Darkman

Sam Raimi spent the first decade of his career straddling the line between potential hit-maker and one-trick pony. After his over-the-top gangster pastiche Crimewave tanked, he ran back to his debut film, only to silence any cynics by creating the greatest horror-comedy in the history of the genre. It renewed faith in the director, who decided to throw his talents into another genre film, albeit about comic book heroes instead of criminals. Released a year after Tim Burton's Batman proved that the genre could be taken seriously (though that film still has one foot planted firmly in cartoonish abandon), Darkman built upon the raves the director received for Evil Dead 2 by showcasing his ability to make a good film outside of the horror genre.

That is not to say that Darkman fully breaks from Raimi's bread and butter. Based on his own short story, it pays homage to classic Universal horror films as much as it does the superhero genre. After all, the story of a man, hideously disfigured, inventing disguises that allow him to cover his wounds as well as seek revenge calls to mind The Phantom of the Opera and The Invisible Man more than Batman or Green Lantern. Comic books inform the dialogue, however, which is gleefully over the top without slipping off the edge as it did in Crimewave.

Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) receives his hideous wounds when mobster Durant (Larry Drake) confronts him in his lab. Durant wants an incriminating document held by Peyton's girlfriend Julie (Frances McDormand), and his thugs burn the poor scientist's face with acid before blowing up the whole place altogether. Peyton survives with massive burns that leave him with an inability to control his emotions and a thirst for vengeance.

He salvages his project, synthetic skin developed just for burn victims and the like, and finds that his overactive adrenal glands give him super-strength and a high tolerance for pain. The only downside to his fake skin? Something within it reacts to light, so his masks deteriorate after 99 minutes. Ergo, he becomes the titular Darkman, a mysteriously, bandaged hero who can also assume the identity of anyone he chooses with his skin molds.

Raimi, clearly still operating at the peak of his camp, has great fun with the movie. His offbeat style of rapid cutting and sudden, swift camera movement doesn't integrate into the story as well as it did for the Evil Dead movies, but it's a noticeable step up from Crimewave. The action is so slick and pulpy the frames might as well be cels of an actual comic. The final fight, on an unfinished building, contains all the joyous revelry that was so sadly lacking in the similarly constructed climax of Spider-Man 3. Its special effects should also be noted; some of the prosthetic make-up cannot be said to look realistic -- particularly around the skeletal mouth -- but the effect of Peyton peeling off a flawless skin mask to reveal a perfectly acceptable face underneath is impressive. Action scenes, though surprisingly few and far between, contain all the visual invention of Raimi's early films but on a budget that allows him to really display his acuity. What a shame that the director later turned to limp, unimaginative CG.

Raimi's dialogue is cheesy, but it works because the actors play it straight enough to give it some weight but light enough to lets us know they're in on the joke. Neeson can't help but ooze gravitas, and even with his face hidden in prosethetics and bandages and his voice altered for much of the film, he makes you care about this strange, frightening hero. McDormand has little screen time, but she establishes Julie as a capable person with her own drives, far removed from the two-dimensional Vicki Vale of the previous year's mega-hit. Casting "real" actors in action flicks doesn't always pay off, but it allows for the opportunity of that actor crafting a three-dimensional character with shades of moral gray, and Neeson and McDormand do a wonderful job.

Supposedly, the studios tampered with the film a bit after some test screenings went badly, though apparently it performed better after some crazier elements were cut and Danny Elfman's score was added. Even without whatever footage the studio hacked out of the film, Darkman remains a thoroughly fun ride. It obviously follows in the footsteps of Batman, but its embracing of old horror pictures made some comparisons with Burton's Expressionist vision inevitable. Far from perfect, Darkman nevertheless demonstrated that Sam Raimi could well become one of the most visually inventive directors to come out of the '80s, and you can see why someone might hand him the reins to a franchise as big as Spider-Man.

Evil Dead II

Following the underwhelming reception of Crimewave, collaborators Sam Raimi and the Coen brothers overhauled their plan to break into Hollywood. The Coens gathered some rising stars and played the farce of Crimewave with a straighter face and without the broad genre pastiches, resulting in the classic comedy Raising Arizona, which helped establish Nicolas Cage as a household name. Raimi, on the other hand, threw up his hands and ran back to the independent world (and the well) to see if a bigger version of the horror film that put him on the radar might allow him to truly get his foot in the door. So, he brought figures of the first film's Italian grosses to producer Dino De Laurentiis and received $3.5 million, tenfold the budget of the original, to make a sequel.

