If you have a pulse, internet access and a sense of nostalgia, it is safe to say you are excited about the upcoming release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. How could you not be? After all, those trailers inspire warm, fuzzy tingles up the spine for anyone raised in the ways of the Force from an early age. I am one of you, I cannot pretend otherwise.
However, I also have to admit there was another long-awaited franchise comeback this year that made me just as excited: the return of a certain man who works in housewares and has a knack for chainsawing demons before dispatching them with a one-liner. What Star Wars meant to me as a child, the Evil Dead series meant to me as a snotty-nosed teen, and I probably watched Sam Raimi’s trilogy just as many times then as I watched George Lucas’ trilogy as a child. Shockingly, there were not many date nights or friends to distract me from movie marathons in high school.
From the moment it was announced that Bruce Campbell and Raimi were getting the band back together for a TV series reunion, I honestly could not quite believe it was real. After all, Army of Darkness wrapped up that cinematic series more than 20 years ago, and there had been so many rumours and false starts surrounding an Evil Dead 4 since then that I had pretty much given up hope on any of those blood-soaked beauties actually getting made.
Then, just as suddenly as there was new Star Wars in the world, Campbell and Raimi flew to New Zealand and made my dreams come true. From the moment I saw the trailer for Ash vs Evil Dead, I had a feeling it might work. However, it was not until I finally saw the pilot that I realized just how perfectly everyone involved raised Ash from the dead.
If you have not seen the Ash vs Evil Dead pilot, do so immediately. Of course, it helps if you are already a bit of an Evil Dead fan. Newcomers might still be charmed, but there is no way for me to know for sure since I am far too lost in my love for the franchise to remember a time when I was not fully immersed in it. What is most amazing about that first episode is how Raimi and Campbell resurrected their old creation without missing a beat.
From the pre-credit sequence, the show was right on point. Campbell’s Ash was more idiotic and wildly confident than ever. His cheesy bar pickup lines were hysterical, the sudden shifts to mocking deadite horror were delightful, and the stoned origins for Ash bringing back the dead again were absolutely brilliant.
Perhaps best of all, the show never attempted to do something big or different to reinvent the franchise. It simply dove back into what made the movies so much fun: a magical mixture of slapstick comedy and gore horror, and an idiot protagonist who only accidentally assumes his role as hero.
If anything, Campbell and Ash are even funnier all these years later. While some actors struggle to slip back into iconic characters due to age, Campbell and Ash only get better with time. After all, he is supposed to be incompetent and his arrogance completely unjustified. A few extra wrinkles and pounds only add to the character’s inappropriately heroic nature. Watching Campbell flirt with a wooden hand or perform a Three Stooges-style routine with broken lightbulbs was a total delight.
The actor’s natural hamminess has always been best served in Raimi’s guiding hands and it was absurdly fun to see them work together again. It also does not hurt that his years of entertaining fans on the convention circuit have only enhanced Campbell’s comedy skills. If anything, he is more suited to play Ash now than he was in the 1990s.
Despite having a lower television budget than the blockbuster specialist is used to these days, Raimi also delivered all the swooping camera work and radical tone shifts that made Evil Dead so special with ease. Drag Me to Hell proved that the director could still get up to his old tricks, but seeing Campbell at the centre of that wacky horror magic made it all flow beautifully. In scenes where Raimi leaned into real scares and gross-out gags, the loud, splashy, more-is-more style was just as fun as ever.
I am no The Walking Dead fan, but that show broke down the gore barriers on television to such an extent that full-blown Evil Dead bloodbaths that once had to be released unrated in theatres can now splash all over your TV at home without raising an eyebrow. It is a great time to be alive.
The setup for the series was surprisingly simple: deadites are back, and Ash will do what he can. What more do you need? It would have been a mistake to overcomplicate things too early. The Evil Dead movies were always more defined by tone and style than narrative. That is what the show needed, and that is exactly what Raimi and Campbell provided. New characters and actors struck just the right tongue-in-cheek tone to share the screen with Campbell, and there is no denying that this already shows tremendous promise.
The second episode may have reverted to a more standard TV aesthetic, but the humour, bloodshed and wild tonal shifts remained, with a few Raimi-influenced visual flourishes. Like the non-David Lynch episodes of Twin Peaks, the other writers and directors of Ash vs Evil Dead clearly revere and have studied Raimi’s directorial playbook, and they imitate it well. The more contained plot still delivered all the one-liners, irony and bloodshed needed to feel like an Evil Dead project. Given that Lucy Lawless has not even become a major factor in the series yet, this is clearly only going to get better.
So, even though it happened on television, it appears we finally have that Evil Dead 4 we have all been waiting for. Even better, it will keep coming weekly for at least two seasons. Campbell and Raimi clearly put a lot of effort into ensuring this show feels right, and if the writers and directors they brought on can maintain that standard, it will be a gift from the geek gods. It is strange to see the series shift mediums, but given that low-budget inventiveness and deliberate cheese were always part of the Evil Dead recipe, the franchise transitions surprisingly well.
It already has and, and hopefully, the boomstick brilliance will continue. This is a product of pure fan service made by people who love the source as much as the audience. That “groovy” moment? Unbelievable. Even if the audience never expands beyond a cult following and Starz lets the series end after its planned run, Ash vs Evil Dead still qualifies as a victory. Somehow, a series of cult films that barely broke even at the box office has returned 20 years later and tastes just as sweet. That should not be possible, but it happened. God bless Bruce Campbell and his cornball, chainsaw-slaying ways.
