27 – Storytime (The Evil Dead)

Standing beside Donald on the village green you cast your eye about at the fantastical costumes people are wearing. The event feels similar to Halloween back home but only if everyone put 110% into their costumes and took things very seriously.

Mentioning this to Donald he smiles and explains.

The Festival of The Dead is a local tradition going back centuries, though it shares the costumes with Halloween we’ve kept our own festivities strictly traditional. Some of those costumes you see are passed down through the generations, you won’t find any shop bought examples here.

Every year we don these ancient outfits and this year’s narrator reads from The Book of The Dead. Every year a single sentence is read, no more, no less. Then we proceed through the woods in a great procession, each villager with a lantern and we sing to the dead so they know we haven’t forgotten them.

Ah see, this year’s narrator is stepping up.

A small wooden stage has been set up and you see a young woman open an ancient looking book. She runs a finger down the page, pauses briefly and then begins to speak.

Wow, we’re 3 for 3 with big names, though today’s is not as known outside of the horror scene as Halloween is and is not as historically significant as Nosferatu it did however spawn its own franchise and helped launch the career of a director probably best known by ‘the man on the street’ for directing the Tobey Maguire Spiderman films, Sam Raimi.

You know what it is, today we review 1981’s The Evil Dead.

The Evil Dead follows five friends who are visiting a remote cabin in the woods of Tennessee. The place is fairly run down looking and full of hunting trophies and the usual old fashioned country style furniture. Later they find the cabin has a basement full of unusual items, including a disturbing book and accompanying audio notes by an archaeologist who had been studying it. Soon all Hell breaks loose and they’re fighting for their lives.

My own experience with The Evil Dead was watching it on DVD while at University. At the time I was picking up films which I’d heard (According to the blurb on the boxes at least) were controversial or extreme, at least by the standards of the day. This one I’d even heard of already so it was an easy choice.

Slight spoiler for my overall feelings but I was not disappointed. The Evil Dead really has everything you could be looking for from a film like this…well almost everything.

Firstly let’s get my negative feelings out of the way because I really do want to mostly be praising this film. The acting and characterisation is where the film suffers I feel. Perhaps it’s because of watching the later two films of the original trilogy but the mighty Bruce Campbell, who plays Ash, in particular feels very odd, like he’s just woken up and needs his morning coffee, he barely reacts to a lot of the crazy stuff that’s happening around him, at least until the finale where he does get more involved. Maybe he’s just a quiet guy and to be fair this is pretty early in his acting career.

The other acting varies from decent to over the top, I hope you like screaming because there’s lots of it. The characters are pretty forgettable, in fact it wasn’t that long ago I watched it and other than Ash the only name I remember is Linda as I seem to recall Ash always has a Linda as a girlfriend.

So on to more positive things. The general look of the film is fantastic. It is the archetypal cabin in the woods movie with a spooky dilapidated cabin, foggy woods, a dank basement and all in a remote location.

The camera work is excellent, with Raimi making certain shots his own, particularly the camera as a character, moving through the woods like the eyes of a creature we never see. This more than anything I feel makes the film stand apart from its peers, something you can point to today and say ‘That’s an Evil Dead thing’.

Is this a scary film? As with most things that’s fairly subjective, for me I wouldn’t say it’s scary, it’s a special effects film, and though it has plenty of atmosphere it soon becomes more of a fight for survival than something that has you peeking through your fingers. Something I personally feel is that this film has a good level of threat to it, you do feel that the characters are in danger and though like I say it isn’t scary, it does take itself quite seriously most of the time. The sequels are often lauded over the original but for me this is preferable. The first two sequels are straight up comedy horror, the third one in particular, but I like my horror less silly…mostly.

The effects work is fantastic (for the most part) and varied, we have some great gore effects, some brilliant make-up, and then to top it all off we have stop motion effects towards the end of the film.

