The Evil Dead launched Sam Raimi from obscurity into a career of comedy and horror. Recently, a remake, Evil Dead, graced cinema screens. Is Sam Raimi’s first feature film worth its legacy?
In 2008, I wasn’t doing a whole lot of reviewing. At the time, I was mainly focused on a form of writing that was half fan fiction, half roleplaying, half social life. As a result, many of the films I watched that year did not get reviewed. I’m not sure exactly what my thoughts of The Evil Dead were at the time, other than that it was okay, and that everybody I talked to at the time proclaimed The Evil Dead to be a 10/10 film. When my review of the film came out, Fight-Evil.com had just closed down, the state it would stay in for about two years, and by the time I next discussed it with anybody, the same group (though possibly not the same individuals) proclaimed that the film was over-rated, and that the second one was better.
When I first watched The Evil Dead critically, it had a pretty daunting reputation to live up to. While it may have been nostalgia goggles talking, everybody I had ever heard talk about the movie referred to as a a 10/10 movie. This was the horror/comedy equivalent of something like Alien, The Thing or A Nightmare on Elm Street, if hearsay was to be believed. Having recently seen Army of Darkness, I was skeptical. I didn’t find the latter movie all that funny, or all that scary. Of course, the first film is generally known to be the least funny and the scariest of the trilogy, so I had that much in the way of hopes. Read the review here.
This article was originally published on April 27, 2011, on MiBReviews. Read the original here.
Insomniatic 
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