Bigger but narrower than the original version, this is better viewed as an insight into 1960s’ faddishness, rather than a supersizing of a TV legend.

Dr. Who And The Daleks
(Gordon Flemyng, 1965)

These days, the BBC branding police would have kittens with the liberties taken with one of its most enduring and lucrative properties. Back in the mid-1960s, however, nobody knew that Doctor Who would time-travel into immortality. All anybody saw was a hit series that was ripe for exploitation, especially after the Daleks wheeled in the action to steal the Zeitgeist.

Dr. Who And The Daleks is a document of those times, the Widescreen, primary-coloured romp that toy manufacturers and comic strip artists envisaged during the height of Dalekmania – as opposed to the creepy claustrophobia of the BBC’s cramped sets, austere monochrome imagery and otherworldly sound effects. The TV show was disposable, just one series amongst many. The film, in contrast, was designed for commercial domination, with a genuine movie star (Peter Cushing) and relatively humungous sets. The difference is most palpable in the sequence where Susan must bravely journey into a forest. On TV, the actress ran on the spot while stagehands brushed her face with foliage; here, Gordon Flemyng exploits his budget with lavish tracking shots.

We know this because the BBC serial still exists, although, in fact, the BBC came very close to junking it in the 1970s. The irony is that, nowadays, the original is the touchstone for a television legend, and the film’s flaws are all too obvious in comparison. Put it this way: had the TV series never existed and Dr. Who And The Daleks was the firing salvo in a brand-new franchise, would Doctor Who still be around today? Probably not, but the whys are instructive.

The source is the second ever Doctor Who story, a seven-parter commonly referred to as The Daleks, as well as a reimagined version of Who’s first episode, An Unearthly Child. That’s a grand total of eight x 25 minutes to blaze through, which the film does in an astonishing 82 minutes. Do the maths: Flemying takes around 10 minutes to tell what took 25 on television. Yes, this is partly because of the superior editing techniques available to a film director compared to the BBC: recorded primarily ‘live’ on multiple cameras, and vision mixed on the day. Yet mainly it’s a matter of structure, for Nation had to pace himself over nearly two months’ worth of Saturday evenings, so some padding was inevitable.

Even so, a lot of the original’s length was generated by the textures of an ongoing, evolving saga, with the lead characters still getting to know each other. Ironically, despite the title, the biggest casualties of the film are Dr. Who (nee The Doctor) and The Daleks. On TV, William Hartnell’s Doctor began life as a cantankerous, cruel man hiding out in a junkyard, who kidnapped two schoolteachers in a panic and put them into harm’s way out of hubris. In the film, Cushing’s Dr. Who is an eccentric inventor in a big, Victorian-style house for whom the trip is a jolly adventure. His impishness anticipates future TV Doctors –and especially the public’s conception of the character – but it short-changes this particular story.

The plot of both The Daleks and its film version is that the Doctor tricks the TARDIS crew into visiting the Daleks’ city out of curiosity. Hartnell did it out of pig-headed arrogance; Cushing does it out of childlike naughtiness, with a wink to the audience. Everything that follows no longer has the weight of the hero being taught a lesson, a key stage in the character’s evolution into the hero he eventually becomes. Instead, Cushing’s irresponsibility is never questioned.

As for the Daleks, it’s difficult to see how they became such a hit on this evidence. Yes, the design is still outstanding, but as antagonists they are mostly reduced to brief cutaways, watching the Doctor on a monitor and explaining the plot (although, in a cut touch, the monitor images are black-and-white, so it looks like they’re watching Doctor Who, the series). Over three hours on television, though, they became characters: devious tacticians and frightened xenophones, a potent blend of hate and ability. Shorn of that, they are no longer chilling Nazi symbols but generic space aliens.

Sadly, that’s what the film mostly resembles: a B-movie. Without the slow-burning alchemy to create legendary characters, the film becomes beholden to Nation’s plotting, whose obvious reliance on 1930s Flash Gordon serials was passé even then. The results are breathless but bland, the gentle ebb and flow of the TV series’ triumphs and setbacks translating into a staccato momentum that jumps the story forward every few minutes.

