Tag: evil dead

Direct beam comms #4

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TV

Is it just me, or is the Netflix series Jessica Jones just a hard-drinking darker version of Veronica Mars (2004–2007)?

 

I was recently able to catch up on the Starz series Ash vs Evil Dead and am happy to say that it’s GREAT. Horror comedies like Ash vs Evil Dead must be hard to pull off since there sure aren’t many of them. Let’s see, there’s the Evil Dead series, What We Do in the Shadows and Shaun of the Dead movies, parts of Tucker and Dale vs Evil and … well, that’s about it.

And Ash vs Evil Dead isn’t JUST horror/comedy either, it’s got a lot of heart too which surprised me.

The one thing is that I’m not quite sure how Ash vs Evil Dead fits with the Evil Dead cannon as a whole? It’s almost like in the Ash vs Evil Dead universe The Evil Dead (1981) didn’t happen but Evil Dead II (1987) did. And either they’re ignoring Army of Darkness (1992) or they just haven’t gotten to the part where Ash is, “Trapped in time, surrounded by evil and low on gas,” yet.

Movies

Kylo Ren from Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Kylo Ren from Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: I was really excited about this one when I saw the first trailer. It seemed that Disney and J.J. Abrams were taking what made the original trilogy great and and molding this into a new film series. After seeing The Force Awakens, I thought the movie was really good but my two complaints are that a lot happens in the film that’s pure coincidence and The Force Awakens is essentially a remake of Star Wars: A New Hope with a dash of The Empire Strikes Back but with everything being BIGGER and more bombastic than before. Most of the beats from A New Hope are present in The Force Awakens which is fine, but I just wish Abrams had gone and done more of his own thing than making a “greatest hits” movie like he did here. B+

Ex Machina: It took me a while to see this one even though several friends highly recommended it to me the last few months. Writer/director Alex Garland is one of the best voices in realistic sci-fi/horror like with 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd and he continues his winning streak with Ex Machina, about the creation of the first artificially intelligent being that might be a little too intelligent for mankind to contain. B

Fantastic Four (2015): Do we really need any more superhero origin movies? Not that we don’t need origin stories for superheroes, just that is there really a need anymore to devote an entire movie to origin when there’s plenty of more interesting ways to do that? Like Iron Man is an origin story but is told in such a way that much of the origin is covered in the first half of the movie and the more recent Ant Man handles his origin by having it be something that’s slowly uncovered over the course of an adventure rather than devoting an entire film to it which Fantastic Four does.

In fact, the actual Four don’t get together until nearly the end of the movie. It’s the film that’s essentially an advertisement to the forthcoming sequel that looks kind’a interesting that’s never going to happen since the first movie didn’t do well enough at the box office.

Fantastic Four isn’t a bad movie, it’s just that in an era of great superhero movies it doesn’t stand out in any substantial way. C

Books

I got the books Sketching from the Imagination: An Insight into Creative Drawing and Art of He Man and the Masters of the Universe this year for Christmas. Sketching from the Imagination is a look at the sorts of techniques different artists use when sketching for fun or work while Art of He Man is a visual history of all the art generated behind the scenes when coming up with a toylike then maintaining it over the years with new toys and playsets.

The myth of the forbidden film

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I don’t think there are anymore forbidden films like there used to be when I was growing up.

I remember when VHS was king and my family would make weekly vigils to one of the local rental shops and when the new movies were already checked out, as they almost always were, we’d peruse the stacks looking for anything interesting to watch. Sometimes we’d come across weird horror flicks like Troma classics The Toxic Avenger (1984) and Class of Nuke ‘em High (1986) and sometimes strange documentaries about odd subjects.

In the 1980s some friends and myself were into heavy metal. I didn’t look like the stereotypical “metal head” but none-the-less when the other kids were listening to Richard Marx and Kenny Loggins, my group of friends were buying, duping and trading Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax and Iron Maiden tapes amongst ourselves.

