerie dance performed by an already suspiciously decomposed corpse. When she pirouettes, her head stays in one place, unturning. So cool. Well, Ash defeats her, but not before she bites his head. Now Ash has to fight his hand, possessed by the evil. What follows is some of the finest slapstick comedy of the last twenty years. Ash wrestles with his own hand, tackling it to the ground until the hand gets the, well, the upper hand and knocks Ash silly by breaking plates over his head in the sink. Keep in mind, this is Ash’s own hand, attached to him. It’s hilarious. This is the film’s great strength. It is by far the film that most effortlessly blends grueling horror with uproarious comedy that I have ever seen. It’s perfect. At one moment, the screen is covered with blood and the next a man fights his own hand. Before long, Ash is forced to lop off his hand with a hatchet. This just means that he has to fight a rather whiley disembodied hand in a sort of Tom and Jerry manner. Horror returns to the picture soon after as Ash continues to go nutty, tormented by the cackling animal heads, stuffed and mounted on the cabin wall. Before long there are also more than enough zombies, full ones and not just hands, for Ash to contend with. This leads to the greatest weapon ever in the history of film. Ash goes out to the tool shed and fastens a chainsaw to his still bloody stump.

At any rate, I don’t get to this often, so let’s take a look at those drive-in totals. We’ve got two zombie breasts. Six dead bodies. Blood-spewing. Zombie detached-hand attack. Hand spearing. Hand sawing. Flying-eyeball swallowing. Fruit-cellar demon attacks. Zombie axing. Heads roll. Hands roll. Everything rolls. Glopola City. Double-barrel sawed-off shotgun blast through the eyes of a demon Fu. With Dan Hicks as the redneck guide searching for his dead girlfriend, Kassie Weslye as the girl who gets raped, pillaged and murdered by the woods (not IN the woods, BY the woods). Campbell has the classic line: “Am I fine? We just cut up our girlfriends with a chainsaw. Does that sound fine? Four stars. Joe Bob and I say check it out.

A quick final note: Gordon Parks, the director of Shaft, died Tuesday at the age of 93. This is decidedly ungroovy. I urge all cats to not cop out, especially when there’s danger all about, in his memory.