EVIL DEAD 2 DEAD BY DAWN (1987)

DIRECTED by Sam Raimi.

SCREENPLAY by Sam Raimi & Scott Spiegel.

STARRING  - Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams, Sarah Berry as Annie Knowby,  Dan Hicks as Jake,  Kassie Wesley as Bobby Joe,  Denise Bixler as Linda,  Richard Domeier as Prof. Ed Getley,  John Peaks as Prof. Raymond Knowby,  Lou Hancock as Henrietta Knowby,  Ted Raimi as Possesed Henrietta,  William Preston Robertson as Voice of the Evil Dead.

PLOT  - (NOTE - Evil Dead 2 infamously starts with a flashback retelling of the events of the first movie, in which Ash and Linda - minus Scott and Shelly - go to the cabin, find the book, unleash the evil, Linda gets possessed and decapitated and Ash gets blasted through the woods by the evil force. This takes up the first ten or so minutes. Both Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi have gone on record as saying that this was due to rights issues concerning the original film and them not being able to reuse footage for a story so far section. Campbell and Raimi have also said that the sequal properly begins at the point where Ash is propelled through the woods by the evil force, so it is from this point that we will begin our plot synopsis...)

Ash Williams after barely surviving the events of the previous night is about to leave the cabin when the force of evil catches up with him. Ash is blasted by the force and briefly possessed himself, however, the sight of the rising sun seems to temporarily keep the evil at bay and Ash is soon normal again.

Finding that the bridge is out with no way of returning to civilisation, Ash resolves to return to the cabin to try to survive another night.

After being attacked by the Deadite possessed corpse of Linda, Ash is bitten in the hand. As a result of this Ash's hand becomes possessed and attacks him. To survive Ash is forced to cut his own hand off with a chainsaw. The attacks continue despite this...

Meanwhile in the outside world, Annie Knowby (daughter of Professor Knowby, the man who originally found the Necronomicon) and her boyfriend/colleague Ed Getley are heading to the cabin to translate more lost pages from the Necronomicon. They are soon joined by two redneck locals - Jake and Bobby Joe - who act as thier guides through the woods.

Arriving at the cabin they find Ash and the carnage that surrounds him. Assuming him to be a killer, they overpower him and lock him in the cellar...

But something is down there with him - the possessed corpse of Annie's mother, Henrietta and she wants to swallow Ash's soul...

Can Ash survive to defeat the evil that exists in both the woods and himself ? To do so Ash needs to become something different...Ash needs to become a hero...

DIALOUGE  - Ash - "Then let's head on down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch."

Ash (upon attaching a chainsaw to his handless wrist) - " Groovy !"

PERFORMANCES  - Evil Dead 2 see's the continuing evolution of both Ash Williams as a character and Bruce Campbell as an actor.

This time round Ash is given a lot more development. In the first movie he was frightened and desperate and barely survived, here Ash begins to become increasingly angry and frustrated by the continued assaults upon his person by the various forces of evil and something inside him finally snaps. Once that happens Ash is a changed man. No longer a victim, he instead becomes a fighter. Attaching a chainsaw to his arm and weilding a sawn-off double barreled shotgun Ash becomes a fearless Deadite killer. He becomes the hero he needs to be, probably the hero he always was deep down. Campbell plays this evolution brilliantly and the moment he acquires the chainsaw and shotgun whilst growling the single word "groovy" is a true punch the air moment. The forces of evil better watch out, Ash is finally here and he's pissed off...

I think I've actually pinpointed the exact moment when this switch in character occurs, the moment when Ash finally snaps. It's this moment...

A possesed wall mounted deer head starts laughing at Ash when he sits down on a broken chair and lands on his arse. It is at this point that Ash suddenly stares into the camera and bursts into hysterical laughter. We can see it in his eyes that he's gone batshit insane, that something inside him has been irrevocably changed forever.

However, instead of succumbing to the madness, Ash instead finds the courage buried deep down within him to start fighting back. In short he's been broken, taken to the edge of madness and come back from it stronger.

Campbell also injects lots of physical comedy into his performance, particularly in the scenes where his own hand is attacking him. It's slapstick, it's frenzied and he does all his own stunts, at one point literally hurling himself head over heels and flipping himself onto his back. Its no wonder that when Campbell returned to the role thirty years later, that the now in his sixties actor found it hard to keep up with the physical demands of the part and ended up having to retire from playing the character. Not even Ash Williams can stop the ravages of time.

The other performances all work well too. Sarah Berry in the role of Annie Knowby is initially hostile to Ash, thinking that he's murdured her parents with a chainsaw. She eventually comes round to him though when the evil starts possessing her companions. She even (briefly) becomes the main character for 10 minutes or so when Ash becomes possessed again and goes on the rampage. Berry has a good chemistry with Campbell and the two work well together.