The result was nothing less than a schlocky masterpiece and the definitive horror-comedy film, if not horror cult movie in general. As if to prove that The Evil Dead wasn't a fluke or that Crimewave had broken his creative spark (which is on display in a few wonderful sequences), Evil Dead II took the sequel maxim of "double everything" and decided it would just be more fun to quadruple it. As he could not secure the rights to use clips from his debut in this film, Raimi decided to simply shoot new material as a recap. Aspects of the story changed (Ash travels to the cabin with only his girlfriend, while others show up later), but the gist of the entire first film is delivered in about seven minutes, which is a subtle indicator that not even The Evil Dead could fully prepare you for what was in store.

At the end of first film, Ash emerged from the cabin as daybreak destroyed the final remains of his possessed friends, only for the unseen evil to rush through the woods and catch him as the image faded to black. Most would assume this to be the end of the line but, as Bruce Campbell likes to phrase it, "positive box-office response saved Ash." The recap of the previous movie ends the moment the evil grabs Ash and we see what happens. He lives, yes, but now he too is possessed.

The first time around, Ash was no different from his compatriots: he was as weak, as dumb and as cheesy. Campbell takes a different approach to the character here, and it forever cements Ash as one of the greatest movie characters in history. In the recap, he is no longer an indecisive wretch but an ice-cold leader. Oh, he's still dumb as a stump, but you tend to listen to a man who doesn't give more than a moment's pause before taking a chainsaw to his demonic girlfriend because he knows that the woman he loved is dead. When his hand becomes possessed, he lops it off and eventually replaces it by hooking the chainsaw to his stump.

Campbell was clearly a rookie when he and Raimi started work on The Evil Dead just after they both graduated high school; his delivery, like the entire dialogue, was so indebted to the B-movies the friends grew up watching that it was simply too straight to convey the parody. No such problem exists here: Campbell can turn from scenery-chewing B-movie putz to ass-kicking action hero on a dime, and that's not even counting all the times he gets possessed in the film. He's as much responsible for the film's brilliance as Raimi and Scott Spiegel's script.

That script bursts at the seams with madcap genius just waiting for Raimi's direction to send it over the edge into cult timelessness. They didn't invent horror-comedy with this movie -- one could argue that the genre goes all the way back to Abbot and Costello's run-ins with movie monsters -- but never had a film so effortlessly mixed scares with laughs. Ash's possession offers up some chilling moments, but when the demon focuses in his hand and Ash must hunt down his own body part, it becomes transcendent farce. And that's not even the best bit involving rogue appendages: remember the eyeball?

And that's the tip of the gory iceberg. Even revisiting this trilogy, it's hard for me to process that The Evil Dead is downright tame compared to this. Going for scares made the filmmakers somewhat restrained (it should go without saying that this is relatively speaking), but now they just threw caution to the wind and went completely and utterly insane. And damned if it doesn't work. The scene were Ash's dead girlfriend rises from her grave and dances using her severed head like a pork pie hat is a creepily hysterical nod to Fred Astaire, while a possessed Ash crying over his lady's necklace might seem like an emotional moment but is just so (deliberately) absurd you'll be crying from the laughter, not the drama.

I want to write about this film all day but I'm afraid that I'll just end up listing every moment of the film, because not a single moment fails to elicit scares, laughs or awe at Raimi's low-budget prowess, and often they inspire all three. As I watched this for the second time, I couldn't help but wonder if Tim Burton ever sent Raimi a royalty check, as Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas openly steal elements and even creature models from Evil Dead II.

Though Campbell and Raimi only spent 6 years on other projects in between the first two Evil Dead movies (with Raimi only making Crimewave in the interim), Evil Dead II appears to be the work of studied pros. While its computer and stop-motion animation looks incredibly dated, the film as a whole hasn't aged a day because it straddles the line between serious filmmaking and mad self-awareness perfectly -- the pendulum swung the other way when the third, hopefully final, installment arrived and completed the journey from straight horror to outright farce, though that too is an excellent picture. As an example of a seamless blend of horror and comedy, only 2004's Shaun of the Dead comes close to the level of Raimi's magnum opus. When people tell me to just sit back and enjoy a thrill ride when I pan something like Transformers, I just think wistfully of Ash's hand giving him the finger before he basts it with his boomstick.