Speaking of gore, this film is loaded with it, and it’s pretty graphic for 1981, in fact, it’s time for an ‘Emma talks about film certificates’ section, or in this case ratings, because for a change I’m going to talk about the US rating. Normally I don’t take much notice of this, being UK based, but this is an unusual case. Most films like this get an ‘R’ rating in the US, but The Evil Dead actually received, and still has, an NC-17 rating. This is pretty unusual as these are normally saved for films with a very adult theme, be that sexual, or drug use or very extreme violence. There is one scene I’ll mention in the spoiler section which may have contributed to this but I’m pretty sure it’s a case of an over-reaction at the time that has never been adjusted. It IS a violent film but by today’s standards, not really. The sort of sequel sort of reboot from 2013 is significantly more graphic and that has an ‘R’ rating.

So what about my personal rating? Well I really debated on this, to the point where this is me re-writing this section. I would give it a 4 ½ if I was doing halves, but honestly, I absolutely love this film. It may not be as polished as something like Alien but it’s one of the titans of the genre and another example of a low budget film defying the odds. It deserves to be up there with Halloween in that regard and for my money this is more fun, so I’m giving The Evil Dead 5 pencils out of 5.

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

OK so the part of the film which may have garnered the NC-17 rating, at least from how I look at it would be the part where Cheryl is assaulted and raped by the tree branches. Though it’s not overly graphic, the content is perhaps the sort of thing the MPAA would come down harder on, and that combined with the general level of gore and violence is maybe what pushed it over the edge. These sort of scenes always up the discomfort level of films for me. I can watch extreme violence (To a degree, I struggle when it gets too realistic like in something like Hostel) but as soon as there’s sexual violence I find it a lot more uncomfortable to watch.

I alluded earlier that not all of the effects are great and the scene which stood out to me was when Cheryl has turned to a Deadite and Scott is hitting her in the face as she tries to escape from the basement. She goes from mostly looking like Cheryl to clearly fake model in an instant. It was abrupt enough that I found it a bit jarring and considering how good most of the rest of the effects look it was a bit strange to see.

What is great though is the whole last 10-15 minutes or so of the film where Ash actually wakes up and starts dealing with the rest of the cast. This part is loaded with fantastic effects, camera work, stop motion and physical acting. Faces melt, blood spurts, skulls shatter and another Raimi staple of gore and bodily fluids going all over somebody’s face. Ash comes into his own in this over the top bloodbath and we start to see him show glimpses of the character he will become in later incarnations.

Right, I’m going to go read a book.

8 – A Grave Mistake (City of The Living Dead)

This doesn’t seem right.

You were following a path, it seemed fairly well trodden, there was even a sign, what did it say? Tavernmaw, so there are other places.

But now the forest has closed in tight on either side and looking back the path has all but disappeared behind you, as if erased by your own steps.

You recall Steven’s Map, perhaps it could shed some light on your whereabouts. Reaching into your pocket you freeze as a low growl comes from somewhere to your right, was that a dog? Again…that doesn’t seem right, it sounds like an imitation of a dog, from a human throat. Then an odd noise and the growl again, but this time from your left, and closer.

Breaking into a run you thrash forwards through the trees, blindly pushing your way through the undergrowth which seems to be getting thicker, and thicker, when suddenly you burst out into a clearing, trip on something solid and come crashing to the ground.

Dazed and slightly winded you look up through a low thick mist and see writing.

Here lies Father Lovecraft

Parish Priest of Tavernmaw

May God have Mercy on his Soul

May God have Mercy on us all

It’s a gravestone. This is a graveyard. Now the growling is everywhere.

Wow, another one for the horror enthusiast, I mean, that’s why you’re reading this right? City of the Living Dead is from another of the ‘Godfather’s of Gore’, this time it’s Italian director Lucio Fulci and the first film of his unofficial Gates of Hell trilogy.

As a lover of Horror but a bit of a babe in the woods when it comes to the films outside of the main stream I’d only watched this film once before, and that was very recently when I got hold of a copy on Blu Ray, courtesy of Arrow who seem to be the go to company for high quality versions of semi obscure films. I’m in no way affiliated with them by the way, I’m just a fan of their output.

This wasn’t quite the first Fulci film I ever saw, that would be Zombi 2 or Zombie Flesh Eaters as it’s known here in the UK, but it was the second. So obviously Zombi 2 fully prepared me for what was to come…or not. This film is weird, I know I said the same about The Wizard of Gore but it’s equally true here, the plot is confusing, we jump around almost as much as the zombies, more on that later, and the whole thing feels a bit like a strange dream pulled from Fulci’s head.