Flemyng doesn’t help matters by allowing such unimaginative design work into the film: the pink-hued corridors have nothing on their stark metallic equivalents on the BBC, which TV director Christopher Barry shot in Caligari-esque distorted angles rather than spacious but inert wide shots.  Likewise, the Daleks’ foes, the Thals, might have looked ridiculous on telly but their Aryan looks offered an intriguing counterpoint to the Daleks’ ideas on racial purity. On the big screen, their silver make-up and blond frightwigs look like any old B-movie.

Dr. Who And The Daleks is released on Blu-ray on 27th May, alongside (superior) sequel Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.

Bigger On The Outside: Gordon Flemyng’s Dr. Who And The Daleks (1965) – Blu-ray review

Think of epic cinema, and invariably you’ll have an image of endless vistas and wide open spaces in mind. So far in my new strand at Derby Quad - called Epic! - that’s exactly how I’ve pitched it, with screenings of Lawrence of Arabia and The Searchers.

Yet an epic tale can also be painted on the most intimate scale, too, and that’s why for the third film in the season I’ll be introducing Frank Darabont’s 1994 modern classic, The Shawshank Redemption, at 4pm on Sunday 26th May.

The story behind the film is itself an epic tale, and one of the happiest underdog tales in cinema.  Based on a short story by Stephen King, Darabont bagged the rights for a dollar when he was an aspiring writer/director still looking for his break.

When he came to make Shawshank, he secured the talents of Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman yet, despite seven Academy awards and widespread critical praise, the film belly-flopped at the box office due to its cumbersome title and seemingly depressing prison setting.

And then… those people who did see it urged their friends to check it out.  And thanks to video and regular television screenings, Shawshank made a stealthy transition from flop to classic. It’s now a mainstay in any list of the public’s favourite films.

Is that enough of a epic? If now, how about the fact that it tells the tale of one man’s life over three long decades, as he struggles to maintain his integrity and to maintain hope against seemingly impossible odds?  And, at 140-odd minutes, it’s perfect viewing for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Better still, it’s a film that relatively few have seen on the big screen, so here’s the chance to marvel at the exquisite cinematography of Roger Deakins, who received the first of 10 as-yet-unrewarded Oscar nominations for his work.

Visit Derby QUAD on Sunday for a long stretch inside, and still be released on good behaviour in time for tea.  Tickets can be booked here.

Epic Stretch: introducing The Shawshank Redemption at Derby QUAD

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I wouldn’t be able to attend any of Derby’s superlative film festival, ID Fest. In the end, the Python gods smiled down on me and conspired to send a giant foot stamping down on my commitments to allow me to see my most-wanted of the weekend – an audience with Terry Jones.

Jones is a bit of an unsung hero. Eclipsed in popularity amongst the Monty Python team by the more prolific performers John Cleese and Michael Palin, Jones was the secret motor of the crew, who was instrumental in the stream-of-consciousness, punchline-less Flying Circus and later became their in-house director on Life Of Brian and The Meaning Of Life after co-helming The Holy Grail with the Pythons’ rival auteur Terry Gilliam.

Outside of Python, he co-created the hugely underrated Ripping Yarns with long-term writing partner Palin, directed non-Python films Personal Services and Erik The Viking, and more recently has been a TV historian with a keen interest in all things muddy and medieval.

His Q&A at ID Fest was, inevitably, a candid and insightful look into this versatile career, ably compered by Empire magazine’s Chris Hewitt who – as an Irishman – was visibly delighted to interview the man who directed three (not one less, nor one more) films which have been banned in his native land.

Allegedly, when he was seven years old, Jones wrote at school that he ‘hopped’ to be an actor. In the end, the acting became the means to creative freedom. Jones happily became the guy who took on roles nobody else would, only playing the nude organist because Gilliam (who had already played the part in the studio) never went on location during the Flying Circus days. Ditto, his uncanny ability to play women: inevitably, a member of the audience asked Jones for his tips on cross-dressing. Jones simply put on his finest ‘Spam’ voice and replied: “Just screech, dear, just screech!”

Instead, he specialised as the artistic lynchpin, helping producer Ian McNaughton to edit the shows (something I’d never realised) and being instrumental in persuading the rest of the team to hire Terry Gilliam, realising how useful he might be in developing the Pythons’ unorthodox show structure.  It was for these reasons that Jones became de facto director of the Pythons’ films… at least after the experiment of The Holy Grail, when he and Gilliam would alternate day by day. Besides, Jones had already found his ideal leading man in the shape of Graham Chapman.

