MOVIE OF THE WEEK: Sam Raimi's debut film -- one of the first of the "cabin in the woods" brand of horror movie. The plot is simple: a group of young people travel into the woods to spend the weekend at a remote, run-down cabin, where they discover an ancient book covered in human flesh that contains spells that bring evil spirits to life. Some of those evil spirits come to life and start attacking the young people.
The plot is pretty standard, but the film is distinguished by Raimi's ferocious visual inventiveness, built around a rapidly moving camera that often seems to defy the laws of physics -- a style that has been so often imitated that it will probably seem passe to anyone seeing the film for the first time today.
It's very much a first film -- a lot of the plot logic doesn't hang together and the acting and staging are just a notch or two above amateur. The film was shot on 16mm (later blown up to 35mm) and made for next to nothing and it looks it. And yet -- damn if the thing doesn't work. It's scary and (very) bloody and filled with make-up and gore effects that are low-tech and low-budget but that have a lot of charm and get the job done.
In addition to being Raimi's debut, it's also the debut of Raimi's friend, the actor Bruce Campbell, and producer Robert Tappert. The trio would go on to do several more Evil Dead films and quite a few others after this, a most impressive introduction.
