Review – The Evil Dead

Here we have one of the legendary classics of low-budget horror. The acting is terrible, and the effects not much better. The misogyny gets a little hard to take as well (particularly the scene in which one of the female characters is graphically raped by plants). And to be honest, once the film passes the halfway point the whole mess disintegrates into a brain-dead gore-fest. But even so, the set-up isn’t too bad, almost Lovecraftian at points. And though a lot of the gore is cliché stuff, every once in awhile director Sam Raimi will throw in something just innovative enough to be genuinely creepy, sometimes even downright scary. If nothing else, this picture should be regarded as a memento of a bygone age when independent film-makers were still able to turn out horror movies on par with the big-budget Hollywood stuff. Worth seeing