30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #1

The Evil Dead/ Evil Dead II/ Army of Darkness

      Okay, okay.  Yes, I know I sort of cheated again.  Hey, at least they're all of the same series, right?  At least I didn't include the remake.  I have to include all three of the films as I saw them all around the same time, and I love them all.  They're all very different from each other, but at the same time hold on to some connecting ideas.  Never mind that the beginnings of the second and third films retcon the ends of the last ones a bit.  I'll explain that later.

   I even own a brick from the fireplace of the original Evil Dead cabin, which I visited the remains of in Morristown, TN ten years ago.  (I do not recommend going to find it.  It's hard to find and it's on private property way back in the woods.  As of 10 years ago, all that was left was part of the fireplace, the cabin having been burned down in the 1980s.)  But here's a picture of my brick.

     Let's start with a bit of history, as usual.  The Evil Dead was filmed in Tennessee in 1979 by a young 20 year old novice filmmaker named Sam Raimi.  It starred some green actors, noticeably Sam Raimi's childhood friend Bruce Campbell, who had acted in his amateur films before this.  The film was financed by showing a short they had filmed with the same subject matter called Within The Woods.  The film's plot is simple.  Five friends travel up to a secluded cabin in the mountains.  They find odd artifacts in the cellar, including a tape recorder, a strange dagger, and a book bound in human flesh.  They decide to play the tape recorder, which spouts out some ancient passages from the book.  This raises the evil in the woods that sequentially possesses the friends and turns them into evil killing machines.  Much gore and chaos ensues.  The film was not a pleasant one to make.  They used old fashioned thick hard contacts painted white for the possessed, which were painful to wear and could only be left in for 15 minutes at a time.  They had medical mishaps when the nearest hospital was miles away and there were no telephones out there.  The fog machines they used were putting out oil-based fog, which is toxic.  The actors had to throw themselves forcefully against walls and doorknobs and bookshelves over and over again.  Still, things got done eventually.  It took a few years to get all the shots, the music, the editing (done by a then unknown Joel Coen) done.  It was finally released in 1981 independently city to city very slowly.  It got good critical reviews, but was not a box office success, making a little less than 2 million dollars.  Siskel and Ebert didn't like it because it was a gore film, as they crusaded against these films in the 1980s.

    Evil Dead II came about purely because the film Sam Raimi made after The Evil Dead, called Crimewave was a critical and box office failure.  Everyone hated it, even Raimi and Campbell.  Normally back then this would cost new film-makers their careers, but Dino De Laurentiis, a popular producer back in the 1980s, was pressured by none other than Stephen King to finance Evil Dead II.  King had given the first movie a glowing review, which had propelled its fortunes.  Dino decided to help, and the movie started filming in a junior high school gymnasium in Wadesboro, North Carolina and the surrounding woods.  The filming of this movie went easier than the first due to a larger budget, having an actual production company, working with KNB Effects Group for makeup, and having better actors.  The film also has a markedly slapstick tone mixed in with its horror and gore effects, which has become known as "splatstick".  The movie is a remake/sequel, with the first few minutes of the movie rapidly redoing the first film, but with only 2 people, and the rest of the movie having new stuff.  The movie made 5 million in theaters in 1987 and was a critical success.  Even Roger Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars in his newspaper review.  However, on Siskel and Ebert At The Movies, Siskel didn't like the film, and Ebert backtracked his like for the film a bit.  Sorry, couldn't find the clip for this one, though it used to be on youtube.

    Army of Darkness was the only film in the series to be studio-backed.  Universal gave Raimi a small $13 million budget to do this film, due to the success of Darkman two years earlier.  The film was again partially financed by Dino De Laurentiis.  However, in post-production, the studio took over quite a bit, after Dino had given Raimi carte blanche to make the film he wanted.  They forced him to change the downbeat ending to a more positive one, and to add some backstory to the beginning of the film.  So we see a retconned ending of Evil Dead II, with yet another actress playing Linda (Bridget Fonda here), but it ends the same way the second movie did; Ash being caught in a portal and landing (literally) in the middle ages to again fight the deadites.  The film is almost completely a comedy/adventure film this time, with very little horror in it. The movie didn't do that well in the box office and didn't get as good reviews as the first two did.  Still, it's become a cult classic close to as much as the other two, partially due to airings on the Sci-Fi Channel in the 1990s, which is how I first saw part of the film, though I didn't know what it was at the time. Again, Siskel and Ebert (especially cynical Siskel) didn't really care for it.

