2 other recommendations for those who like this genre :
Drag me to hell
Yeah, you can view "Drag Me to Hell" as Raimi's polished version of comic horror with a high production budget, since he was revisiting the genre after working on the Spiderman pics. It manages to be an over-the-top, still pretty creepy-scary comedy horror film due to the absurd elements. Its tone is remarkably consistent, I don't think it missed a beat in there (aside from maybe the dancing lamia? But it still works). It's become one of my favorite horror movies because it doesn't miss any beats + it refuses to cop out. (My eloquent summary of the movie: "Fucking awesome.")
I also have to give a mention to one of my all time favourite films, Bubba Ho Tep, its a fantastic movie if you liked the evil dead films, very much in that spirit and Campbell said he liked shooting it because the "stunts" what little of them there were he was able to perform himself, he is an old guy now.
I faintly remember hearing this title mentioned before but never ran across it. Campbell is actually pretty funny, self-deprecating, and it's cool he wanted to be so heavily involved in the process. I think I hadn't really heard of him outside of Evil dead et al, except for the TV show "Burn Notice" (?). I did always enjoy his cameos in Raimi's other movies.
I watched it on Amazon, I love the idea and the show, I also would say to see if you can see any of the evil dead outings on console platforms on youtube since they fill in a lot of the detail of what's happened between the movies and the TV series.
To think that Campbell joked that PS2's evil dead was the closest you would get to evil dead 3 because of his age when it was released (there was an unlockable extra of an interview with him playing the game).
The games, at least one of them, heavily featured the Cthulu mythos, in fact I think featuring the only really accurate depictions of a creature from The Mountains of Madness that I've seen, and the TV series seemed to be going that way too for a bit but the Lawless story line and some later Witchery seemed to take it in a slightly different direction. I've always thought that evil dead was Cthulu mythos terrain because of the Necronomicon being featured so prominantly/heavily throughout. The gore and the action can seem a bit OTT but, it varies from episode to episode, later on the amount of CGI gets a little obvious, those movies were great, in my opinion, because like Hellraiser they predate some of the slicker production values.
Yeah, Evil Dead was a little too low-budget for me (it would knock me out of the movie), but Evil Dead 2 and onwards I was totally happy with.
Definitely noticed that their version of Eligos had Hellraiser overtones to it. I don't know if I can trudge through all the Hellraiser movies (I just actually picked up six of them for $5 total over the weekend at Wal-Mart, in case I feel like being a masochist), I've seen the first and it still unsettles me even today decades later. Great mythos, not as great execution in the movies.
Lovecraft has been becoming more mainstream, in part because of the mythos itself, and because the cult following has kept it alive for a long time, and also because much of his stuff (or all of it?) is now public domain. The show is kind of cobbling things together a bit, they still seemed more focus on "evil" vs "chaos.
The show definitely has more CGI since it's a developed technology now. It doesn't bother me, as long as they keep some real effects in there (and you can see some of what they do, in the short clips that are shown after each episode which is cool).
It doesnt sound like you made it to the end of season one, I would have asked you what you thought of it if you had because it was well done/could be self-contained but equally could set up another series, it did manage to do full on Ash is an asshole but I think that was set up all throughout the series. I like that because I kind of think Ash was meant to be an archetype much like "the fool" in the movie Cabin In The Woods (original title for Evil Dead BTW), also Campbell himself said of the original films and the remakes that they only appeared slapstick because he considers himself to have been a terrible actor at the time (he's said that in his two biographies and its a big part of the absolutely brilliant and hilarious They Still Call Me Bruce movie).
Currently I have watched all of Season 1 + the opener to Season 2, and I'll watch episodes 2&3 (which is everything that has been broadcast) if I still have access to Starz when I get home today.
I would agree that Ash plays the role of "Fool" (aside from the end of Season 1, lol) -- he's easy to laugh at because he doesn't realize he is the Fool and takes himself seriously -- it's what makes his negative qualities acceptable. I think the TV show drives this home even more because we actually have some other characters sticking around for more than ten minutes, so they can provide commentary about and contrast with Ash over the long haul, and so if they can like him or value him, then the audience can too... but his blind spots also become more glaring.
I love the fact that Campbell himself is almost a character, although I know he dislikes it and has talked about how he is not Ash and that the Ash character has eclipsed his roles in other films, not just the cameos in Spiderman, and role in Burn Notice, which he said he felt should've been a bigger show than it got to be, blaming networks and decisions about scheduling for that one. I cant remember exactly but I think he appeared in an episode of X-Files or Millennium too.
Yup, he was in this episode of X-Files ("Terms of Endearment"), just an encapsulated story -- it's essentially about a devil desperate to father a "normal" child. I don't want to say more because of the great twist, but it's a mix of humor and disturbing bits. Still, Campbell brings some depth to the character and shows a little more of his potential range.
Incidentally, again, one of the greatest talking points about the show evil dead mythos that arose from the show among my friends and I was whether or not Ash is this big "choosen one" or anointed one who through his own lack of awareness and foolhardy "bravery" is able to challenge the evil dead and go on surviving for so long or that he's just the evil dead's play thing and they have decided to keep him alive, threatened the whole time, suffering the death of anyone and everyone close to him, as a sort of eternal torment/punishment for summoning them up. It gives a whole other meaning to "choosen one", like was he a cosmic "choosen one" or did the evil dead "choose" him?
That's actually a great discussion. Will they want to play it deeper than that or ever address it? I don't know. the dead do seem to enjoy tormenting him, and know him by name, though, and never seem to be bothered by his killing them... like cats toying with a mouse. It's an interesting spin.