Week 5: Watch a Movie I've Never Seen - The Evil Dead(1981)

Last year, during my senior year of college I began a journey through horror classics. The Exorcist, Friday the 13th(which I hate by the way), etcetera. A big one on that list was The Evil Dead, but I never actually got around to it. That has ended. I watched it. And perhaps if you stick around I'll give you my thoughts. Maybe, just maybe, that's actually the point of this post.

So. This movie. Where to begin. The plot maybe? Sure. Yeah. The premise is pretty good, maybe not so much now. Five college kids go to a cabin - and get this - it's in the woods. They find a creepy book in the cellar, and play a tape of some ancient incantations. Obviously this brings forth some evil shit. What's her name goes into the woods to investigate a spooky voice, and gets raped by a tree. And it's weird. And I don't even understand why it's in there. I mean, maybe it's cause this was written by, like, a twenty year old? It's just the weirdest thing, and it is never expanded on. But anyway. So What's her name one wants to leave, understandably, and Bruce Campbell drives her but the bridge is out, dun dun dun. So they go back and then it's pretty much everyone getting possessed one by one and getting killed by escalating violence.

My thoughts on this film can be summed up like so: the last quarter of this film was so, so good. If the other 3/4s of it were as good I would love it, but as it stands, I like this film. The last quarter is so, so good. Pretty much as soon as Ash decapitates his girlfriend with a shovel as she jumps out of her grave to kill him, this movie goes from fine, to reeeeaaaaal nice. The cinematography, the creeps/the spooks, the violence, etc. it all ramps up. There are so many really good moments at the end. Ash goes back into the cellar, and the house starts bleeding, and a pipe of blood bursts onto his head. He reaches at a mirror to touch it and it's made of water and he freaks out and a shadow goes by the window. I don't know. I can keep describing things, but what's the point.

The cinematography is rather interesting. I really loved the POV "monster cam" stuff, it was used so well, in the opinion of this one man. The meandering, handheld camera was quite incoming buzzword immersive. There was a lot of long takes of following characters while they look for their possessed friends. The lighting for most of the film was almost hilariously out of place, but at the end it got really wacky and I liked. Also the last shot of this film is so, so good, and it cuts to credits at the best time and the song over the credits is hilariously unexpected.

One biiiiiiig knock against the film is that the sound (especially the mixing) is bad. Maybe it was just the Amazon digital copy, but the mixing was so bad.

I can see why the film's a classic and it's hard to judge it today. The idea is thoroughly played out at this point, and the makeup effects are very low budget 1980. The special effects though are pretty good, or at the very least very entertaining. Now I get to watch Evil Dead 2.

Well that's that.