Crimewave

When Sam Raimi's no-budget horror debut The Evil Dead became an instant cult hit when it finally found a distributor, the studios naturally came calling. After all, if this guy could make such a splash with a $375,000 schlock movie, imagine what he could do with a real budget and wide distribution. So, Raimi received $3 million to make his proposed gangster comedy, Crimewave, a pastiche of Golden Age noir and Three Stooges gags. Enlisting the help of his old friends the Coen brothers, who were themselves fresh off their acclaimed debut Blood Simple, Raimi seemed poised to bring the indie ethos to Hollywood and possibly even change the system.

Then the filmmakers learned a hard lesson about studio involvement. Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead co-producer Ron Talpert and the Coens worked in the independent film, particularly the Evil Dead people, who raised their money through dentists and vendors. Now someone was on-set, reminding them that their budget did not take into account union fees and that some scenes needed to look bigger. Sadly, this effectively castrated both Raimi and the Coens, making Crimewave seem more like a self-parody of both camps before they'd even established themselves.

The film concerns Victor Ajax (Reed Birney, forced on the filmmakers when the studio refused Campbell the part), a technician for the Trend-Odegard Security. He's on the way to the electric chair at the beginning for a crime he claims he didn't commit, and we then cut to flashbacks of his story.

The crimes in question -- a string of murders -- were committed by a group of hitmen posing as, appropriately enough, exterminators of "all sizes." Mr. Trend hires them to kill his partner when he catches Odegard planning to sell the company to an oily huckster named "Renaldo the Hell" (Bruce Campbell). In true Coens fashion, this simple crime goes terribly awry when they accidentally kill Trend as well and someone witnesses the murder. Victor doesn't know about all this, as he is too busy attempting to woo his perfect woman, Nancy (Sheree J. Wilson), who cares little for Vic but desires the dismissive Renaldo.

The Three Stooges have played an active role in Raimi's writing throughout his career, but never has it been so pronounced (or so poorly integrated). The director utilizes the tricks that made The Evil Dead so inventive -- the cheap rigs that allow doors to pop open and slam closed by themselves, zooming close-ups -- are on display, but they're made to emphasize a physical gag or beyond-hammy acting. The actors all laugh in overblown manners, and any time someone is hit or falls down it's accompanied by a silly sound effect. Not a single line passes without a sight gag, hammy dialogue or a pratfall, and it makes everything simply too referential and parodic and it robs the action scenes of any power. Occasionally it works, such as the scene where Mrs. Trend drops a potted plant to alert help, only for Faron to catch it, and then only for the pot to fall off the grasped plant, but for the most part it simply falls flat.

I realize that the dialogue is supposed to be cheesy and it's supposed to play up the stilted absurdity of so many noir pictures, but it just gets old after a while. Only Campbell pulls it off well, because the man was born to be ridiculous. He's not just hammy like everyone else; he calls to mind the acting style of the '30s and '40s. He's perfect for the role, which was heavily expanded when producers refused to let Campbell play the lead, and he makes you wish that someone in charge had the foresight to recognize his talent. Also worth mentioning is Paul L. Smith as Faron, who doesn't pull of the annoying laugh but makes up for it with a deep growl that actually inspires some chills here and there.

There's really not much to say about this film. Both Raimi and the Coens draw inspiration from classic trash, be it horror flicks (Raimi) or pulp noir (the Coen brothers), but here it's just too broad and too poorly married to the action. The two groups would collaborate again on the Coens' maligned The Hudsucker Proxy, which also worked as a pastiche of old noir but had the wit and acting talent behind it to make it work even if it isn't top-tier Coens. It's strange to watch this mostly unfunny film, one that contains only traces of the Coens' and Raimi's strength, and realize that the Coens would next make Raising Arizona and Raimi Evil Dead 2, two of the funniest movies of the last 25 years. All of this makes Crimewave a curiosity for Raimi and Coens die-hards over anything overly entertaining, and it ranks as one of the weakest efforts from either party.

-camera movement actually looks less refined that his debut

The Evil Dead

My recent love affair with Burn Notice has reminded me how much I adore Bruce Campbell, and how woefully little of his filmography I've seen (though I can certainly see myself going to the grave without trolling through his Sci-Fi channel TV movies). Along with Sam Raimi's barnstorming return to form, Drag Me to Hell, I was in the mood to revisit the start of both their careers and then travel forward through their resumés. While I won't do this as stringently as, say, my planned John Carpenter retrospective, I do plan to at least run through Raimi's filmography and the more renowned Campbell fare.

