Halloween is coming up and horror movies are probably on your mind, right?
If you’re thinking about watching a scary movie this Halloween season, start with Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn, starring extremely talented actor Bruce Campbell as Ashley Williams.
The movie was originally released in 1987 but still holds up today. You can watch the movie on DVD or you can buy it on YouTube for $10.99 or rent it for $3.99.
The movie begins with Ash and his girlfriend Linda, played by Denise Bixler, driving to the cabin in the woods from the first Evil Dead movie. The introduction to the film would probably give you the impression that the movie is going to be a slow burner but trust me when I say I’ve never seen a movie get into the action as fast as this and that’s something I’ll always praise about it.
To sum it up as best I can without spoiling too much, there is an old cursed book in the cabin called The Book of The Dead. There is a tape recorder in the cabin that plays a recording of the man who owned the cabin translating a verse from the book which awakens a demon that can manipulate the house and surrounding area outside the house as well as possess people and in a couple of instances, human corpses.
The movie doesn’t go full throttle on the blood and gore as much as the first film, so much so that the director significantly reduced the severity of the effects to not get into trouble, but he still did. I hate the fact that they had to reduce the blood and gore effects as much as they did only because of how impressive-looking they were in the first movie for the time.
This film is almost perfect. The only thing that holds it back is the blood effect reduction but it doesn’t matter because of how good everything else is. The scene where Ash sits on the chair that breaks and objects in the house start to laugh at him made me laugh when I first saw it.
The performance Campbell put on in this film is probably one of the best I’ve seen in any movie ever. My favorite thing about Campbell’s performance is how animated he was when was attacked by the deadite corpse of the tape recorder man’s wife, which is the name given to possessed humans in this franchise. I also enjoyed when he gets chased around by the demon that both stalks and attacks him as well as the rest of the characters in point-of-view style shots. The scene where Linda gets possessed and decapitated by Ash then rises from the grave to attack and detaches her head from her body and bites his hand is another memorable scene. And the scene where Ash is running around the cabin banding her possessed head around and trying to get it off was pretty funny and a highlight of the film as well.
IMBD rated the movie a 7.7/10 and Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie an 88 percent approval rating. I give the movie 5 stars out 5.