Jones talked at length about the late star’s alcohol addiction, something he only noticed on set when Chapman hadn’t been able to secure a bottle of gin before the day’s shoot began. When able to drink, he was a natural. Jones explained he was first drawn to Chapman’s ease as a performer when he saw him in revue with Cleese, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor. The others, Jones said, were visibly acting, whereas Chapman looked like he’d simply walked in off the street and was being himself. That quality lent itself to the lead roles of King Arthur and Brian Cohen, and Jones overruled Cleese, who initially fancied playing Brian.

As for Jones, he remained saddled with the extreme end of the Pythons’ character repertoire, most obviously Mr Creosote. Jones revealed that, at the sketch’s first read-through, the others hated it… until Cleese rang him the next night, having worked out that the French maître d’ had all the best lines. As for the gargantuan gourmand himself, Jones ended up in endless make-up en route to cinematic immortality.

Jones is better known nowadays for his gigs as a presenter on TV history shows, but he announced that he will soon be stepping back into the director’s chair for the first time since his 1996 adaptation of The Wind In The Willows. He has been working on-and off to complete a screenplay about a man whose magic powers enable him to do anything. The project was abandoned in 2003 after Bruce Almighty was released, but Jones has resurrected it and hopes to attract Simon Pegg to the lead role. Better still, he has already secured the commitment of Michael Palin and John Cleese to voice a pair of aliens. Not quite a Python reunion, but proof that Jones is still very much leader of the pack.

And, I’m chuffed to say, I got to ask the great man a question.  I’m currently nearing the end of a marathon rewatch of the full Flying Circus, and it’s struck me how much factual information – on history, literature or philosophy – there is buried beneath the comedic chaos.  So I asked Jones whether they did a lot of research.  Not the case, it turns out: “it was just stuff we knew.”  Ah, the benefits of an Oxbridge education!

Woah Constrictor: Terry Jones in conversation at ID Fest 2013

Ariel Vroman’s hitman biopic The Iceman opens ID Fest at Derby QUAD tomorrow night (Thursday 9th May).  Here’s a preview.  Spoiler warnings apply if you’d rather not know anything, but if you’ve seen Goodfellas there’s little to spoil anyway.

The Iceman
(Ariel Vroman, 2012)

As long as Richie Kuklinski could remember, he always wanted to be a hitman. The recruitment by a local Mafia player.  The instant wealth: the house, the suits, the model family.  And then the inevitable fall: a paranoid descent whereby it becomes second nature to bump off friends and colleagues in an increasingly desperate attempt to deny the inevitable.

The Iceman can’t avoid those Goodfellas comparisons – never mind the presence of Ray Liotta, even the 1960s to 1980s time frame is the same.  Yet Ariel Vroman’s crime thriller about the notorious New York contract killer has one asset Scorsese had to wait until Boardwalk Empire before he could use: Michael Shannon.  The actor’s intensity has rarely been better utilised, as that monolithic face and dead-eyed stare are used to essay the coldest of screen killers.

While the Iceman identity wasn’t technically the result of Kuklinski’s demeanour – it was a media nickname based on a gruesome modus operandi – Vroman milks the metaphor by encouraging Shannon to remain implacable, the poker face genuinely unsettling as he chats to victims in the seconds leading up to swift, remorseless shootings or stabbings.

There is, however, a twist: beneath the frozen surface lurks a heart, which beats with genuine warmth for his wife (Winona Ryder) and two daughters.  Vroman dissects the duality with admirable precision: this is a family man who has compartmentalised his life in an attempt to repress a boiling rage caused by an abused childhood.  But when Kuklinski’s fortunes turn and his worlds collide, so his mood changes. Scared of Shannon when he’s icy? Try him when he’s angry.

The academic approach is fascinating, but never quite eclipses the film’s flaws.  The dispassionate direction refreshes well-worn narrative beats but it sits oddly with Vroman’s ‘throw a dart at the Screen Actors Guild directory’ approach to casting.  For every eccentric triumph (a scene-stealing Chris Evans as an ice cream van-driving hitman who keeps more than choc ices in the freezer), there’s an equally odd misfire, with one icon of TV comedy coming particularly unstuck playing against type.  Nor is the passage of time convincing, as Vroman trusts to hairstyles to convince that Shannon and Ryder have aged from twentysomething newlyweds to middle-age spread.