We also get Richard Domeier as Ed Getley - Annie's slightly wet boyfriend, he doesn't last very long before he becomes a hair chomping monsterous Deadite. In his human version he reminds me a bit of Fred from the Scooby Doo cartoons. He's a square jawed, clean cut college boy through and through. No wonder the forces of evil have a field day with him.

Rounding out the cast we have Dan Hicks and Kassie Wesley playing the hillbilly couple Jake and Bobby Joe. I don't know if they're supposed to be boyfriend and girlfriend, brother and sister or just cousins but there's definitely something sexual going on with them. Let's just say they're country folk and leave it at that...

Finally we get one of the most iconic villains in the entire series - Henrietta Knowby. In human form Henrietta is played by Lou Hancock, in full on Deadite mode she's played by Ted Raimi. Raimi is brilliant as the possessed Henrietta, he's totally unrecognisable and one hundred percent menacing. The character of Henrietta became so iconic that she was to later reappear in season 2 of Ash vs Evil Dead for a rematch with her arch nemesis, Ashley J. Williams.

SFX - As with the first movie, the Deadites provide the effects people with the chance to let thier imaginations run riot. With a bigger budget to play with this time around the Deadites become more extreme looking than previously.

The first Deadite we see is Linda (this time played by Denise Bixler), this "new" Linda isn't quite as creepy as Deadite Linda was in the original but she still has her moments...

Theres a great scene where Linda rises from the grave and her head reattaches itself to her body. She then does a macabre dance. This is all done with stop motion animation, it looks slightly out of place but this sense of it being a bit jarring only adds to the scene's weird, otherworldly quality...

We get a nice animatronic laughing deer head...

Ash's abusive severed hand (which becomes a character in its own right)...

Deadite Ed (an Edite ?...no ?...No)...

Deadite Ash...

And Henrietta in two forms, firstly theres her (slightly more) human original Deadite mode...

Later on, Henrietta mutates further into this weird, long necked slightly bird-like monster...

We also see the evil in what is apparently it's "true form" - an evil tree monster with a rotting apple for an eye...

Eventually a time vortex gets ripped open in the fabric of reality and Ash (and his trusty yellow car) get sucked into it...

To arrive slap bang in Medieval England, ready to do battle with this flying stop motion monstrosity...

The effects work is all round excellent. Classic practical effects work at its best.

SEX & VIOLENCE  -  Overall Evil Dead 2 isn't quite as gory as its predecessor but it still has its moments.

An example of the lesser gore quotient comes in the recreation of Linda's decapitation, in the original Ash gets covered in blood, this time round the head comes off much more cleanly. Things soon pickup though when Ash chainsaws Linda's torso and head. This finally shuts her up for good (at least until we see her again 30 years later in the TV show).

Perhaps one of the goriest scenes is when Ash chops his own hand off...

He gets a face full of arterial looking blood.

Ash later gets a huge jet of blood (and slime) in the face after looking in a possesed mirror...

Deadite Ed gets hacked to bits. Later on, Henrietta sticks her head out of the cellar and gets it jumped on, her eyeball flies through the air and lands in Bobby Joe's mouth...

Seeing as how she's sleeping with someone who's most likely related to her, she's probably had worse things in her mouth to be fair. Shortly after this Bobby Joe flees the cabin and gets attacked by the trees, unlike Cheryl in the first film she doesn't get raped. Instead she's dragged along and slammed into a tree trunk at high speed. Killing her instantly.

Jake probably gets it the worst of all, first he's accidentally stabbed in the stomach, then he's dragged painfully through a hallway as he chokes on his own blood, gets his torso slammed repeatedly by a door before finally being dragged to his death in the cellar by Henrietta. She literally chews him up and spits him out as a wave of (very watery looking) blood...

Leaving behind a sorry looking skeleton, bye Jake...

Ash takes down Henrietta with his "boomstick" leading to a splatertastic exit...

The final one to die is Annie - stabbed in the back by Ash's rogue hand weilding the Kandarian dagger...

Then its back to the past where Ash blows a flying Deadite's head off and gets proclaimed to be the "prophesised one" - the man from the sky who has come to save the kingdom from the evil of the Deadites. Now THATS what I call a good sequal hook.

RATING  - Evil Dead 2 is every bit the classic that the original was, perhaps even moreso. It takes everything that was great about the first film and just runs with it. Developing its lead character and concepts in increasingly interesting, inventive and insane ways.

Raimi's direction and visuals are even more kinetic and frantic than before. The whole film just pulsates with crazy energy. Its an utter thrillride of a movie and I love it to bits.

Overall 5 evil severed hands out of 5. Groovy !!!

POSTER/VHS/DVD ART  -