if you were to choose which character in horror films has the most staying power. who would you choose. Freddie Krueger, Michael Meyers, The Mummy, Dracula, The Frankenstein Monster, The Wolfman, Jason, Godzilla? All are great candidates, They are all worthy choices. but my choice is different, he comes at you from another perspective. He debuted in a little low budget masterpiece in 1981. It was a horror film tha not only changed the way we look at horror movies,. it changed horror movies. It forced producers to find more intelligent scripts and better directors. I coined the phrase, Tongue in Mutilated Cheek to describe this feature. Here is my choice for the horror movie character with the most staying power, who takes a licking and just keeps ticking. In my mind it has to be Ashley J. Williams, better known as Ash, played by the immortal Bruce Campbell, leading with his chin, in Sam Raimis classic Evil Dead Trilogy. Lets face it, book cases fall on him, monsters attack him from every direction, he gets possessed, his hand gets possessed and tries to strangle him, he cuts it off with a chain saw, he has to dismember his best friends, and his girl friend, Evil Dead hands grab from a mirror, through doors, does he give up? Not at all, he merely travels back in time to destroy the Necronomicon, the book of the dead and join forces with noble knights fighting the undead Army of Darkness, with his trusty chainsaw and shotgun after drinking boiling water to destroy a diminutive Ash who goes down his throat. he continues to seek the Book and to remember the secret incantation Klaatu Barata Nikto. And he does so with bravado and panache. The main story in both 1 and 2 follows a group of college kids to a weekend at a cabin in the deep woods of Tennessee. Your Dont go there Vibe should have started kicking in here. Well, whaddya know, they go and they start to violate every Dont do that horror rule ever written. they go into the woods at night, they peer out the dark window,they read from the Necronomicon and play a tape recording of the missing professor of the occult who had been a resident at the cabin,in short, its al a big F*ck up for them, everything goes down hill and keeps on spiraling down the drain, to mix metaphors. One by one they die and get possessed and the survivors, who dont last long have to come to the decision that they must dismember the living remains, the honor basically falls to Ash, the last surviving member of the trip, or was he? the movie ends very ambiguously at sunrise, and we all know nothing horrific ever happens in day light. but wait, the camera starts whipping through the woods very stesdi-cam like, tracks through the cabin, crashes through the back door and comes upon Ash who is looking at the camera with a horrified look on his face. Roll Credits. Part 2 was just about the same movie, with much, much better special effects, and completely played for laughs. It remains a classic o the genre. At the end Ash is sucked into a maelstrom rip in the fabric of time and when Army of Darkness starts, he finds him self in Medievall Times and brother, it was no restaurant. He fights for life truth, honor and with a new found duty to destroy all monsters. It is all good fun. I didnt see this until I rented the VHS from Blockbuster, I found it truly scary and very well done, somehow I acquired my own copy, Videos were extremely expensive back then. I think a bought a previewed copy for a mere pittance, but God, I sure had a helluva lot of fun with it. Id bring it to parties and i would take over the VCR and announce that I was going to scare the shit out of everybody. For the most part, nobody had ever seen it or heard of it, so they bit. Id start it up and provide an MST3K kind of running commentary. I had a little musical device that when a tiny button was pushed it would beep out a tinny little version of Jingle Bells.It sounded much like those greeting cards of today but more primitive. I called it the Horror Horn, and if they heard it, they could avert their eyes so as not to be horrified. Man, did it work. People were truly scared, they couldnt stay in the room, running to the kitchen or hallway and peeking to see if the coast was clear. Veteran viewers would add to the merriment of the commentary, and they became some of the best parties of the early 80s. Rent them, see them all wherever you can, always remember that through all the blood and gore, its only a comedy. The new remake is worthy of the name, it was produced by Sam Raimi, but not with his total sense of macabre merriment. Stand by for Pictures
Posted on: Thu, 29 May 2014 22:08:06 +0000
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