The Iceman is on general release from 7th June, but you can catch it tomorrow at ID Fest, along with a host of other family-themed movies and some great special events.

Flow Like a Harpoon: previewing The Iceman at ID Fest 2013

Schlesinger’s masterpiece was a key formative influence… and, amazingly, it continues to be even now. The dream is more complex, but still one to cherish.

Billy Liar
(John Schlesinger, 1963)

Everybody has cherished films that helped to define their love of cinema: geeks have Star Wars, gangta rappers have Scarface and everybody else seemingly has The Shawshank Redemption. My own teenage Epiphany came in the form of Billy Liar – an unlikely choice at first glance, but one that was probably inevitable when you look at it closely.

Flashback to the early 1990s. I’d just discovered The Smiths, so imagine my delight to find that John Schlesinger’s film portrayed exactly the grubby/glamorous England celebrated in Morrissey’s lyrics – sometimes explicitly referencing Billy Liar. Another of my then-favourite bands, Ride had not long released a song – Twisterella – which was named after (and includes elements of) the one Billy writes in the film. And then there were my own affinities to the title character: a sensitive wannabe writer who yearns to get away from ‘grim oop North’ Britain. As if to make it all the more personal, the first place namedropped in the opening sequence is my own home town of Derby.

So the release of Billy Liar onto Blu-ray isn’t merely a chance to reflect on its 50th anniversary, but also my own relationship with the film. I’m delighted to say it’s still as fresh, funny and quietly heartbreaking as it was when I first saw it… but, if anything, the passage of time (my own, as much as Britain’s) have given it greater resonance and ambiguity.

Few films capture a world in flux, but Schlesinger’s prescient portrait of the nascent Swinging Sixties is rife with social and cinematic ironies. This is a world with one foot still in the Second World War, but the other inching cautiously into modernism: a literal building site where the past is being bulldozed but the hero remains so uncertain about the future he’s hoarding all of the calendars. The threat of domesticity and conformity clash with the promise of sex and rebellion, and it could go either way – the biggest shock nowadays is noticing how Billy’s square, middle-aged boss frequents the same dance hall as the cool kids, the last gasp of a shared heritage before the subcultures take over.

Schlesinger captures this in a freewheeling style that marries the scruffy realism of Kitchen Sink peers like Saturday Night And Sunday Morning with the ‘anything goes’ verve of the French New Wave, as Billy imagines machine-gunning his parents and retreats into a fantasy life as the dictator of Ambrosia. For British cinema, this was probably the most daring experimentation with form seen since Michael Powell’s heyday, and in retrospect it opened the floodgates for the more irreverent style perfected in A Hard Day’s Night, If… and Monty Python. Meanwhile, the director signals his statement of intent by shooting in Cinemascope – hinting at his future career in Hollywood – and introduces Julie Christie in an intoxicating, laissez-faire montage that gives Britain a homegrown equivalent to Jeanne Moreau.

Christie is the obvious breakout star, but Schlesinger had an eye for heroes of future Britain, with 1970s sitcom legends Leonard Rossiter and Rodney Bewes catching the eye in supporting roles. And then, of course, there is Tom Courtenay, already on the public’s radar thanks to The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, but here achieving the role of his lifetime.

And yet… let’s not overstate the film as some kind of avant-garde, era-defining masterpiece.There’s still a slightly fussy, restrained mood to proceedings, a very British reserve prevents the film from really going for it – yet it’s precisely that tension that makes it resonate so much with me. If it was perfect, it wouldn’t capture the Quixotic appeal of Billy’s rebellion, the Wildean glamour of a film that is lying in the gutter but looking up at the stars. Maybe you need to be British to really get it; it’s probably not one for the global intelligentsia who determine the canon of art-house classics. But, even fifty years on, its study in parochial repression, and the banal excuses by which this country underachieves, are stingingly accurate.

Courtenay nails the complexity in Billy: cheeky chappie or damaged goods? He’s immensely likeable, but too prissy to convince as a counter-cultural icon, and Courtenay isn’t afraid to create a hero who brings out the worst traits of British society, a cauldron of class envy, entitlement, dodgy entrepreneurism and self-delusion that makes him behave in uncomfortably selfish and cowardly ways. In many ways, he’s a prototype for sitcom devils from Reginald Perrin (there’s the Rossiter connection…) to David Brent, but Courtenay still makes him raffish and noble in the sad sincerity with which he cleaves to dreams that he hasn’t the stomach to actually chase after.

