Ash vs. Evil Dead – Reaction and thoughts on the trailer.

After twenty odd years of endless rumors, speculation, and a controversial remake, the Horror gods that are Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert have finally blessed us with a follow up to 1992’s Army of Darkness, though rather than being a fourth entry in the Evil Dead series of films, they have instead took the the route of a TV series with the title Ash vs. Evil Dead. It’s a smart choice, TV series are all the rage nowadays thanks to the Netflix revolution, and the massive success of HBO’s The Walking Dead along with Robert Rodriquez’s From Dusk ’til Dawn revival through his El Rey network likely spurred them on to the fact that Horror can thrive in this format.

I’m a huge Evil Dead and Bruce Campbell fan, I even started wearing Old Spice deodorant because of Bruce Campbell’s series of adverts for the brand, and there’s something glorious and exhilarating about seeing the square chinned legend strap on the chainsaw and boomstick again after so many years. This however brings me to the first worry about the trailer, the characterisation of Ash himself. In the first Evil Dead, there wasn’t anything heroic or badass about Ash, he just happened to the luckiest member of the group and used what little smarts he had to banish the deadites in the films climax. In Evil Dead 2, Ash continued torment at the hands of the deadites and resulting deteriorating mental state caused him to snap and in the name of not taking any more shit, fix a chainsaw onto the stump where his hand used to be and become the one liner spewing badass we all know and love. Army of Darkness continued this image of Ash with it’s slew of one liners, cementing the pop culture image of Bruce Campbell as a man so badass that Duke Nukem nicked his one liners form him (HAIL TO THE KING BABY!). The fact remains however that the dialogue and characterisation of the Evil Dead films was never Shakespeare, they’re a series of films in which a man has his hand possessed by demons which he then cuts off and attaches a chainsaw to the stump. What worries me is that, with a higher level of writing and characterisation required for a long term TV series, Campbell has inadvertently put his ‘My Name Is Bruce’ persona on the Ash template. 2009’s My Name Is Bruce was a daft but entertaining look at Campbell as a hyper real version of himself who is called out of his washed up B Movie star existence by a fanboy in order to help combat an evil in his home town. Ash referring to himself as ‘sexy’ and some of his mannerisms in the trailer were more reminiscent of My Name Is Bruce than anything in the Evil Dead trilogy.

This worry aside however, the tone of the trailer is PERFECT. The slapstick horror comedy of the Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness is perfectly on show, with moments like Boomstick coming out of the floor and Ash being attacked by a possessed doll looking like they could have come straight out of those films. Some people prefer the more straight faced, brutal horror approach of the first Evil Dead, which was seemingly what 2013’s Evil Dead remake was trying to recapture. This series seems to be more about giving people like me, who consider Evil Dead 2 to be a masterpiece of Slapstick Comedy Gore Horror, what they’ve been craving these last twenty years. Raimi, Campbell and their cohorts were a bunch of misfits from Detroit who grew up watching The Three Stooges shorts and messing around in the woods with a Super 8 camera. It was this sense of youthful silliness that allowed them to make Evil Dead 2 into the slapstick masterpiece it was, with blood and gore replacing custard pies. From what we have seen today, it looks extremely hopeful that they carry this sensibility through to a Horror Sitcom with Ash vs. Evil Dead.

Ash vs. Evil Dead is set to premiere on Halloween.

(Originally published at https://tornfromthetomb.wordpress.com/2015/07/11/ash-vs-evil-dead-reaction-and-thoughts-on-the-trailer/)