2nd February, 2006
Not Really Dead, I'd Say
Thursday, 7:36 pm in Movies & TV
Well, so, I finally watched The Evil Dead today which was… interesting. I suppose like most people who’ve nevr seen it, I had this Big Idea in my head – involving Ash standing with a fistfull of boomstick and a chainsaw for a hand – thanks mainly to ~Random [h]. Despite it’s ubiquity, I can only assume that this ‘Action Hero Ash’ comes from the Evil Dead Sequels (and movie posters; unless I managed to sleep through it, there was 100% no ladies in negligees standing behind a chainsaw holding Ash being menaced by unconvincing skeleton hands), since Ash’s character in Evil Dead reminded me more of the gibbering mess of a protagonist from Jacob’s Ladder than anything else.
You all know the story; kids go to cabin, weird things happen, Evil Book of Evil turns up (not, I was also interested to note, the Necronomicon like the blurb says), people start getting possessed by demons and dismemberment occurs. No worries. What I wasn’t prepared for was not the over-the-top gore (which, let’s face it, I’ve seen worse and better done in everything from Undead to Battle Royale) but the incredible surrealist ‘descent into hell’ scenes that happen towards the last part of the movie. They mostly involve Ash wandering around the cabin (which seems to get bigger and bigger as the movie progresses), drenched in blood, eyes rolling in maddened terror. There is an absolutely stunning panning shot of Ash walking down a hallway with the camera positioned above the rafters; every time a rafter goes past it makes this amazing noise. It seems to have no purpose whatsoever; except of course as a psychological marker. The infamous Hospital Gurney Ride in Jacob’s Ladder (which, if you’ve seen it, is Silent Hill packaged up into roughly ten minutes) is the one thing I can think of that is similar. In another scene Ash gets menaced by a film projector that slowly gets drizzled in blood. Trivia buffs will tell you this is a tribute to a piece of advice given to the director, however viewed outside of any ‘nudge-nudge-wink-wink’ we’re left with something almost surreal. I started half expecting the twist at the end to show up (by the way, Jacob really died in Vietnam; he’s actually in purgatory). There wasn’t one, of course, asides from the horror staple of “It’s dead… or is it!”. Nevertheless, by the time the credits rolled around I got the feeling Ash was more drooling madman than action hero which, let’s face it, is more realistic.
The stop-motion at the end reminded me of my favourite Peter Gabriel videoclip as a child. Maybe it was scary in the 80s, but I guess nowadays we’re just too used to the hyper-realism of CG.
In the long run, there was 95% less camp, 80% less comedy (okay, repeatedly hitting a ghoul with a steel girder is kinda funny, but we’ve seen it so many times before; I guess that’s the lot of a classic film when viewed with genre hindsight), 40% less gore (Land of the Dead was worse… hell, so was We Were Soliders), 70% more Blair Witch and 100% more Salvidor Dali.
Oh yeah, and unless the version we’ve got here is highly censored (likely); don’t worry about the infamous ‘Tree Rape’ scene, Perfect Blue is worse. I can’t say I’ve seen a large number of films featuring rape scenes – either expicit or otherwise – but I’m pretty sensitive to gratuitous misogyny in literature and the tree scene in Evil Dead just made me roll my eyes more than anything else. It’s also amusing when you consider non-Ash-Guy comes running back into the cabin later on, ripped up by the woods… (Which, of course, has prmopted IMDb goons to say “we don’t want to see that sort of thing!”, because we all know female rape is ‘hot’ but male rape… hah! What’s that! Deliverance and American History X nonwithstanding.)
Perhaps more interesting than the film itself, however, was the clunky little featurette I found on the DVD that gave a sort of potted history of the video industry. For a kid who can never remember a time when she couldn’t run down to the nearest Blockbuster-equivalent and grab some flicks it’s interesting to realise that Once Upon a Time video was almost the sole domain of what would nowadays be referred to as the ‘cat 3 crowd’ (referring to Hong Kong Category 3 films; the stuff Saw and Hostel are pale imitations of). At the time Evil Dead was lumped into the ‘video nasties’ category along with such infamous films as Snuff, I Spit on Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust. I’m sure I’m not the first modern viewer to wonder what the fuss was about. As the people on the mini-doc pointed out, unlike many of the other films mentioned Evil Dead is very obviously a fantasy. Tangental to this is that – while it’s violent – it’s not sadisticly violent. Okay, the ghouls like to claw and gnaw at people but… they’re ghouls. Or demons. Or whatever. Ghouls do that sort of thing, and though Ash does his own share of chopping and so forth, it upsets (and unhinges!) him. Just about the only scene to actually include a chainsaw involves Ash not being able to cut up his possessed girlfriend; instead, he breaks down and cries. This is ‘survival violence’, and while Evil Dead picks no bones about being an expliotation splatter, it doesn’t really glorify its own gore.
An interesting flim, all in all, and definatley not what I was expecting.
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