And then – SPOILER WARNING – there’s that ending! Years ago, I found the film’s climax so distressing I would literally yell at the character not to be so stupid. Nowadays, I’m not so sure whether it’s a clear-cut defeat of personality – Billy’s decision to stay at home is as poignant as it is pathetic, and maybe even it’ll do him some good to support his parents in their grief. It’s always a sign of a film’s greatness when it can grow with you and Billy Liar offers complexities now that weren’t apparent to my younger self. Ironically, in real life I actually ‘got on the train’ and moved to London… but then I came back to the once-hated home town and now I’m the provincial parent whose kids might one day become Billies. That’s an interesting position to be in, but one which the film is strong enough to accommodate. I might have changed, but Billy Liar is still worth cherishing.

Billy Liar is released on Blu-ray on Monday 6th May.

Daydream Believer: John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963) – Blu-ray review

Typical. An ace film festival on my very doorstep, and I can’t make it due to prior commitments.

Sadly, I won’t be attending the 2013 ID Fest at Derby QUAD, which takes place 9-12 May but, based on past experience, I urge you all to go.  The 2012 ID Fest was wonderful, with guests as varied as Mike Hodges, Paddy Considine and Brian Blessed.

The 2013 event, which mixes screenings and talks all themed around the concept of family, offers several events that I’m particularly sad to be missing.  In no particular order, here are four highlights that would be on my must-see list.

- Terry Jones In Conversation. I’m actually in the middle of my first Monty Python marathon in over a decade, so I’m absolutely gutted to miss out on this Q&A with arguably the Pythons’ most influential figure, whose experimental approach to comedy shaped the format of the TV show and who later found his niche as director of their films, including The Meaning Of Life (screening at ID Fest).  My consolation prize is that I chatted to Carol Cleveland when she was at QUAD earlier this year, but still…

- Martin Stephens In Conversation. For a few years at the beginning of the 1960s, Stephens was Britain’s creepiest child star, as an alien moppet in Village Of The Damned and as a haunted child in The Innocents (screening at ID Fest).  I interviewed Stephens, now a retired architect, over the phone in 2009 for a feature on Village Of The Damned and he was full of great stories about a Golden Age of British genre film.  I’d have loved to have said hello in person.  Alas: no.

- The Dark Side of Oz.  Everybody’s heard the rumour that Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side Of The Moon is structured to provide a musical counterpoint to events in The Wizard Of Oz, right?  But few can be bothered to see if the urban legend is true.  In an innovative screening hosted by my pal Adam Batty of Hope Lies At 24 Frames A Second, ID Fest is offering you the chance to find out.  Either watch the film as normal, or don headphones so you can prog-rock out to the Floyd while you’re watching.  As for me, the nearest to Oz I’m getting is seeing Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead get to #2 in the Charts.

- The Iceman preview.  Ironically, the one screening I can make is a film I only saw last month.  The opening night preview sees a screening of Ariel Vromen’s thriller about a sociopathic hitman who also manages to be a doting family man.  It’s a solid if overfamiliar film, noticeably indebted to Goodfellas, but it benefits from a chilling performance by Michael Shannon as the title character and a skewed take on the festival’s theme.  I’ll post a full review in the run-up to the event.

For more details on ID Fest, visit the website at www.idfest.co.uk and please make every effort join the Midlands’ premier cinematic family.

We Are Family – previewing ID Fest 2013 at Derby QUAD

Only two Ns and an A away from my name, but a world apart in terms of mood and characterisation. At least, I hope so.

Simon Killer
(Antonio Campos, 2012)

If you review films long enough, chances are that eventually you’ll review one that has your name in the title. I’d always assumed it would be an existing film that I hadn’t seen - Bunuel’s Simon Of The Desert – until a new pretender came along that manages to nearly sound like my surname as well as my first name.

So: Simon Kinnear, meet Simon Killer, the tale of an overeducated slacker who wanders aimlessly around Paris, shacks up with a prostitute and starts an ill-advised amateur blackmail racket. Marvellous. It makes me pine for the days when the worst of my troubles was getting mistaken for gay artist Simon (Kinnear) out of As Good As It Gets.