Anyway, back to the film at hand. The Evil Dead, Raimi and Campbell's debuts, took the horror community by storm when it at last hit wide distribution in 1983, two years after its completion and exhibition in Detroit and four years since Raimi started working on the project. Raimi secured the measly $375,000 budget with his short film Within the Woods, a 30-minute, $1,600 short film also starring Campbell that ostensibly served the same function as a television pilot: to attract investors for a full-length version. The rest, as they say is history.

But what makes The Evil Dead such an enduring cult favorite and its protagonist inarguably the most beloved horror film hero of all time? Perhaps I just answered my own question: you see, where Raimi excelled -- and where so many imitators fall short -- is his focus on the the victim and not the monster. Campbell's Ash Williams is a fresh-faced, terrified All-American in this installment, but eventually he would grow into the biggest bad-ass the horror genre ever produced. Yet even here he is the center of the film. Strange, terrible things happen all around him, but we're made to consider how it affects him, not how brilliant or evil the villain is. Though he's stuck with some rotten dialogue that he delivers with matching stiffness ("Why are you bastards tormenting me?!"), Campbell adds a human element to Ash, and you can see his suffering when he must eventually kill his possessed gal.

Then again, it might just be the insanity depicted on-screen. The Evil Dead is awash in the sort of gore that you rarely saw at the pinnacle (or nadir, depending on your tastes) of '70s exploitation films. Raimi and his team ingeniously rigged their sets with swings that way in idle wind, cellars that pop open with no visible hands pushing or pulling them. It puts you on your edge before the first drop of blood is spilled. But when it is, oh boy. As Ash must face the demons possessing his friends one by one, they spew blood and vomit everywhere. At some point, you begin to wonder if it took two years to film because for every day of shooting, it must have taken four to clean up to shoot again.

From the start, Raimi plays up B-movie clichés for his own demented use. To say that the plot is simple would be an understatement of almost British proportions: the five college kids rent a cabin deep in the woods of Tennessee to rent for the weekend, and soon they stumble into an excavation site in the cellar. Inside, they discover a knife, a tape recording, and the Necromicon, the Book of the Dead. They play the tape, which just so happens to contain recitations of the book, and soon demons start tormenting them.

It's a tried and true horror trope delivered with some of the cheesiest dialogue you'll ever hear. Unlike the sequels, though, it's hard to tell whether these lines are meant to be cheesy or if Raimi has some growing to do. Considering that this sort of dialogue has found its way into his subsequent films, even the Spider-Man trilogy (most notably in the third installment, which he co-wrote), I'd say that Raimi's never really been one with words.

He makes up for it, however, in the staging. While Raimi has never really been able to pen dialogue that wasn't at least intentionally corny, he is an adept storyteller. Most horror films spend 20 minutes setting up the characters, another 20 of scattered exposition concerning whatever evil the characters must face, and then it's all jump scares leading up to some final showdown. The Evil Dead crams all of its exposition into the first 20 minutes, which unsettle from the start with the brief drive over a rotting bridge, and that feeling that the cabin is alive somehow.

How did these kids from Michigan State end up in Appalachia, and how did they find and book this secluded cabin which surely must not have come with many referrals? Why am I asking these sorts of questions? They're there because that's where the demons are, and Raimi is far too concerned with ratcheting up tension to fever pitches from the start to give a damn about the logic of a possession story. He slams his foot down on the gas pedal the instant the audio recording finishes reciting and never lets up, yet there is actually a modicum of taste to the affair.

Take the infamous rape scene, in which Linda is violated by the branches of a demonic tree: it's horrific and exploitative, but not in the sense that so many horror films play up rape. No shot lingers for too long in the sequence, and it cuts away before getting too graphic. This scene is truly terrifying, and Raimi makes sure that it never becomes even unintentionally funny. Later, when Ash's sister and girlfriend, both possessed, attempt to convince him that they're all better now, the result is genuinely chilling. The sequels played up the absurdity of the gore and the dialogue, but Raimi's commitment here makes The Evil Dead truly scary even on a repeat viewing.

There's also the bonus of his strikingly original direction. There are so many canted angles in The Evil Dead you practically expect Harry Lime to jump out at any minute to discuss cuckoo clocks. The music plays a much smaller role in the film compared to most horror flicks, leaving Raimi to pick up the slack with his breakneck editing and the mad rush of camera movement so original it is now known as the "Raimi cam." The Coens, long-time friends of Raimi, helped out on the film, and their early films bristle with his influence. Imagine, two of the best filmmakers to come out of the independent scene and indeed modern masters of their craft, spent their first few films aping the B-moviest B-move ever made.

