Evil Dead II
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| Evil Dead II | |
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| Directed by | Sam Raimi |
| Produced by | Robert Tapert Alex De Benedetti Irvin Shapiro Bruce Campbell |
| Written by | Sam Raimi Scott Spiegel |
| Starring | Bruce Campbell Sarah Berry |
| Music by | Joseph LoDuca |
| Distributed by | Rosebud Pictures |
| Release date(s) | March 13, 1987 |
| Running time | 85 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3,500,000 |
| Gross revenue | $5,900,000 (est.) (As of July 26, 2006) |
| Preceded by | The Evil Dead |
| Followed by | Army of Darkness |
Evil Dead II (also known as Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn) is a 1987 American horror-comedy film. Standing as a sequel to 1981's The Evil Dead, the film was directed by Sam Raimi, written by Raimi and Scott Spiegel, produced by Rob Tapert and starred Bruce Campbell as Ash Williams. The film was followed by a sequel of its own in 1993 entitled Army of Darkness.
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Plot
The film opens with a very rough re-play of the important events of the first film. Ash Williams and his girlfriend Linda take a romantic vacation to a seemingly abandoned cabin in the woods. While in the cabin, Ash plays a tape of an archeology professor (the cabin's previous inhabitant), reciting passages from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis (or "Book of the Dead"), which had been discovered during an archaeological dig. The recorded incantation unleashes an evil force which soon takes possession of Linda. Ash is forced to kill and bury her. Something remains and continues to terrorize Ash.
It is here that the film picks up where its predecessor left off. The evil spirit lifts up Ash and tosses him into a tree where he is briefly possessed by a demon. Ash tries to escape in his car to the bridge, but the metal rods are still bent into a hand.
Suddenly, night time approaches and Ash senses that a demon is after him, so he gets back into his car and drives back to the cabin where he crashes and flies through the front window. Ash is then chased throughout the cabin, portrayed on-screen from the point of view of the demon. Eventually, Ash manages to hide from the demon.
Meanwhile, two archeologists, Annie and Ed, come back with newly discovered pages from the Book of the Dead, but find that the bridge is out, so they enlist the help of Jake and Bobby Joe.
Ash notices Linda's dead body coming back to life in a twisted dance, but Linda abandons her gyrations and attacks Ash soon after reviving. Ash seemingly awakens believing he had been dreaming, but then Linda's head falls into his lap and bites his hand. After using a chainsaw to finally eliminate Linda, Ash turns the chainsaw upon himself, severing his possessed hand when it begins to attack him. However, the detached, possessed hand takes on a life of its own, and Ash tries to destroy it with a shotgun.
Ash then shoots through the door and nearly hits Bobby Joe. Annie, Ed, Jake, and Bobby Joe begin to think that Ash killed Annie's parents, so they throw Ash into the the cellar. The new group begin to play the rest of Professor Knowby's tape recordings and accidentally unleash Henrietta in the cellar luckily they manage to save Ash and lock the cellar, but Ed gets injured and later turns into a deadite. Ash eventually kills Ed. The disembodied spirit of the Professor appears befor Ash and the others, telling them that the pages Annie and Ed had are the key to dispelling the evil dead. Bobby Jo then discovers Ash's possessed hand holding hers, and runs, screaming, into the forest. She is attacked by the trees. Jake goes hysterical, while Annie and Ash see a drawing in the book of a hero said to have dispelled the evil. Then Jake picks up the shotgun and forces them to go after Bobby Jo, throwing the pages into the cellar. They go into the woods only to discover that the trail has dissapeared. A demon rushes them, again possessing ash, and throws Jake into a tree, hitting his head. Ash chases Annie back to the cabin. she grabs the bone dagger from the first movie, and accidentally stabs Jake trying to get back into the cabin. She pulls Jake's body in, then shuts the door. Ash pounds on it, then suddenly stops. She takes the dagger out of Jake, then drags him to the cellar door, where Henrietta attacks and kills him. Ash attacks Annie.
Sequel or Remake?