Given its status as near-namesake, I wish I liked Antonio Campos’ film more, but it’s the kind of story that goes out of its way to be difficult in order to appear more sophisticated. It has that 1970s vibe of being a character study with zero interest in a wider narrative, becoming increasingly insular and abstruse just as it was promising to become about something more than merely one dislikeable guy’s sociopathy.

Whereas, say, Taxi Driver (an obvious influence) presented a portrait of 1970s New York and post-Vietnam America, Simon is so studied and apathetic to stand for everything.  Instead, he is dulled by indolence and veiled misogyny into a life of walking the streets, his hip electropop sounstrack turned up to maximum to try and coax himself out of his ennui. In other words, it’s like a Bret Easton Ellis story without the humour.

Campos draws two smart performances from Brady Corbet as Simon, and 30 Shots of Rum’s Mati Diop as his partner in bed and business – and the fact that the two have story credit explains the languorous pacing and fearless, uncomfortably explicit shared scenes. It feels admirably raw and improvised. Even so, Campos has settled on alienation as both theme and leitmotif, and conspires to frame the film so that the actors’ faces – and, frequently, their entire heads – are outside the frame. There are only so many times you can watch the back of Corbet’s head while he strolls along before it becomes a bad Gus Van Sant parody.

True, the film has a strong sense of geography, portraying a seedy, decidedly non-touristy vision of Paris: the film’s best shot sees Simon at the Louvre looking at the Mona Lisa, but the audience’s vision is obstructed by a dozen camera phones. Similarly, the use of music – switching tracks mid-scene as Simon impatiently shuffles his iPod – has a laconic thrill in keeping with the study of a hipster with too much time on his hands. But, ultimately, Simon remains too blank, and Campos’ distance too remote, for this to catch fire.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently received a press release about a new ‘alien abduction film’ called The Search For Simon. According to the blurb, this is “a comedy science-fiction feature film about a man named David and his lifelong search for alien life. When David was 10 years old, his younger brother Simon disappeared from his life forever. His father told him that Simon ‘now lives with the space people.’” Give me strength.

Simon Killer is released in cinemas on Friday 12th April.

Simon Kinnear reviews Simon Killer

Had enough of cabin fever?  Raimi ramps up the action, Ash becomes a hero and the Evil Dead are having too much fun to be evil.

Army Of Darkness
(Sam Raimi, 1993)

It’s hard to get away from that cabin. Sam Raimi might have ended Evil Dead 2 by slinging hapless hero Ash back in time to the Middle Ages, but no sooner has Army Of Darkness begun than the inevitable recap – this time with Bridget Fonda cameoing as ill-fated lover Linda – starts the whole story again. It’s probably a wise move: not only to explain to newcomers why there’s a guy from the present day duking it out with the undead in medieval times, but also to assure the faithful that Raimi hasn’t sold out.

Army Of Darkness came after Raimi’s Hollywood calling card, Darkman – and, indeed, it was only really possible because of that film’s success. Raimi took the money (huge by his standards, if not quite what was needed to satiate his ambition) and ran with it, swapping claustrophobic horror for a barmy Harryhausen-style creature feature. Years before Peter Jackson made the move from euuch to epic, Raimi paved the way with a full-scale knights vs skeletons battle sequence.

But that Evil Dead spirit lingers on. Army Of Darkness is the natural progression from its predecessors, finally giving in to Raimi’s need for slapstick without really bothering to scare us.  Similarly, Bruce Campbell’s Ash, once a traumatised survivor, is now a battle-hardened veteran with possibly the greatest set of one-liners ever given to a single character. Not for nothing do the credits actually pitch the title as ‘Bruce Campbell vs Army Of Darkness,’ for this is the actor’s finest hour.

Budgetary limitations keep the cast to the barest minimum, with Embeth Davidtz the nearest to a fellow star; instead, Raimi recognises what worked best in Evil Dead 2 and takes Ash off on his lonesome on a quest to find the Necronomicon, where his greatest foes turn out to be, respectively, a gaggle of miniaturised Doppelgangers and a full-size evil twin. Raimi and Campbell delight in making the actor a one-man tribute act to the Three Stooges, and there are plenty of delirious laughs in the film’s mid-section.