Back then it wasn’t easy to follow your favorite bands. There were a few heavy metal magazines you could buy at drug stores and supermarkets and Headbangers Ball on MTV. But otherwise you were pretty much on your own. What was the meaning of the cover painting to Guns N’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction?” Did listening to any Judas Priest song automatically place satanic suggestions in one’s brain? Who exactly was this “Walking Dude” that Anthrax was singing about? How many dead in the apocalypse constitutes a Megadeth?

And outside of these magazines and Headbangers Ball and sensationalized TV news programs about the horrors of heavy metal there weren’t many real answers. That was until a fateful day in the video store when we rented the tape The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988). Read more “The myth of the forbidden film”

Evil Dead vs the Gore Zone

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I was the teen who was into horror movies with a lot of gore; the “gore” the better. I’m not sure what it was that hooked me about them but whatever it was I was locked in. In the mid–1980s I used to prowl the isles of our video rental shop looking for movies with the most gore, yet one of the goriest movies out there at the time was a film called The Evil Dead (1981) that I’d seen but had no idea just what a gorefest it really was.

Evil Dead movie posterAt the time I’d already watched a version of The Evil Dead that was in a neutered “edited for content” TV version that would turn up on cable from time to time. So to me The Evil Dead was little more than a cheapie looking film about a group of teens trapped in a cabin by demonic forces outside. I remember being bored by The Evil Dead and usually turning to something else when it came on.

At that same time I was into Fangoria magazine another called Gorefest that covered these kinds of movies. And in an issue of one of them was a writeup on the The Evil Dead sequel Evil Dead II (1987). While I thought the photos for that film looked cool and the movie sounded interesting for whatever reason I didn’t end up checking out Evil Dead II either on cable or VHS.

Fast forward a few years and the movie Army of Darkness (1993), really Evil Dead III, was out and it was the film me and my brother watched over and over again on cable. I was so into that movie that I got my own copy of it for Christmas then later on bought a special widescreen version too.

But even then with my love of Army of Darkness I still didn’t go back and checkout The Evil Dead or Evil Dead II.

Now it’s the early 2000s and I’m reading about how The Evil Dead was this controversial movie that was banned in the UK as a “video nasty” and I started wondering how this lame movie I remember seeing on TV as a kid Saturday afternoons was so bad it was banned? Around that time there was a resurgence of movies by The Evil Dead director Sam Raimi when the first Spider-Man (2002) was out in theaters and The Evil Dead was being restored and re-released on DVD. Which is how I finally got to see an unadulterated version of that classic.

evil_dead_iiAnd yes, The Evil Dead is one of the goriest movies out there. Wounds spout great gouts of blood, some of it green! There are axes flying and corpses dissolving into masses of bugs and maggots and pencils stabbed into feet.

All of which is so over the top and heightened it’s more Looney Tunes in tone that straight horror.

And after having finally seen The Evil Dead I checked out Evil Dead II as well. Evil Dead II is almost as gory and over the top as The Evil Dead is, but honestly, it’s an odd movie.

I’m not sure why but Evil Dead II is a partial remake of The Evil Dead before expanding the story and telling something new. It’s almost like the filmmakers wanted to make sure that everyone seeing Evil Dead II knew the original story so decided to tell it again at the start of the sequel. Nowadays everyone would just go out and rent The Evil Dead to catch up, but back then movies had a limited, or none depending on where you lived, availability so retelling that story kind’a made sense.

And the followup Army of Darkness is a brilliant, campy, scary and, yes, gory film too and is my favorite of the bunch. (The Evil Dead was remade in 2013 but avoid that movie at all costs.)

Now comes the TV version of The Evil Dead in a series Ash vs Evil Dead with Evil Dead lead Bruce Campbell back in the Ash role. And by all accounts Ash vs Evil Dead looks to be just as gory and over the top as its predecessors which makes the little 12 year old inside me leap for joy!

The 10 episode Ash vs Evil Dead series premiers Halloween night on Starz.

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