p e n g u i n d e v i l

Oh jiminey christmas, where to start? I feel the speechlessness welling up inside as I try to write these words (and down a rolling rock at the same time). But there is no point in beating around the bush I suppose. Regardless of what you might think of it (though I assume that we all feel equally about it), The Evil Dead is one of the most important, seminal, entertaining, enthralling and just plain fantastic films ever made! I was down in the bed for some general anesthetic recovery and I felt no fancy to watch any other film. The Evil Dead is the great horror classic that established Sam Raimi’s career (for better or worse) and introduced most of the world to the wonderful Bruce Campbell, in his leading role as the second great “Ashley” in filmdom!

In The Evil Dead, the godlike Bruce Campbell is Ashley, a fine chap who has come with four other young’un’s to some godforsaken (well, some gods have probably forsaken it) woods in the middle of gol-darned, b-f nowhere to rent a terrible, run down and creepy cabin. Of course, this nowhere isn’t nowhere to everything, as it seems to be filled with some terribly evil, rambunctious & witty spirits…. So even before they get to the cabin it is obvious that this vacation will not turn out well.





Strangely enough, they actually go into this cabin and decide to stay! And then, while traipsing around the creepy place, they head into, sigh, the basement… There they find a tabletop with such bad omens as: a shotgun, a reel to reel tape player (with a tape still in it), a creepy dagger with skulls all about its hilt and a book bound in flesh with a face on the cover (also, worst of all, a poster for The Hills Have Eyes)!





Of course, picking up books like that is no great idea and reading from books especially so… No matter how creepy they might be. But an even worse idea is to play the reel-to-reel tapes of someone reading the books aloud… Especially if the person who is reading is also recounting how things start to go awry once he started reading the book! For our heroes, there is little relief after this. With the first recitation of the verses, the steam starts to rise from the leaves on the ground outside and, not to give things away (though I hope that you have all seen this film many times over already), bad things start to happen to the characters. After leaving the cabin at night to follow up on a bad sensation, one of the girls is hauled off into the woods to be bound and violated by various plant matters, something that she doesn’t take to well to. In fact, after that experience, she doesn’t take to well to anything.





Of course, to be fair to her, anyone who gets into close contact with the haunters of the dark out there begins to react quite unfavorably. The Evil Dead is pretty much non-stop creepy, gore action. It is filled with terrible violence, much running from ominous cameras (if you haven’t seen it, you can’t even imagine how much running from ominous cameras there is), over-the-top ridiculous gore, horrid voices, delightfully evil dialogue, and an unsettling and creepy location that might make you not want to stroll into the woods again.





It’s not as over-the-top as Raimi’s more humorous, but equally great, Evil Dead Two a couple of years later, but The Evil Dead is highly recommended to everyone. Everyone… Regardless of taste, age or language.