Sam Raimi, for legal reasons pertaining to the rights, could not show any footage from the first Evil Dead film. Instead, an extremely simplified recap of The Evil Dead (spanning 7 minutes and 7 seconds of The Evil Dead II) was shot and used as the opening to the film. It edited out several of the characters and major events for timing reasons, leading some fans to think that the implication was they "never existed" within the timeline of Evil Dead II, and that it was a remake rather than a sequel. Sam Raimi did clear up the sequel-VS-remake debate in the DVD commentary for the third film, Army of Darkness, in which he states that if the recaps from the second and third films were edited out, all three could be watched back-to-back as one movie, confirming that Evil Dead II is intended to be a sequel. Nevertheless, fans are split, as some prefer to look at Evil Dead II as a remake, while others prefer to view it as a sequel.
The recreation of the final shot of The Evil Dead is the bridge into the new material.
History
The concept of a sequel to The Evil Dead was discussed during the location shooting on the first film. Sam Raimi wanted to toss his hero, Ash, through a time portal, back into the Middle Ages. That notion eventually led to the third installment, Army of Darkness.
After the release of Evil Dead, Raimi moved on to Crimewave, a cross between a crime film and a comedy produced by Raimi and Joel and Ethan Coen. Irvin Shapiro, a publicist who was primarily responsible for the mainstream release of The Evil Dead, suggested that they next work on an Evil Dead sequel. Raimi scoffed at the idea, expecting Crimewave to be a hit, but Shapiro put out ads announcing the sequel regardless.
After Crimewave was released to little audience or critical acclaim, Raimi and Tapert, knowing that another flop would further stall their already lagging careers, took Shapiro up on his offer. Around the same time, they met Italian movie producer Dino De Laurentiis, the owner of production and distribution company DEG. He had asked Raimi if he would direct a theatrical adaptation of the Stephen King (written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym) novel Thinner. Raimi turned down the offer, but De Laurentiis continued to be interested in the young filmmaker.
The Thinner adaptation was part of a deal between De Laurentiis and King to produce several adaptations of King's successful horror fiction. At the time, King was directing the first such adaptation, Maximum Overdrive, based on his short story "Trucks". He had dinner with a crewmember who had been interviewed about the Evil Dead sequel, and told King that the film was having trouble attracting funding. Upon hearing this, King, who had written a glowing review of the first film that helped it become an audience favorite at Cannes, called De Laurentiis and asked him to fund the film.
Though initially skeptical, De Laurentiis agreed after being presented with the extremely high Italian grosses for the first film. Although Raimi and Tapert had desired $4 million for the production, they were allotted only $3.6 million. As such, the planned medieval storyline had to be scrapped.
Script
Though they had only recently received the funding necessary to produce the film, the script had been written for some time, having been composed largely during the production of Crimewave. Raimi contacted his old friend Scott Spiegel, who had collaborated with Campbell and others on the Super-8 films they had produced during their childhood in Michigan. Most of these films had been comedies, and Spiegel felt that Evil Dead II should be less straight horror than the first. Initially, the opening sequence included all five characters from the original film, but, in an effort to save time and money, all but Ash and Linda were cut from the final draft. This argues against the "remake" theory (see above), because it makes clear that the events of the first film are meant to take place within the timeframe of the beginning of the sequel, and that everything that happens after Ash is hit by the invisible force is new.
Spiegel and Raimi wrote most of the film in their house in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California, where they were living with the aforementioned Coen brothers, as well as actors Frances McDormand, Kathy Bates and Holly Hunter (Hunter was the primary inspiration for the Bobby Jo character). Due both to the distractions of their house guests and the films they were involved with, Crimewave and Josh Becker's Thou Shalt Not Kill... Except, the script took an inordinately long time to finish.
Among the many inspirations for the film include The Three Stooges and other slapstick comedy films; Ash's fights with his disembodied hand come from a film made by Spiegel as a teenager, entitled Attack of the Helping Hand, which was itself inspired by television commercials advertising Hamburger Helper. The "laughing room" scene, where all the objects in the room seemingly come to life and begin to cackle maniacally along with Ash, came about after Spiegel jokingly used a gooseneck lamp to visually demonstrate a Popeye-esque laugh. Scott Spiegel's humorous influence can be seen throughout the film, perhaps most prominently in certain visual jokes; for instance, when Ash traps his rogue hand under a pile of books, on top is A Farewell to Arms.
