Evil Dead II

Sam Raimi’s film opens with a trap: the recap at the start is not footage from the first film but a restaging. Raimi had no right to use images from The Evil Dead, so he shot the events again, dropped the friends entirely and left only Ash and Linda at the cabin, Linda recast and played by Denise Bixler. Anyone who knows the first film will notice the details drift. What follows spends almost all of its 84 minutes in and around one cabin. Raimi and co writer Scott Spiegel took the comic half of the mixture from the Three Stooges, and in Ash’s fight with his own hand the gag and the horror occupy the same shot. Dino De Laurentiis financed it after a phone call from Stephen King. The cabin interior was built inside a junior high school, J.R. Faison, in Wadesboro, North Carolina. Mark Shostrom supervised the makeup effects, and Ted Raimi plays the undead Henrietta. Expecting an X, producer DEG never submitted the film to the MPAA and released it in the United States unrated. A good fit if you treat the swing from horror into slapstick as design rather than failure. Not for viewers who expect the opening to match the first film; that stretch was shot from scratch.