There’s a buoyancy to the camerawork, too, as Raimi brings his breakneck, experimental movement into the mainstream. CGI has made this kind of live-action cartoon commonplace, but credit should go to Raimi’s pioneering efforts. If there’s a fault, it’s that – for all the expanded scale – Raimi is at his best within constraints; he needs something to bounce the camera off. That’s why the final battle, while giddy and gleeful in small doses, quickly palls because there are only so many times you can blow up a skeleton.

Curiously, Army Of Darkness ends at a crossroads with two equally strong endings. One is cheesy and obvious, but an absolute blast: a signal of the crowd-pleaser who would win over the world with Spider-man. The other is wry and pessimistic, throwing Ash into a post-apocalyptic future and showing the dark side of Raimi that would flourish with A Simple Plan and Drag Me To Hell. With rumours that a fourth film is on the cards, surely this conundrum will need to be resolved at some point, presumably by sending Ash back to the cabin one last time to get us up to speed with the story so far.

This is the last in a trilogy of reviews revisiting Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, sparked by the release of Evil Dead 2 on Blu-ray. The Evil Dead is reviewed here, and Evil Dead 2 here.

Medieval Madness: rewatching the Evil Dead trilogy part 3 of 3 – Army Of Darkness (1992)

It’s all about the hardware. Just as Bruce Campbell ‘arms’ himself with a chainsaw, Raimi retools his original shocker as a loopy splatstick comedy.

Evil Dead 2
(Sam Raimi, 1987)

Films are made for many reasons – passion, ambition, greed – but seldom out of sheer frustration. According to documentary Swallowed Souls, Sam Raimi hadn’t wanted to direct Evil Dead 2, but felt compelled to do so after the critical and commercial disaster of Crimewave undid all of The Evil Dead’s hard work in getting him noticed. Then again, comedy fanboy Raimi hadn’t really wanted to make a horror movie to start with, so he had form for turning indifference into gold. And so it proved again with his second trip to the cabin in the woods.

Evil Dead 2 is so taken for granted as a classic that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it is. Less a sequel than a bells-and-whistles remake of Raimi’s no-budget original, it takes the bare bones of The Evil Dead and (in the words of another cult 1980s favourite) ramps everything up to 11. Raimi’s response to criticism that he might be a one-trick pony is to say, “What, this trick?” Given better resources and funding from producer Dino De Laurentiis – patron saint of unlikely collaborations – Raimi tries everything, screwing with the camera speed and lenses, and creating one of the most insanely ambitious Steadicam shots ever committed to film.

And, of course, it’s funny. Raimi’s sense of comedy had gradually infiltrated the first film until it became a slapstick demolition derby between Bruce Campbell’s Ash and the possessed dead.  In the sequel, it starts mad and gets madder, as Ash goes (literally) mano a mano with himself, an eyeball pops out of a demonic face into a screaming woman’s mouth, and a stuffed moose head has a fit of the giggles. The film has been justifiably compared to a funhouse, although I don’t recall Pat Sharp attaching a chainsaw to the bloody stump of his arm. But Campbell makes it look like something he was born to do. His features – statuesque yet sardonic – make him the perfect matinee idol for a film without a matinee.

It only goes awry when the story’s unwillingness to move on become apparent. The opening seven minutes, a madcap recap of The Evil Dead right down to an impressive remount of its famous final shot, provides one of the most inventive approaches to backstory ever seen in a sequel.  However, after the bravura, one-man show of the opening act, Raimi forces a retread of the original’s ‘Ash plus four’ plotting by bringing in a new quartet of hapless playthings for the dead. The mid-section mines tropes familiar from The Evil Dead (a basement prisoner, a less rapey take on the notorious ‘tree rape’)for laughs, and consistently achieves them, yet it’s almost too goofy compared to the subversion with which the original’s cruelty slipped into dark laughs.

Only in the final act does Raimi realise he’s got to offer more than a refinement of stuff he’d more or less cracked first time, transforming his franchise into a full-on cult adventure by introducing a super-sized monster and a rug-pulling time-travel climax that remains disconcerting no matter how many times you see it. The stage is set for the full-on, manic-medieval Harryhausen-esque creature feature of Army Of Darkness, a film that is so different from the intentions of The Evil Dead that it highlights Evil Dead 2’s greatest achievement: to show the sheer power a sequel can have to stick or twist with a proven formula.

