Best Blu ray Movie Review: The Evil Dead [Blu-ray]

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The Evil Dead, director Sam Raimi's (Darkman, Quick & The Dead, Army Of Darkness) first feature film, is a true cult classic in every sense of the word. Originally released in 1982, The Evil Dead tells the tale of a group of friends who go to a cabin in the woods, where they find an unspeakable evil lurking in the forest. They find the Necronomicon, the Book Of The Dead, and the taped translation of the text. Once the tape is played, the evil is released. One by one, the teens become deadly zombies. With only one remaining (Bruce Campbell), it is up to him to survive the night and battle The Evil Dead.

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In the fall of 1979, Sam Raimi and his merry band headed into the woods of rural Tennessee to make a movie. They emerged with a roller coaster of a film packed with shocks, gore, and wild humor, a film that remains a benchmark for the genre. Ash (cult favorite Bruce Campbell) and four friends arrive at a backwoods cabin for a vacation, where they find a tape recorder containing incantations from an ancient book of the dead. When they play the tape, evil forces are unleashed, and one by one the friends are possessed. Wouldn't you know it, the only way to kill a "deadite" is by total bodily dismemberment, and soon the blood starts to fly. Raimi injects tremendous energy into this simple plot, using the claustrophobic set, disorienting camera angles, and even the graininess of the film stock itself to create an atmosphere of dread, punctuated by a relentless series of jump-out-of-your-seat shocks. The Evil Dead lacks the more highly developed sense of the absurd that distinguish later entries in the series--Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness--but it is still much more than a gore movie. It marks the appearance of one of the most original and visually exciting directors of his generation, and it stands as a monument to the triumph of imagination over budget. --Simon Leake

EVIL DEAD BLU-RAY (BLU-RAY DISC)

The Evil Dead [Blu-ray] Reviews

84 of 87 people found the following review helpful:

Widescreen & Full-screen, April 23, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Evil Dead (Special Edition) (DVD)

This is one of the greatest horror films ever made. Some people may find the special effects work primitive by todays standards, but for a low-budget film as this is they are excellent and charged with a weirdly supernatural energy; something one never sees today in the big production horror films.

However, this review is mainly going to be about the picture format. Evil Dead was filmed in 16mm, which is a full-screen format, not widescreen.
BEWARE of the so called "widescreen" versions: Book of the Dead Limited Edition, and the other editions from Anchor Bay. Nothing has been added to sides of the picture to make it wider; instead the top and bottom of the film have been cut away to make it look like a modern theatre film. Instead of more, you actually gett less. In some parts of the movie this makes an important differance; in the close-ups of faces, parts like the chins are now gone (...); other important details also disappear, like when the trap-door in the floor opens... Read more

48 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

Not Yet a Fan of This Cult Flick? "Join Us!", November 14, 2004

Michael R Gates (Nampa, ID United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Evil Dead (Special Edition) (DVD)

Even though it's been more than 20 years since its original release, 1982's THE EVIL DEAD is still an impressive marvel of low-budget filmmaking. It does have its palpable flaws, but this first feature-length directorial effort from SPIDERMAN's (2002) Sam Raimi, produced on a shoestring budget of circa $350,000, offers clever special FX, interesting make-up work, relentless shocks, and brilliant direction and camera work. And of considerable note to genre fans, it highlights Raimi's knack for pushing violence and gore to such an extreme that it becomes comic or farcical, a characteristic that is enhanced by the slapstick talents of actor Bruce Campbell (who would himself become a cult hero due to his work in this and other Raimi films).

The story involves a group of college students who, during a weekend getaway, find a Sumerian Book of the Dead in an old wilderness cabin they've rented. When they unwittingly unleash evil spirits and demons while reading incantations... Read more

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

THE, "ULTIMATE" EDITION, BUT STILL NOT THE, "PENULTIMATE" EDITION..., December 17, 2007

stryper "stryper" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Evil Dead (Ultimate Edition) (DVD)

First off, anyone who loves this film knows, that the now out of print, "Elite" edition, has the best over all picture quality (just compare the scene where Ash gives Linda the necklace, between the two versions, and you'll see that the Anchor Bay version is soft, almost to the point of being out of focus, where as the Elite version is much sharper) and it seems that no matter how many times Anchor Bay, "Remasters" their print of, The Evil Dead, they just can't seem to make it look any better.

So what we have in this new, "Ultimate" edition, is the same old tired transfer of the film, this time in both wide and full screen formats (of which the major consensus is that the full screen version is the director's preferred aspect ratio, which is made even more evident during the commentaries for Anchor Bay's previous, "Evil Dead" edition (the one cropped to widescreen, but with both commentaries on the same disc) during the scenes where things in the picture are referred to,... Read more

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