The Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)

dir. Sam Raimi cast Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley

"Kiss you nerves good-bye!" said the poster for this one, but there's nothing to be scared of, though you may die laughing. The pinnacle of the "splatstick" sub-genre (along with Peter Jackson's Dead Alive), this resembles a Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Ash (Campbell), brings his girlfriend to a remote mountain cabin and, while there, turns on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder left by the former owner of the cabin, a college professor who was investigating the occult. Unfortunately, the tape contains incantations from the "Book of the Dead," a medieval guide to summoning demons, who immediately posses Ash's girlfriend. Chopping her head off with a shovel (in a scene perhaps borrowed from Hammer's Plague of the Zombies) he buries her and barricades the cabin against a demonic onslaught, which he must face alone until the arrival of the professor's daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple of rednecks.

The catalog of horrors goes on and on. We get the old standby, the crawling hand, perambulating evil trees, a dancing corpse, a laughing disembodied head ("Hello, lover!"), a "witch" in the cellar (actually the professor's possessed wife), oceans of blood, and much more. The special effects are excellent, but not "realistic." Instead they're caroonish; the dancing corpse and the monster that the "witch" becomes both look like what they are: good examples of stop-motion animation. The demonic trees, with evil faces in the bark, look like something out of The Wizard of Oz.

Few actors ever seemed more like live-action cartoons than Bruce Campbell in this film. The only comparison would be Jim Carrey, whom Campbell strongly resembles, in some of his more manic roles. The demons seem to want to beat Ash up, rather than possess him (though he is briefly possessed) and he suffers just about every indignity one can imagine, even having is own hand turn on him at one point. Ash cuts off the hand with a convenient chainsaw, then, later, attaches the chainsaw to the stump of his wrist ("Groovy!" he says). Campbell is very, very funny in this movie.

I was always skeptical that a movie with lots of gore could possibly be funny, but this film really does take it so far that it's impossible to take seriously. It's far too cartoonish to work as a truly scary film, but as a black, black comedy, it succeeds admirably.