Evil Dead 2 is released on Blu-ray on Monday 8th April. While darker scenes are subject to fuzziness, for the most part this Blu-ray offers dazzling clarity, especially to the streaks of blood and mud running down Campbell’s face. Arguably, though, this is one of those films – like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – that doesn’t look quite right without the fuzziness of VHS. The real reason to buy the disc is Swallowed Souls, a making of doc that’s longer than the film it is about, and digs into the film with the same gusto as Ash with his chainsaw.

This is the second in a trilogy of reviews revisiting Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, sparked by the release of Evil Dead 2 on Blu-ray. The Evil Dead was reviewed here, and Army Of Darkness here.

Ash Williams’ Fun House: rewatching the Evil Dead trilogy part 2 of 3 – Evil Dead 2 (1987)

The gore is ramped up; the hysteria all-consuming… and yet when a funny guy tackles horror, the result is an exhilarating thrill ride.

The Evil Dead
(Sam Raimi, 1981)

Horror has long ticked the box for tyro filmmakers, thanks to its unrivalled ability to attract a guaranteed audience regardless of budget. Yet, after a generation of radical, independent directors – George A. Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter – had proven the genre’s artistry, it was also attracting kids who might never have even thought of trying their hand at horror. Sam Raimi, by his own confession, was more of a comedy fan… a unique perspective that would make The Evil Dead the next step in horror’s evolution.

Despite the film’s tagline being ‘the ultimate exercise in gruelling terror’ being reinforced by its status as a Video Nasty, ‘terrifying’ isn’t as appropriate a word as ‘startling’. The Evil Dead is the bounding puppy amongst horror movies, with Raimi’s delight in sheer technique apparent in the then-novelty of its pell-mell camerawork and the gusto with which limbs and blood are flung like custard pies. The second half is a remorseless, rat-a-tat assault on star-in-the-making Bruce Campbell, whose face finds a third way between the classic silent comedy poles of deadpan Keaton and soulful Chaplin. It is a look of panicked disbelief, an incredulous rabbit in the headlights of evil.

But is it? Retrospect plays a huge part in shaping attitudes towards The Evil Dead, given the overt splatstick of its sequels. Did Raimi intend the first film to be so funny, or was he merely responding to the audiences who embraced his film’s inadvertent insanity?  There isn’t a hint of comedy in the film’s early stages, as it sets up the archetypal ‘cabin in the woods’ scenario with sober, even banal, exposition. It’s a crucial point, but nobody – even Campbell’s Ash – is especially charismatic. They’re an interchangeable bunch, really: lambs to the slaughter.

And then there’s the tree rape: one of the most insidious ideas in a genre defined by shock value, and played frighteningly straight. It establishes women as fair game for the theatre of cruelty that follows, in which the possessed girls will be stabbed, burnt and dismembered with impunity. What’s interesting here is the modus operandi of the spirits, who prey on the most hysterical members of the group and – once possessed – exaggerate those qualities into a shrill, cackling goad. Given that the film was made by a bunch of nerds barely out of their teens, and you can read a fairly misogynistic subtext into a film that requires the drippy Ash to man-up against his now-demonic ex and her mates.

And yet, it’s done with such lightness that this only really occurs in retrospect. It’s the criticism of a grown-up, but on-screen, the mania of the Deadites makes them more akin to mischievous children, shouting “we’re going to get you” as they chase Ash around. There’s always been an element of hide and seek to the horror movie, but this one makes a raison d’etre, as Raimi springloads the structure with ‘boo’ moments, bolstered by the intensity of the sound effects. A more serious film would get dull pretty quickly, but Raimi makes a virtue of repetition by treating it as an (admittedly sick) game. It helps that his staging is endlessly inventive, finding new angles of attack to bely the obvious budgetary limits. It looks cheaper in its earlier, more generic sequences; but once Raimi has decided that comedy is his metier – and allowed his ghouls to run amok – a director is born.

This is the first in a trilogy of reviews revisiting Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, sparked by the release of Evil Dead 2 on Blu-ray. Evil Dead 2 is reviewed here, and Army Of Darkness here.

Cabin Fever: rewatching the Evil Dead trilogy part 1 of 3 – The Evil Dead (1981)