    I first saw the last 20 minutes of Army of Darkness at my aunt's when I was probably 11 or 12.  I thought it was great, but didn't know what the film was.  I wouldn't find out for a few years.  I got really into horror films when I was around 15 and was allowed to watch R rated films.  I didn't yet know of this series, but found out about the first film by what I call going down the rabbit hole.  This is similar to what happens on Wikipedia now, where you start looking up something, then hours later due to clicking different blue links to related topics, you're suddenly looking at something totally unrelated to your original search.  Well, what I was looking up wasn't unrelated, but Dario Argento films aren't really like Evil Dead...  Evil Dead has more in common with Lucio Fulci.  After reading about the film's plot, I thought it sounded great.  Most horror films don't live up to my expectations...  This one did.  Boy did it ever.  It surpassed my expectation by a mile.  I had never seen, and really haven't since seen a film this off-the-wall, no-holds-barred assault on the senses.  It starts slow... almost boring.  The acting is high-school level cheese.  But then the possessions start.  The blood starts flowing, people get thrown all over the place, things jump out from everywhere, there's a great amount of suspense due to the amount of jump scares, the camera is constantly moving in odd ways... a woman gets raped by a tree! It's what I'd been waiting to see for years!  (Well, minus the crap acting and the tree part.)   I cannot tell you how many times I watched the first movie the first year after I saw it the first time.  It must have been at least once every two weeks.  I wasn't only enjoying the movie every time I watched it, I was studying it.  Finally the type of film I wanted to  make I was seeing on screen!  This was what I wanted to do with my life.

     Not long after I first saw the first film, I borrowed a VHS copy of Evil Dead II.  Holy cow!  This one's great too.  It has the same plot, but it's totally different!  I must admit, though I liked Evil Dead II, it didn't have the same massive effect that the first film did.  It's not as brutal.  It's a Looney Tunes cartoon brought to life and slapped together with Evil Dead.  There's a disembodied hand that causes all sorts of hijinks, there's a guy with a shotgun to replace his aforementioned hand, there's dancing headless corpses, laughing moose heads and lamps... Now that is awesome, but it's not scary.  There's better effects work on this film, mostly due to KNB Effects Group and the bigger budget, but there's less real gore here.  They decided to go for odd colored gore here instead of the more believable dark red blood of the first film.  Here we get bright red blood and different colored splashes of other liquids.  The acting has improved, however.  The film is considered more of a classic than the first movie, these days, but I can't agree.  I consider it to be an equal.  They both were highly original and great low-budget films done right.

    By the time I'd seen the second film, I knew that Army of Darkness was what I had seen part of on the Sci-Fi channel years earlier.  I was looking forward to seeing the whole thing.  Again, I loved it.  It's not as original or as cutting-edge as the first two and it's not scary in any way, but it's a whole lot of fun and really funny to boot.  The acting is at about the same level as Evil Dead II.  That is to say, it's servicable, but it's not great.  There's little gore in this film.  It was the first film to actually be rated, being rated R.  It was originally given an X rating for some reason, which makes no sense to me.  I've seen the "bootleg edition" which has all the deleted stuff put back in, and there's nothing that would remotely cause an X rating.  However, this was 1992, and the MPAA were horrible back then.  Heck, this film would be rated PG-13 today, and only due to fantasy violence and language.  There's scarier more violent stuff in Harry Potter.  No, this film is purely for fun.  One thing that drew me to this film was that it was partially a celebration of stop-motion animation, which as I've stated before, I love.  There's lots of skeletons brought to life in this film to storm a castle and retrieve the Book of The Dead from Ash.  And the skeletons are funny as hell.

And unlike many people, I prefer the ending of the theatrical version instead of the ending shown in Europe.  

   It's more fun that way.

    So ends my list, folks.  Here we have the three films that did the most to form the person I am today.  I own all three films in quite a few different versions/forms.  Bruce Campbell is my hero, and is quite possibly the best example of the everyday man thrown into the unexpected situation.  He's stupid at times, he doesn't want to save everyone, he can be a jerk, but he has to deal get out alive. Sam Raimi got me making amateur short films with friends in my teenage years, which was a lot of fun and I wish I could still do that.  I loved to copy his innovative camera rigs and movements which sadly I could find no clips of.  Putting a camera on a 2x4 board and holding the board by two strings to give it a gliding movement, and get the camera to go pretty much anywhere including close to the ground is something I find genius.  If you want to learn to make a low budget film, listen to any commentary done by Raimi or Campbell on The Evil Dead.  Or read If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell to find out the recipe they used for fake blood and some of the effects on the film.  I've found these films to be a great help to me.  They made me find myself.  They're more popular now due to DVD than when I first saw them, but they're still just as special to me.  If you're one of the few that haven't seen these films, do so immediately.  There's no excuse.

I hope you folks have enjoyed this list, and I'm sorry for all the Facebook and Twitter advertisements for them.  I hope the list has been informative, and gotten you to know me better.  More lists will come eventually, along with one-offs and reviews.  So stay tuned!