The general premise of the film is that a priest in the town of Dunwich, no not that one, but named as an homage to that one, commits suicide and this starts to open the gates of Hell. A few days from this event, on All Saints Day, the invasion of the living dead will begin and our group of heroes is trying to stop that from happening.

This never really felt like an imminent event, even when it was, well, imminent. For a start there were already a few scattered zombies appearing throughout the film and you just don’t get a real sense of urgency. Essentially my main issue with this film is the confusing and disjointed plot which feels like it’s there as an excuse for a series of bizarre events.

The good news is that these bizarre events are great and we get to see all sorts of gross effects and craziness which I’m beginning to suspect is a hallmark of Fulci, I mean he does have that nickname.

Teleporting Zombies, check. Maggot Storm, check. Intestinal Regurgitation, check. The list goes on and I’ll expand on these more in the spoiler section. The effects for these events are great, the film does an excellent job of grossing you out, and I say this having watched a fair few gross films.

Something I’ve noted from the three Fulci films I’ve seen is that he does Zombies well, and more importantly he does threatening feeling zombies well. There’s no hint of humanity here, nothing to reason with. A special mention goes for any scene where zombies are rising from the ground, hands down of all the Zombie films I’ve seen, Fulci does this the best, it’s slow and sinister and deliciously macabre.

Visually the film is really good, there’s great use of lighting and fog that creates a spooky, dreamlike atmosphere. Dunwich itself feels like a haunted town somewhat cut off from the rest of the world, we mostly see it at night but even in the day it never feels safe.

The music is also great, but sadly very repetitive. There’s one particular piece, which I love, but it’s overused. I adored it on the Blu Ray menu but it really began to grate by the finale.

The acting, like many Italian films of this era, is a little hard to judge as the voices are all dubbed in the studio afterwards, this is true whether you listen to the Italian or the English audio, it’s just how they did things. It’s nothing special but it’s also not awful, just OK.

So to the score. I’m probably going to get frowned upon by Fulci enthusiasts but I found this to be pretty middle of the road. Maybe odd to say for something so weird but what I mean is I didn’t come away thinking it was a masterpiece, or that it was terrible either, it was just, OK. With that in mind the most appropriate score is 3 flying maggots out of 5. I definitely think it’s worth seeing for the various set pieces and the brilliant visuals, I almost gave it a 4, but it just never felt, complete. I have seen it stated that it feels like a dry run for the film Fulci released a year later The Beyond, so I look forward to seeing that in the future.

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

I mentioned that the film was worth seeing for the set pieces, so let’s talk about some of those.

Peter Bell, a Journalist who’s investigating the death of the medium Mary Woodhouse, goes to the graveyard where’s she’s part way though being buried when he discovers she’s not so dead after all. What follows is one of the most stressful scenes I’ve ever had to sit through. Peter leaps to Mary’s rescue by jumping into the grave and then repeatedly slamming a pickaxe through the lid of coffin at about the point where you would expect her face to be. You would think he was trying to impale her through the head with the point of the axe, it’s frankly amazing that he doesn’t kill her for real.

There’s a scene which seems to be fairly well known, at least in horror circles, and that’s the girl who starts bringing up her own intestines. She and her date are making out in a car when they’re confronted by a teleporting Father Thomas, the aforementioned priest who committed suicide. He then stares at her until her eyes start to bleed and her entire digestive tract makes its way out of her mouth, the effects of which are pretty good, especially coming off the back of watching The Wizard of Gore.

One of the next scenes that stands out is where the hapless character Bob, who people seem to be blaming for the recent deaths, gets straight up murdered by a Dunwich resident who thinks he’s after his daughter. This isn’t a simple case of a father getting carried away and accidentally killing the guy, or even pulling the trigger and shooting him from across the room. No. This fucking psychopath of a Dad holds Bob down on a workbench whilst a lathe drill slowly drills through his head! When I say slowly I mean it, even in the world of film where it takes a descending stone door forever to close it still takes 1m 15 seconds, PLUS Bob was trying to run away, he wasn’t even fighting the Dad. He tries to explain why he was there and the Dad looks at the lathe, then at Bob and makes the decision to drill through his head. Psy-cho-path!

