The Evil Dead (1982)-"NC-17"

Run Time:85 minutes

3 and 1/2 stars out of 4

Ever since I saw Sam Raimi's Evil Dead on display at the video store as a film that must be rented by a person that was 18 or older, I knew that I had to see it. No, this movie is not rated NC-17 for extensive nudity, it's just incredibly, graphically violent. The Evil Dead is the story of five friends who rent a cabin together, deep in the backcountry, for a romantic and fun-filled weekend. When the two guys, Ash (Bruce Campbell) and Scotty (Hal Delrich), stumble across a bizarre assortment of weapons, a book bound in flesh, and a tape recorder in the basement, things get a little strange. When they play the tape, it reveals that the cabin's former owner was an archaeologist. He had been excavating a Candarian burial site, when he stumbled upon the Necronomicon, an ancient Book of the Dead. When the man reads a passage into the tape recorder, evil spirits in the forest are awakened by the chant. The spirits possess one girl, and they turn her into a hideous, Exorcist-like monster called a deadite, desperate for the flesh of others. When our hero, Ash, finds out that the only way to truly stop a Deadite is through total dismemberment, he must fight to keep himself alive against the blood-thirsty monsters that used to be his best friends. True, this movie has its scary parts, though I would not agree with the back cover in saying that it would "bring screams from the base of your spine and the depths of your soul". No, this movie is gore for gore's sake, a worse-than-slasher genre that is mostly succeeds in only making the audience laugh, rather than urinate in fear. Sam Raimi, however, had so much success in directed this film, that he went on to make two sequels, also starring Bruce Campbell, both of which try to be much less serious and much more laughable. Evil Dead is a difficult film to review. From a "professional" standpoint this film was not exactly a moving cinematic experience. Yet, I couldn't help liking Bruce Campbell's mannerisms and facial expressions, and the storyline is flexible enough to have several rather scary parts along with a bunch of other comic scenes. This film was a labor of love on Raimi and Campbell's parts, the final product only coming after years of production and probably decades of conception. As gorey, zombie-type farces go, this is a classic, right up there with Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985) and Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987), and is way too much fun to miss out on because of an arcane "NC-17" rating.