‘The Evil Dead’ coming to Malco drive-in
John Beifuss
Memphis Commercial Appeal USA TODAY NETWORK – TENN.
In 1982, author Stephen King attended an early screening of “The Evil Dead” and was flabbergasted by its no-holdsbarred (no-veins-stanched) splatter slapstick, its demon-possessed “shaky cam” cinematography, its shoestring ingenuity. He called it “the most ferociously original horror film of the year.”
Almost 40 years later, King’s famous encomium — which became the movie’s most effective sales pitch during its original release — still applies. “The Evil Dead” might be the most ferociously original horror film to be booked in theaters in 2020, too, although its novelty may be harder to appreciate in the context of its two sequels, its 2013 remake, its three-season Starz network television series and its countless spinoffs and imitations in many types of media.
Friday, “The Evil Dead” returns to Malco’s Summer Quartet Drive-in, as part of a nationwide revival organized by distributor Grindhouse Releasing, a cult-movie company co-founded by Sage (son of Sylvester) Stallone and Bob Murawski, the Oscar-winning film editor of “The Hurt Locker” and a longtime associate of “Evil Dead” director Sam Raimi. In a process supervised by Raimi, the film for this revival has been scanned from the original 16mm camera negatives, and its original sound mix has been restored.
The Summer booking (with a new horror film, “Followed,” as the second feature) represents something of a homecoming for “The Evil Dead,” if we can loosely define “home” as “same state.” Although Raimi and his young key collaborators — producer Rob Tapert and actor Bruce Campbell — were natives of tiny Royal Oak, Michigan, they shot “The Evil Dead” around an isolated cabin in the backwoods of Morristown, Tennessee, east of Knoxville.
“I’m glad ‘Evil Dead’ can return to Tennessee where it all began,” said Campbell, 62, in an interview from his home in rural Oregon. “I hope Memphis enjoys it while screaming their brains out.”
In fact, Campbell has directed a movie titled “The Man with the Screaming Brain,” which he brought to Memphis in 2005 for a screening at the Malco Paradiso. Although he will make a few public appearances in connection with the return of “The Evil Dead,” the coronavirus shutdown has curtailed the actor’s typically peripatetic promotion schedule, and he won’t be coming to Memphis.
“Everything I do relates to crowds,” Campbell said. “You want hundreds of people in the theater. You want thousands of people at Comic-con. I counted it up, and in the last three years — 2017, 2018, 2019 — I’ve been to 99 cities. This year — one city.”
The downtime, however, did enable Campbell to finish his latest book, “The Cool Side of My Pillow,” a collection of essays due later this summer.
A product of not so much beginner’s luck as beginner’s pluck, “The Evil Dead” was made for about $350,000 when Raimi, Campbell and associates were barely out of Michigan State. (In comparison, “Spider-man 3,” which Raimi directed in 2007, cost $350 million.)
Although many of its participants have gone on to bigger if not always better things, “The Evil Dead” has — like the demons released from the Sumerian Book of the Dead by the movie’s vacationing college students — haunted its makers ever since. No one is more closely associated with the franchise than Campbell, who has transformed the original film’s hapless cipher of a hero, named Ash, into a distinctive, increasingly comedic and even beloved creation — so much so that he received top billing in the gore-soaked Starz series, which was titled “Ash vs. Evil Dead,” the better to showcase the actor’s hambone baritone, formidable chin (his first memoir was titled “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor”), instinct for self-parody (another book is titled “Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way”) and demon-dismembering prowess with a chainsaw.
“The first ‘Evil Dead,’ in my opinion, is a melodrama,” Campbell said. “There is not a lot of winking at the camera because we were not sophisticated. And some stuff is funny because it’s either bad dialogue or poorly delivered dialogue or poorly delivered bad dialogue, which is the worst of all.
“The second is more humorous, we really perfected the ‘splatstick.’ The third one (1992’s ‘Army of Darkness,’ in which Ash is transported to the Middle Ages) is a ridiculous adventure, it’s almost like a Ray Harryhausen movie.”
Of course, all these movies found some of their first fans via that allamerican and free-range cinema innovation known as the drive-in.
“Drive-ins were crucial to the history of ‘The Evil Dead,’” said David Szulkin, film booker for Grindhouse Releasing, which also handles such films as Lucio Fulci’s “The Beyond” (1981) and the hippies-with-rabies shocker, “I Drink Your