The last of the weird set pieces I’m going to mention is the maggot storm. There’s a shot where our 4 main heroes are sat discussing what they’re going to do when the window blows open and maggots start spraying in through the window. A lot of maggots. 10kg of them apparently, blown at the actors by two wind machines. Lovely!

Some more general observations.

The zombies seem to be able to teleport. This isn’t explained, or discussed, it’s just something they seem to be able to do, well at least some of the time, it’s pretty inconsistent.

Somebody, Fulci I imagine, definitely liked the idea of Zombies grabbing somebody’s scalp and pulping the back of their skull by squeezing it. This happens at least 3 times that I recall. It’s a great effect but some more variation would have been nice.

Lastly, and appropriately, the ending. Our two remaining heroes Mary and Gerry emerge from the crypt beneath the Dunwich graveyard, they’ve saved the day. The little boy who they helped earlier, John-John, really? What a name choice. Anyway John-John runs towards them, everyone’s happy, then slowly we hear Mary start to say, “No!”, “No!” and finally scream and we freeze frame on the boy’s face as animated cracks appear, the screen goes black and the credits roll. I’d love to now explain to you what that meant but unfortunately the best I have is that either, that’s just the ending and it’s weird, live with it, or that the ending was damaged or destroyed and they had no money to re-shoot it so that’s what we ended up with, I haven’t seen a definitive answer.

[Happy laughter then screams. Crackle effect to black. Credits]

7 – Can I Have a Volunteer? (The Wizard of Gore)

You finally reach the edge of town. Cobbled streets give way to trodden dirt and ahead, a wall of green, a forest, with an opening like a gothic archway of viridian leads into darkness.

At the edge of the wood, there has been a massacre. The stumps of trees fill the space, like islands in a sea of muddy ground. You look closer, the earth has been trampled by the coming and going of many feet and the stumps themselves appear worn and smooth on top, smooth except for numbers carved into each one. The ground slopes down to the west and there beyond the rows of stumps, is a stone dais…this is an amphitheatre

A stout wooden table sits in the centre of the dais, dark wood with dark stains.

Looking down, a sheet of paper flaps against your foot. Picking it up you see it’s a flyer for some event.

Mittwoch the Magnificent!

Magic and Mayhem.

You won’t believe your eyes, if you still have them!

A magic show then, but promising something more than just the usual mundane tricks. The flyer has no date but looks fairly new, perhaps the show is still on, if not here then somewhere else on the island…is there anywhere else on the island? People weren’t clear on that.

You fold the flyer and slip it into your pocket with Steven’s map.

Taking one last look at the dais, you turn and stride towards the trees.

Today’s film is a bit more of an obscure one, at least outside of Horror fan circles. I love Horror, but I’d never heard of this film, perhaps shame on me, until I heard it mentioned on Cinemassacre. The Monster Madness series introduced me to many of the lesser known films in my collection and I’ll forever be grateful for that, even when it’s a film like this. Ominous? Perhaps.

The Wizard of Gore is a 1970 film, directed by, The Godfather of Gore, or at least one of them, Herschell Gordon Lewis. This is one of the later films in his initial run between 1961 and 1972 and follows the exploits of a rather intense Magician named Montag the Magnificent. Montag has an unusual show, it has the old clichés like sawing a woman in half, but he takes it up a notch and uses a chainsaw!

Like the film, the spoiler free section of this review will probably be somewhat confusing as I’ll mostly be wanting to type ‘But what the fuck was actually happening when…’ or ‘I don’t understand! I thought…’ etc… Basically the film is all sorts of weird and despite having watched it twice in the space of a month it didn’t really answer my questions.

Let’s get on to what we can talk about. The film is gory, very gory. Real animal offal is used in the gruesome death scenes and performances, though despite the use of real gore, I’d be lying if I said it looked real…does that make sense? It looks like what it is, people with animal guts on them, there are some fun prosthetics and fake body parts used in close ups, though again they’re obviously fake. So despite all of the blood and guts this, probably, isn’t going to make you cringe or look away in the way the Saw or Hostel films might do, I mostly found myself laughing at it, though maybe that’s just me.