Filming
With the script completed, and a production company secured, filming could begin. The production commenced in Wadesboro, North Carolina, not far from De Laurentiis' offices in Wilmington. De Laurentiis had wanted them to film in his elaborate Wilmington studio, but the production team felt uneasy being so close to the producer, so they moved to Wadesboro, approximately three hours away. Steven Spielberg had previously filmed The Color Purple in Wadesboro, and the large white farmhouse used as an exterior location in that film became the production office for Evil Dead II. Most of the film was shot in the woods near that farmhouse, or J.R. Faison Junior High School, which is where the interior cabin set was located.
The film's production was not nearly as chaotic or strange as the production of the original, largely because of Raimi, Tapert and Campbell's additional film making experience. However, there are nevertheless numerous stories about the strange happenings on the set. For instance, the rat seen in the cellar was nicknamed "Señor Cojones" by the crew. "Cojones" is Spanish slang for "testicles".
Even so, there were hardships, mostly involving Ted Raimi's costume. Ted, director Sam's younger brother, had been involved in the first film briefly, acting as a fake Shemp, but in Evil Dead II he gets the larger role of the historian's demon-possessed wife, Henrietta. Raimi was forced to wear a full-body, latex costume, crouch in a small hole in the floor acting as a "cellar", or on one day, both. Raimi became extremely overheated, to the point that his costume was literally filled with liters of sweat; special effects artist Gregory Nicotero describes pouring the fluid into several Dixie cups so as to get it out of the costume. The sweat is also visible on-screen, dripping out of the costume's ear, in the scene where Henrietta spins around over Annie's head.
The crew also sneaked various in-jokes into the film itself, such as the clawed glove of Freddy Krueger, the primary antagonist of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of slasher films, which hangs in the cabin's basement and toolshed. This was, at least partially, a reference to a scene in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street where the character Nancy Thompson (portrayed by Heather Langenkamp), watches the original Evil Dead on a television set in her room. In turn, that scene was a reference to the torn The Hills Have Eyes poster seen in the original Evil Dead film, which was itself a reference to a torn Jaws poster in The Hills Have Eyes.
At the film's wrap party, the crew held a talent contest, where Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell sang The Byrds' "Eight Miles High", with Nicotero on guitar.[1]
Cast and Crew
| Bruce Campbell | Ash |
| Sarah Berry | Annie |
| Danny Hicks | Jake |
| Kassie DePaiva | Bobby Jo |
| Ted Raimi | Possessed Henrietta |
| Denise Bixler | Linda |
| Richard Domeier | Ed |
| John Peaks | Professor Knowby |
| Lou Hancock | Henrietta |
| William Preston Robertson | Voice |
| Sam Raimi | Director |
| Sam Raimi | Screenplay |
| Scott Spiegel | Screenplay |
| Irvin Shapiro | Executive Producer |
| Alex DeBenedetti | Executive Producer |
| Robert Tapert | Producer |
| Bruce Campbell | Co-Producer |
Reception
Evil Dead II recieved very positive reviews from critics and audience members; it has a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Empire Magazine praised the film saying "The gaudily gory, virtuoso, hyper-kinetic horror sequel/remake uses every trick in the cinematic book, and confirms that Bruce Campbell and Raimi are gods" and Caryn James of the New York times called it "Genuine, if bizarre, proof of Sam Raimi's talent and developing skill".
References
- ^ Mentioned in Evil Dead II audio commentary
- Warren, Bill. The Evil Dead Companion. ISBN 0-312-27501-3.
- Raimi, Sam. Spiegel, Scott. Nicotero, Greg. Campbell, Bruce. Evil Dead II DVD, audio commentary.
- Campbell, Bruce. If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. ISBN 0-312-29145-0
External links
- Evil Dead II at the Internet Movie Database
- Evil Dead II from Deadites Online.
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