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It opens and closes like The Shining though the main joke is from The Exorcist, the Necronomicon from Kandar turns up in rural Tennessee for one winter night. Five college youngsters out in the woods cabin, "a real pit," malefic forces are roused and have a blast with human flesh—a bare setup into which Sam Raimi pours gallon after gallon of gore and stupendously gleeful inspiration. The bashful jock (Bruce Campbell, his Dudley Do-Right jaw perpetually damp with viscera) has some misgivings about reading from the tome of ancient incantations, his sister (Ellen Sandweiss) is the first one possessed and locked in the cellar. (Distorted growls and buckling chains promptly fill the air, her gruesome new visage evinces a touch of Suspiria.) His girlfriend (Betsy Baker) becomes a taunting bobblehead with milky eyes, the brunette coed (Theresa Tilly) wields a medieval dagger while her beau (Richard DeManincor) oozes corn cream from his torso. "Far from the groves of academe," a perfect kinetic object, the gooey and giddy convulsions of indie filmmaking. The last post of humanity comes equipped with dungeon and self-circuiting projector (cp. Powell's Herzog Blaubarts Burg), outside awaits Nature with its grabby branches and roots. A lightbulb fills with blood like a glass with champagne, "a demon in my view" plus Cocteau's liquid mirror, the Campbell deadpan absorbs it all. Raimi's gift is a camera operated by gremlins, the centrifugal play of high and low angles that puts the lenses behind a grandfather clock's pendulum or down in a shallow grave for a shoveful of dirt. (Mayhem is a choreographed art after all, "really some sort of extra sense or something.") The sequels gladly embrace the slapstick of dismemberment. Cinematography by Tim Philo.
--- Fernando F. Croce |