Evil Dead II

"Workshed!"

The importance of this film is very hard to overstate. When I first watched it in the theater with my cousin at the tender age of 13 I never expected that two decades later it would have cured world hunger and the common cold. Alright, so maybe it only managed to scare a pair of teenage girls out of my theater within the first five minutes- but that's pretty damn important when you're 13 and hormones are kicking in with all the rage of a Candarian Demon. Come back here, girls!

In actuality, my libido was the LAST thing I was thinking about when this film was running. At 13, I was admittedly scared shitless at what might leap off the screen at me. This film was the big, bad Rated R. People died in those films if they weren't careful. In retrospect, I think the only thing that kept me from running in the footsteps of the two girls who wigged out during the decapitation scene was the fact that Evil Dead II made me laugh as often as it made me jump in fear.



If nothing else, Sam Raimi taught the world that horror and intentional humor go together like peanut butter and jelly. Sure, you can laugh at all of the unintentional humor in a film like The Screaming Skull but it takes a craftsman to come up with a hysterical middle finger joke after watching a gratuitous scene of self-induced mutilation.

I take great pride in the fact that I championed this film among my friends in college, well before there were a hundred versions of it on DVD (or even DVDs!) and when finding a video store with a copy for rent was difficult because fans were simply stealing them since it was out of print for so long. To this day, I'll stop whatever is going on among the guests in my house to make them watch this film if they admit to never having seen it. (Remember that before you come over!)

I could go on and on about the innovative film techniques and the personal trials of the film crew and the death-defying performance of Bruce Campbell, but you can read about that in Bruce's book. Chances are you've seen this film scores of times are are simply reading this because you want to give me high-fives in your mind. You know this film rocks and you know I'm justified in saying that it is the best horror film ever made during anyone's lifetime. FUCK YEAH, MAN! And if you haven't already seen it then where the hell have you been? There have been multiple video games and even a musical made based on this film. Hell, I'm surprised that General Mills hasn't licensed an Evil Dead breakfast cereal. (How much ass would that kick, huh?)

Now if you know anything about me, you know that I tend to mention female breasts a little too much when I review movies. You'd probably (rightfully) expect that any horror movie with a shameful dearth of (non-puppet, non-rotting) breasts would receive only a three of four rating on the ol' Georgian Scale. That, dear readers, is why this film is so important. A parade of naked Suicide Girls could be marching down my street and I wouldn't even get up to watch if Evil Dead II was playing on my TV. It's that damn good.

-2 points for lack of boobs (and making me look at rotting ones), +2 points for the scares, +1 for the "ewww" factor, +2 for breaking the mold with new concepts in film technique, and +2 for the laughs earns Evil Dead II a FULL GEORGE in my book, man.