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Bruce Campbell once again stars as the hapless Ash, center of Sam Raimi's one-man Evil Dead freakshows. Evil Dead 2 essentially remakes the second half of Raimi's first film after providing an abreviated synopsis (which, interestingly, omits two characters). In other words, the film is still, to use Joe Bob Briggs's description, "Spam in a cabin," in which Ash is marooned in a cabin in the woods and left to fend off demonic zombies that have been summoned by the Necronomicon Morbundis. There are characters other than Ash, of course--the zombies have to have SOMEBODY to chow down on, after all, but this is really a one-man review. In fact, for the first half of the movie, Ash's principal nemesis is his own possessed body.

The principal difference between the first and the second film is that, instead of being influenced by George Romero's zombie films, the second film is influenced by the Three Stooges. The gore is deliberately cartoonish, the special effects are deliberately bad (and deliberately shot a second or two too long in almost every instance), and the performance by Campbell is deliberately broad. The result is slapstick. Evil Dead 2 is the living end of the eighties trend toward horror comedy, a film so drunk on its own bloodlust that crosses the border into broad farce early on, never to return. As such, parts of Evil Dead 2 are awfully funny. After Ash cuts off his own possessed hand and traps it under a pail, Raimi provides one of the cinema's worst puns when Ash weights the pail with a copy of A Farewell to Arms, for instance. And when Ash converts a chainsaw to substitute for his missing appendage later in the movie, he declares the result "Groovy". This line traditionally gets howls from the audience.

There is a fairly widespread critical consensus that Evil Dead 2 is better than its predecessor. I personally don't share that view. A large part of my sentiments towards the film are shaped by my resentment of the horror comedies of the era--I go to horror movies for horror, not comedy. Oh, don't get me wrong: Evil Dead 2 is a fun movie, all right, but The Evil Dead (the first one) is SCARY. Given a choice, I prefer scary to fun any day.