Because we’re still in the spoiler free section I can’t go into too much detail regarding the plot but essentially Montag is doing his shows and selecting ‘volunteers’ and these same people are turning up dead shortly afterwards and it’s really a bit of a who done it mystery, which I actually found pretty compelling, at least until the end sequence. I really did wonder what was really going on behind the mysterious deaths, as I hinted earlier this really doesn’t pay off in the end, if you’re looking for a film which pays off in the end, this will disappoint.

On the theme of disappointing, the acting is awful, though hilariously so. The film’s main protagonist, talk show host Sherry Carson, played by Judy Cler puts in probably the best performance though it’s Ray Sager as Montag who steals the show. He’s so over the top and dramatic, which kind of works for a Magician, but he’s always at 200% even when off stage. Oh, special mention goes to the mortuary owner…just wait.

So it’s a badly acted, over the top gore film with a somewhat compelling plot but a disappointing ending, but is it worth watching? Well, I’m going to give this film the lowest score I’ve given any film so far, 2 bloody hands out of 5. It’s campy, it’s silly, but ultimately it isn’t fun, and a film like this really needs to be. If you do decide to watch it, do so with friends, it’s a film that requires lively debate and incredulity. It succeeds as a talking point where it fails as a film.

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

So my main question with this film is WTF IS HAPPENING?? We see Montag performing his magic tricks, such as chainsawing a girl in half and we keep cutting between a calm scene where he’s going about his business, everybody is watching intently and there’s little going on it seems, and super gory shots of guts everywhere and blood, and screaming, and then back to the calm shot again, and repeat. It seems clear that the audience aren’t seeing all of the viscera or hearing the screaming and are only seeing the ‘trick’ being performed. Are the bloody bits in Montag’s head, is he using magic to hide this part from the viewers?

Later we see the volunteer/victim seemingly succumb to the wounds they received in the show and now everybody can see it. The cast start to think a copycat killer is following the volunteers after the show and killing them in the same way as the tricks that were performed.

We know…do we? I’m honestly not sure. That it’s Montag who is killing these women with magic, or perhaps some form of mass hypnosis (That works on people who weren’t there? And keeps people alive who should be dead?). Honestly this is why I said it was compelling, I found myself really wanting to know how it worked, what was the trick? At the end it seems like perhaps this was all in Montag’s mind, the entire film, this makes the most sense I guess but the ending is equally strange and there’s even a false ending to confuse things further. Montag is killed and our two main protagonists enjoy a well deserved drink. But wait! Jack peels off his face to reveal that he is actually Montag! He goes to kill Sherry but then she laughs and tells him that everything that happened was actually HER illusion! She tells him he’ll have to start again and we go back to the start of the film.

So okay you say, Sherry explains it, it was an illusion of her making, but you know what, that’s bullshit! That’s a case of not knowing how to end the film, it’s similar to the classic ‘It was all a dream’ ending, and those are never satisfying! I was hoping for something clever, but then that was wishful thinking with a film like this. Ultimately it left me unsatisfied.

Moving away from the plot there were a few moments in the film which I did enjoy. I liked the creepy scenes in a graveyard where Montag retrieves the (Suddenly far less grisly) corpses of the victims and starts placing them one by one into a mausoleum, some creepy music plays and there’s a red filter over everything and the whole section plays out like an old gothic horror and is really the cinematographic highlight of the film, in fact if taken on its own the first of these scenes in particular would be a great creepy little short.

Speaking of the graveyard, I mentioned him earlier but the mortuary owner is hilarious. Apparently he’s the actual owner of the graveyard used in the film and he wanted to be in the film. There’s a scene where he’s in the morgue and Montag freezes him with his stare and he stands there with one arm in the air supposedly frozen but he’s swaying about and to be fair to him he’s kept in shot for a very long time for somebody trying to stand still, maybe his direction was to sway about, that’s entirely possible, I could be being too harsh on him, but it’s amusing none the less.

Other than that there’s little else I really want to mention. If you’re looking for a gore fest and you like some 70’s exploitation then you might enjoy it. I myself didn’t hate it, I gave it a 2 out of 5 but it maybe creeps towards so bad it’s good, but doesn’t quite make it. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s slightly later The Gore Gore Girls was a more enjoyable one for me because it wasn’t trying to be serious, the only humour in this feels unintentional.

Now, go back to the beginning…