The Evil Dead

It takes a pair of balls to make meat like this on a budget of $375k, and for a then !!! twenty-two year old !!! The Evil Dead was a dream come true for Sam Raimi, as he and Bruce Campbell had saved up for it during their high school years and largely financed the entire project themselves. To be honest, I didn't believe it could be that good :))), however, already here, in Raimi's first "major" film, you can see his unmistakable style, some excellent directorial ideas, and an amazing ability to create, in conjunction with the sometimes quite unpleasant music :)), a great atmosphere that will have you gasping from the first minutes. An absolutely stunning work for its time, and one that has given Sam Raimi a reputation as one of the most interesting icons of film directing. (2010-02-09)

Since the remake is knocking on the door, I decided to watch the original 1981 film without being some kind of horror movie fan. And I have to say that this 30+ year old film does not do the genre any shame. Many of the scenes are nicely paced, the atmosphere is thick, and the visual effects are quite well done for the time (the rape in the woods was really scary). Otherwise, the make-up artists also did a great job and created more than one hideous face. (2013-03-17)

On the one hand, it is perhaps too frantic and prolonged by several unnecessarily long scenes of destroying "friends", yet on the other hand, it is definitely imaginative, playful, solidly suspenseful atmospheric fun. I saw Evil Dead for the first time today, so I really can't go on and on about nostalgia, VHS tapes and whatnot. But even so, the film has a kind of special charm that is hard to describe. I'm curious about the sequel. (2012-07-27)

The first half is excellent. With a minimum of resources, Raimi manages to evoke an oppressive atmosphere of fear. The tree rape scene is something that is not easily forgotten. But the second half is terribly jumbled, as if Raimi didn't know what he wanted to do and was paying for his inexperience as a filmmaker. What I mean is that the scenes are poorly sequenced. In one scene there is a brutal death, and in the one that immediately follows, the characters look uninterested, as if not much had actually happened a few minutes before. I consider Evil Dead to be merely a good, not great, precursor to the flawless sequel. (2002-06-28)

The cult value, of course, prevails. If it hadn't become such a theme, there would be no reason to revisit this slasher, but history would have it otherwise. Today, however, the first film is like a bit of Deja vu, a strange sense of Ash having two hands, of not making fun of the Necronomicon yet, because this is the actual first encounter with evil. And, of course, Bruce is still a young innocent man here. It's interesting, but other parts of the Evil Dead phenomenon have more charm for me. (2019-02-21)