Amazon.com Essentials:
In the fall of 1979, Sam Raimi and his merry band headed into
the woods of rural Tennessee to make a movie. They emerged with a
roller coaster of a film packed with shocks, gore, and wild humor, a
film that remains a benchmark for the genre. Ash (cult favorite Bruce
Campbell) and four friends arrive at a backwoods cabin for a vacation,
where they find a tape recorder containing incantations from an
ancient book of the dead. When they play the tape, evil forces are
unleashed, and one by one the friends are possessed. Wouldn't you know
it, the only way to kill a "deadite" is by total bodily dismemberment,
and soon the blood starts to fly. Raimi injects tremendous energy into
this simple plot, using the claustrophobic set, disorienting camera
angles, and even the graininess of the film stock itself to create an
atmosphere of dread, punctuated by a relentless series of
jump-out-of-your-seat shocks. The Evil Dead lacks the more
highly developed sense of the absurd that distinguish later entries in
the series--Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness--but it is
still much more than a gore movie. It marks the appearance of one of
the most original and visually exciting directors of his generation,
and it stands as a monument to the triumph of imagination over
budget. --Simon Leake
