NOTE FROM MATT: Hey everybody – the IAMDC army is growing! Here’s a fabulous review from who I hope will become a regular contributor, Max Jacobson! I’ll be on later tonight with a review of 2007 travelogue Into the Wild, and now I have to really step up my game to follow this! Enjoy!
This is the beginning of the body of text that will constitute my review of the 1981 horror film The Evil Dead. By the end of this body of text, you will feel a ravenous hunger for seeing this movie. Is that the point? I don’t feel driven to share my opinion with you. Should I? Sometimes I do. If I adore the shit out of a movie, I become missionary-like, spreading the good word of whatever to the tragically out of the loop. But that’s not really the case with The Evil Dead.
Because I’m a complete junkie when it comes to reviews, I’d heard it name dropped a couple times, and I had a vague notion that The Evil Dead trilogy was supposed to be hilarious and badass and so I was planning to watch it someday, way off in the future, but the impetus came the other day when I was chatting with some friends about rotten tomatoes. Someone said they didn’t think Wall-E looked that good. As it happens, I’m really looking forward to it, so I playfully offered a ten dollar bet that it’s going to be a masterpiece, and have at the very least a 95% score on rotten tomatoes. I thought for sure they’d take the bet; only 22 movies got a score that good last year. That’s good odds. Anything above 80% or so colors me impressed. But rather than accept the loaded bet, they steered the conversation toward this philosophical discourse on the worth of reviews, and the validity of a review aggregator like RT.
So here’s how it ties in to the subject of the review: The Evil Dead has a 100% on RT. What that means is that of all 40 reviews the RT could find of the movie, not a one of them was, essentially, thumbs down. It’s extremely likely that some if not many of them held small gripes, but overall they enjoyed it. My friend said it was so bad that he couldn’t sit through it. He’d tried watching it on 3 different occasions to no avail. He looked up some of his favorite movies and found scores in the high 80’s and was disappointed. One of his favorites, Boondock Saints, has a score of 18%. At first I tried to bring the conversation back to Wall-E, and how good it’s gonna be… but then I decided that if no one was going to accept my bet, I’d accept his challenge. I was to watch The Evil Dead and report back. And if I had any audacity at all, I was to enjoy it.
I watched it that night. I signed up for Netflix and was able to stream it straightaway. So picture me sitting in the dark with my laptop, headphones plugged in because everyone else is sleeping, staring transfixed as the titular evil dead possess anything and everything they can with the simply evil motivation of being really scary and really gross (The full title? The Evil Dead: The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror). White liquids come spewing out of wounds, eyeballs are pressed in, pencils are burrowed into ankles, and soon enough everyone’s covered in blood. Oh, and a forest rapes a woman. (“Did someone in the woods do this to you?” “The woods themselves did this to me!”)
And I did not enjoy it.
Because I was watching by myself, I kept pausing when I was worried that something particularly gross was about to happen. When Ash, the hero of the flick played by Bruce Campbell, sticks his thumbs into the eyes of one of the demons, I was mortified that they were about to pop with a squelch and that anonymous white goo was going to get loose. So I went and got a snack.
It’s worth mentioning that Bruce Campbell, then an unknown actor, is a really good sport. First of all, his character is named Ashley, which is actually kind of hilarious considering how badass a name Ash is (one of the few instances of humor in the otherwise strictly gross-out horror movie), but he also gets a lot of blood and guts sprayed on his face. In one nearly poetic moment, his possessed girlfriend is lunging for him and he swiftly decapitates her with a shovel, she lands on him… and just as I’m contemplating how if she still had a head, they would be kissing… squirt. A surge of neck-blood gushes onto his face.
What I love the most though, is that the writer/director of this repulsive indie horror movie would go on, some 20 years later, to direct the three hit Spider-Man movies. Seriously think about it. The same imagination that had Spider-Man and Mary-Jane Watson sharing a romantic date laying together on a web under the stars… that same guy compelled a woman to get branched. Oh, and the “assistant film editor”, Joel Coen, would go on to make some pretty great movies with his brother Ethan.
And so here I am at the crossroads between having every reason to like it other than the fact that I saw it and it was, in a word, unpleasant. Well, what did I expect?
I’m mixed. I’m irresolute. Then this ain’t a review, this is me blogsturbating!
Here’s a quote from Dustin Putman, a film critic who I half-seriously refer to as “my trusted reviewer.” On a day like today when I was worrying that if reviews are actually as destructive as I feared (read: causing people to dislike things they could have liked– what’s the point of that? Unless it in turn increases how much they like other more esoteric works and so it balances out? Even then?), then I definitely read far too many reviews, I sent him an email asking for some thoughts on the issue. I’ll just end on this excerpt from his reply:
The use of my review, I think, is the same as any review–to express a personal opinion, and maybe give the reader an idea of why something may or may not have worked. As long as I do this, and clearly describe the pros and cons of X movie, I feel I have done my job. And if, for example, I feel “There Will Be Blood” and “Atonement” are overrated, albeit ambitious failures, and yet actually enjoy “The Hottie and the Nottie” or “I Know Who Killed Me” for what they are, so be it. A critic should never apologize for how they feel, just as long as they’re honest and do not conform to the majority opinion for the sake of it. There’s no dignity in that.
That dignity is a big part of why I respect him as a critic, but now upon attempting a review, I’m realizing something else worth respecting: sure, he just honestly tells how he feels, but he has to know how he feels. Here’s what I know about how I felt about The Evil Dead: I did not have a fun time watching it; now and then the camera work really impressed me; despite the really bad effects I jumped at each and every one of the dozens of jump scares (seriously, I wish I had counted them. It feels like 50); I think it’s kind of rad that critics are on board with this out-there of a movie; and I’m actually pretty psyched to watch the sequel.
And that concludes the body of text that constitutes this review.
-Max Jacobson
I Ate My DVD Collection 