Evil Dead 2 (1987) (USA)

aka Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn

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If you were ever curious what it would like if the Three Stooges, H.G. Lewis and a particularly enthusiastic Lucio Fulci got together to collaborate on your standard “cabin in the woods” horror film, well, look no further. Raimi and crew may have unleashed an excellent original but their return to The Book of the Dead and those damn Deadites amped up the slapstick ethos to the splatter ambience and made a perfect bit of insane horror. Following an awesome opening involving an exposition dump (sometimes, they can really work) about said evil book and its powers, Ash and his girlfriend head to an empty cabin in the woods for a little couple time. The fact that this is somebody else’s cabin and they have no right to be there makes it easier to swallow when Ash comes across a tape recorder just laying around containing some backstory the cabin’s owner (a professor of ancient history, naturally) narrates about the discovery of an ancient book. He and his wife brought this tome back to the cabin for study and, in an excellently realized bit of genuine terror, goes into detail about what went wrong. Of course, after already summoning the POV terror so it’s a bit too late for any warning the professor lays out in his desperate recording. By the point where Ash finally hears what went down, he’s already been attacked by his possessed girlfriend Linda, decapitated her with a shovel and buried her in the earth. As we all know, that’s gonna do jack and shit. Ash manages to survive a possession of his own thanks to the healing rays of the sun but his problems are truly just beginning. The bridge is out, the sun is setting and Ash is in for one hell of night which will consist of his dead gal rising from the ground and dancing with her severed head, his hand getting possessed and having to cut it off with a chainsaw, his severed hand raising some serious hell, insanity knocking on the poor man’s door and the arrival of the professor’s daughter Annie (Sarah Berry looking like an impressively hair’d Julie Bowen) along with some others who stumble upon a scene that truly looks like an insane man just slaughtered the elderly inhabitants of the cabin. So it makes sense that they throw him down in the fruit cellar where Ash meets the professor’s wife who has seen better days (and played by Ted Raimi) while the daughter and company listen to her father’s recordings and come to realize just how far south things went. There won’t be many left standing by the time things get taken care of and Ash gets thrown into a new adventure. So much happens so damn fast in this movie that you don’t really have much time to stop and catch your breath. It’s bearable thanks to an ingenious combination of finding comedy in the ridiculousness of the situation and some truly macabre horror… and never forget the magnificent physicality of Bruce Campbell’s insane performance. One of the greatest genre films ever made.