Sam Raimi's (that's a good sign, and I'm on the second word of the review!) classic "The Evil Dead" lives up to everything Dave says about it in his review, and quite a bit more. As Dave said, lovers of gore will get their respective fills here, but even those of us who don't generally care for it may get a kick out of the truly excessive amount of red spillage in nearly every scene (after the demons appear, anyway).

Dave's review mentioned the scene with Cheryl and the trees (in fact, I believe he billed it as the scene to watch for), but he neglected to mention one thing: this may well be the most disturbing and disgusting scene ever put on film.

The poor production values become most apparent as they kill the zombies off; one of the zombies, upon recieving an axe blow to the head, crumples to the side like the paper bag it so obviously is. The stop-motion technique used when the zombies finally burn off at the end is not only terrible, it's also totally out of place and somewhat stomach-churning. And *everything* that moves that isn't supposed to is done in stop-motion (I'd say claymation, but I'm not so sure it is).

My main beef with "The Evil Dead," though, is with the ending: Ash runs out of the house after toasting the book and banishing all the zombies (in the most disgusting fashion), and the demons get him ANYWAY! What the *heck?* This unexplained, unmentioned evil force comes out of NOWHERE and gets him (though you have to see the sequel to find out what happens; this movie ends with Ash being charged by what I have dubbed "the Evil Dead effect.")

Even if "The Evil Dead" wasn't your thing, I'd still encourage you to see the sequels. "Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn" is bad on purpose, and very enjoyably so. "Army of Darkness" is an outright comedy and so loses a bit over ED2. They're still both very much worth seeing, especially if you've seen "The Evil Dead."

Response From RinkWorks:

I didn't say anything more about the Cheryl/tree scene because of RinkWorks' family orientation. But I agree that it was a fairly disturbing scene, although personally I wasn't so much disturbed as just shocked at how stupid and gratuitous it was.

I also thought the end (where Ash apparently gets it anyway) was pretty dumb and just a bad excuse for Raimi to do one of his trademark fast-tracking shots.

Although I said I wasn't particularly enthused about seeing the sequels, I think I may watch them anyway. I've been told so many times that "Army of Darkness" is hilarious that I'm beginning to wonder if maybe it might be worth my time, even if I couldn't review it for the page.