Additional Posters Part 2:

Peak Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell collaboration. So many quotable lines! Bruce has some entertaining stories about making this film in his first autobiography If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor.

How have we never picked this one before?!

Discovered this in high school after buying it from Suncoast Video. Loved it. Definitely a big impact and helped me through a rough patch in life

I love this movie, but I admit it's maybe my last favorite of the three. I wish I could turn down the comedy just a tad and turn up the horror just a little more, but this is just me literally trying to nitpick a beloved movie that I've watched many, many times.

What are people's preferred cuts? I think I prefer the ending of the director's cut. It just seems fitting that Ash would do something like that.

I really should look into finally upgrading this to 4K. Is there a definitive version out there? I know the Shout Factory disc doesn't have the director's cut in 4K. I really need to do some searching.

Believe it or not, we have not as I went through every one of the subsets to do the Letterboxd lists.

Not much I can say about this one that hasn't been said a million times before.

I like it but it is my least favorite of the Bruce Campbell Evil Dead stuff (including the TV show). This one just has too much comedy and slapstick for my tastes. And even watching the theatrical cut scant 80-minute version, the fighting at the end takes up too much time and begins to wear on me.

I love the S-Mart ending but I need to revisit the other alternate ending to be sure. It has been a while. I watched the Shout Factory 4K UHD theatrical version release and the damn thing is beautiful. A lot of it looks like it was shot yesterday but that also exposes a lot of the poor effects, optical, stop motion, bad make-up, dummies, etc. But who care? It is Ash Vs. Evil Dead and he is at his wittiest best in this one.

To me The Evil Dead (1981) is 75% horror/25% comedy. Evil Dead 2 and Ash Vs. Evil Dead is 50/50, and Army of Darkness is about 25% horror/75% comedy. The TV show and Part 2 are my favorites of the bunch for that reason as they balance both perfectly.

But Army Of Darkness is still highly watchable. I think it would be a good choice as a gateway movie to horror for a younger audience.

Those percentages look pretty accurate, and are also why this is my least favorite of the franchise. It’s good, but I’m rarely in the mood for that much slapstick.

100% agreed. This is more like The Ghost and Mr. Chicken than the original Evil Dead. Evil Dead II hits the right note between horror and comedy.

Ditto again. Screwing up the formula, sleeping a century too long and waking up in a post-nuke world makes sense for Ash, sad sack protagonist that he is. I really wish that Raimi would direct a film version of Evil Dead: The Musical

Same here somewhat; my parents were strict about what I watched as a youth but I stumbled on the fact that the local library somehow has a 'no questions asked' policy on checking out whatever VHS tapes anyone with a library card could carry to rhe register.

This is my least favorite of the three as well, but I still enjoy it quite a bit. Like most of us I’m guessing, I’ve bought this so many times over the years in various formats. I prefer the old man ending, but I appreciate the other one too. I can’t actually remember which one was the theatrical.

The castle siege stuff here is legendary. I enjoyed revisiting the Evil Dead films but couldn't access Evil Dead 2 (which is my favorite) so jumping from 1 to 3 was whiplash, Evil Dead really reinvents itself each installment. Trading in blood oozing demons for glourious stop motion skeletons works wonderfully and keeps it fresh. The gonzo time travel approach in AoD is so gutsy it's a wonder. Bruce Campbell is a justified legend but the Ash hero worship stuff gets a little brazen; the bravado is part of what makes AoD work but the fan service elements feel like a twist for Ash (whose flustered overwhelmed lack of confidence added to the comedy of the series). With as many cuts of AoD there are it's surprising the theatrical cut is a lean 85 minutes; when there's enough here to the siege horror it might make Peter Jackson blush (curiously Dead Alive came out in 1992 and builds on ED tropes even featuring a similar ending twist as AoD). I never delved much into the making of AoD but with all the endings and different cuts there must have been some drama; I think this was the first time I saw the theatricul rather than director's cut. To the castle!

This is a tremendous movie. I can watch it many times over, which is rare for me but is true of the evil dead movies. As I've said about other movies this year, it is surprising that it has never been a subset before. The use of Bruce Campbell as good Ash and bad Ash is very well done, especially the final battle between them. The make-up and special effects is simply spectacualar, especially the approach and subsequent attack by the skeleton army. You could fill up the page with descriptions of the many highlights of this movie but everyone has probably seen this and are familiar with them. I'll just repeat that I think this is a tremendous movie and gets my highest recommendation.

I feel pretty sure that, for most people who caught the first Evil Dead in its original theatrical release (as I did), the percentage of horror to comedy would be 100% horror / 0% comedy. I think that the comedy in the first can only been seen once it's laid against the other two films; I found it, on that first viewing so long ago, so profoundly scary that I was afraid to go home to my empty apartment lest the possessed Linda show up in a doorway singing, "We're going to get you...." I did go home, though, and when my roommate got home from a date, I told him all about it, and I went back the next night to see it with him. He, also, found nothing humorous about it whatsoever.

When he and I heard that Evil Dead II was coming out, and the TV ads made it look just as scary as the first one, we were beside ourselves with excitement. We showed up at the theater for the first screening that Friday night in 1987, ready to have the wits scared out of us. It took us longer than the rest of the audience to realize that the film was a comedy, mainly because we so badly wanted it to be as scary as the first film. We walked out angry, feeling that the rug had been yanked out from under us.

When Army of Darkness came out and was ADVERTISED as a comedy, I felt that I could let go of my resentment toward the second film and try to enjoy it. I missed it in its brief stopover at our town's theater, but I caught it on VHS...and loved it. Still do.

Because of my crushed expectations, Evil Dead II is still my least favorite of the original trilogy, but I like Army of Darkness almost as much as I do Evil Dead (for different reasons, natch). I have yet to get around to watching the TV show, but I've bought it and plan to watch it one day. And as for the follow-up theatrical films, I hated the 2013 reboot, but I really enjoyed Evil Dead Rise, as it felt more like a true Evil Dead film than Fede Alvarez's addiction allegory.

I always have considered that the first The Evil Dead had some dark comedy in it, but I do find some things funny that others do not.

It has been a while since I have seen it but just off the top of my head, I can think of at least half a dozen funny gags along with several funny lines and situations. But again, it was extremely dark humor. Even the making of book that was written discusses the humor they put into it the first one.

I think all three films are horror comedies. The first has dark comedy, the second transitions to straight comedy with some three stooge physical comedy and the third is a full blown slapstick comedy. I love them all.

I had a random AoD thought today, hope it's okay to put here:

I currently own the Blu-ray special edition with all the different cuts and I'm glad to have it, but I find myself missing some of the old DVDs I had, particularly the 2 disc Anchor Bay edition (which I initially blind bought way back in the day and it got me into the franchise) and said to myself that if I run across cheap used copies at the thrift stores and such, I'd grab some just for fun. I figured that since Anchor Bay had released so many damn versions over the years (remember how much we used to talk about that?) that I would easily find a half dozen different versions in no time.

However: 1. that two disc SE *never* shows up used. 2. Used DVDs of AoD are kinda rare in general.

I truly thought it would be easy to find them very easily but it's weird that they're not. I don't need them, to be honest, but I guess it might point to there really being a decent fanbase of the movie out there.

We also ought to celebrate the acting range of Embeth Davidtz. Here she plays the love interest who becomes a Deadite, and in the same year she played Helen Hirsch, the concentration camp prisoner who becomes Amon Goeth's housekeeper/ sex slave in Schindler's List..