I remember sitting down with this film for the first time a mere year ago and was bowled over that the seemingly average director of the Spider-Man films (by that time I'd been consumed in backlash for the franchise, though I plan to revisit and re-evaluate them in the near future), could make something so original even though it practically congealed from the corn-syrup blood of B-movies past. I'd never seen such gore, and not in the way that today's torture porn depicts, that of gritty "realism" and nauseating, forced terror. No, Raimi understands the absurdity of it all, even when he plays it with a straight face. The Evil Dead received wide distribution in part because of a rave review from horror icon Stephen King, who called it "a black rainbow of terror," (as you can see, another one of his comments made the poster) and that's a damn good summary. Roger Ebert has a maxim that states, "It's not what a film is about but how it is about it." The Evil Dead looks pedestrian on paper, but in the hands of Raimi, it's a classic.

Drag Me to Hell

I originally opened this review by mentioning how Drag Me to Hell is Sam Raimi's return to the horror genre after 16 years of more mainstream fare, but I scrapped it for two reasons: unlike his revered Evil Dead series, this has broad mainstream appeal; and, by focusing on the fact that he's back to horror, I move the focus away from how brilliant the film actually is.

Raimi fans will feel a rush of joy in the very first moments where a Mexican couple bring their hallucinating child to a mystic to free him of some sort of curse. Before she can, an invisible force bursts through the windows and beats the adults before the floor opens up and demon hands drag the boy to, well, you can guess.

Flash-forward from 1969 to the present, and we meet our protagonist. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a loan officer at the local bank. She's dating a psychology professor (Justin Long) and she's in the running for the open Assistant Manager position alongside Stu, who only recently joined the bank but is, in the words of the boss, "aggressive." To prove her backbone, she denies a loan to elderly Mrs. Ganush, who's already received two extensions but can't keep up the payments.

When Christine goes to leave that evening, the old gypsy assails her in the parking lot and steals a button of the young lady's coat. She chants a curse, then hands it back to Christine. Soon, she sees the same visions that plagued the boy all those years ago, as well as visions of the mad old woman. After consulting with the obligatory fortune teller, she discovers that she will endure the visions/attacks for three days, at which point the tormenting demon will manifest and claim her soul.

And that's all you need to know. Drag Me to Hell is nothing if not predictable, and Raimi's horror films have never been big on plot. But what makes it so great, as with Raimi's other horror fare, is his inventiveness and how he toys with staid conventions. Yes, Christine must seek out the Eastern mystic, but the Raimi brothers avoid stereotypes. Rham Jas (Dileep Rao) wears business attire, knows Western philosophy and psychology, and accepts credit cards. When Long's Clay brings the farm-raised Christine to meet his high-society parents, his mother fits the bill for the frigid, dismissive snob but quickly warms to Christine's honesty and ambition.

I can't find the figures on the film's budget, but it's clearly not a whole lot, and certainly a significant amount less than the numbers Raimi's had at his disposal for the Spider-Man franchise. But that brings out the spark that's been missing from his work for so long: he brings back good old Raimi mainstays with his invisible attacker, ratcheting up the tension with the mostly physical effects of objects creaking and crashing as the Beast approaches. The CG leaves a lot to be desired, but it's to be expected for lower-budget features, and it never distracts all that much.

Those physical effects, combined with Christopher Young's terrific score, create an endlessly creepy atmosphere, one that never allows you to drop your guard, not even for a second. But Raimi fills the screams with so much of his unique humor that I didn't know whether to use my hands to shield my eyes or hold my insides. You can see the ending coming from a mile away, but Raimi lulls you into a sense of security before he does it, and it makes the final moment one of the most brilliantly funny scenes of any film in recently memory. I had tears in my eyes when the title card came up from laughing so hard.

So, there's barely a plot to speak of, and no real subtext. The closest thing I can think of to a message is that loan officers should be more careful when it comes to denying people. Raimi spent the entire decade slipping into directorial mediocrity with the Spider-Man franchise -- which has aged about as gracefully as milk -- but here he's back on top as one of the most creative and entertaining filmmakers in the industry. Even if, like me, you're not big on horror, you owe it to yourself to check out Drag Me to Hell, by leaps and bounds Raimi's best since Evil Dead II.