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Evil
Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987) (aka Evil Dead 2 or II)
In Sam Raimi's gruesomely funny horror film sequel
(and/or remake) - a well-done horror parody with an intense
kinetic tone and quick edits, including incredible special effects
such as stop-motion animation, reverse motion, and lengthy tracking shots:
- the film's opening sequence presented a modified
or alternative recap of the previous film in which Ash
Williams (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler)
arrived at a remote Tennessee cabin; unfortunately, he happened
to find a reel-to-reel tape-recording made by the cabin's owner,
archaeologist Prof. Raymond Knowby (John Peakes) about his translation
of "The Book of the Dead" ("Necronomicon
Ex Mortis"); he played the tape that recited one of the book's
passages, thereby awakening evil, demonic forces in the woods and
infecting Linda; she was taken outside through a broken bedroom
window, where Ash decided to end her torment as a "deadite" and
to save himself by decapitating her - he neatly sliced her
head off at the neck with a shovel and then buried her headless body
Ash With Girlfriend Linda
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The Book of the Dead ("Necronomicon Ex Mortis")
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Possessed Linda Infected With Demonic Forces
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Ash Temporarily Possessed or Zombified
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- Ash was also temporarily possessed by the demonic
spiritual forces in the wooded forest until dawn broke, when his
body was picked up, carried and swept through the wooded area and
dumped into a large puddle; in an attempt to drive off and escape
in his Oldsmobile, he discovered that he was entrapped at the cabin
due to a destroyed bridge; as darkness descended and clouds covered
the sun, he was pursued in his speeding car back through the woods
to the cabin where he crashed, and his body was hurled through the
windshield into a tree; when he revived, he raced on foot through
the woods toward his cabin, entered and tried to escape through multiple
doors and hallways from the evil forces before hiding under a trap
door; the demonic power retreated momentarily
Linda's Revived Headless Body Doing a Macabre Dance
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Linda's Body With Attached Head
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Linda's Separated Head in Ash's Lap Before Biting
and Infecting His Right Hand
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- once he revived, Ash thought
he had vanquished Linda, but that night, both her head and naked
headless body came to life in a reanimated state; after rising up from
her grave, her head was joined to her body and she performed a brief danse
macabre for
him before attacking him through a window; Ash woke up in a rocking
chair and believed that he was dreaming; however, Linda's separated
head fell into his lap where it bit his right hand, and he struggled
to disattach her grip on him; he ran to a nearby workshed and pried
her head off in a vise; she was joined by her headless body and
again assaulted him with a chainsaw; lacking a head with eyes, the
corpse bloodily and clumsily sawed into itself; Ash grabbed the chain
saw and cut into Linda's head in the vise, spraying the room with
blood
- back inside the cabin, Ash swapped the chain saw for
a loaded shotgun (boomstick) and noticed an invisible creature moving
in the rocking chair; in a startling, hallucinatory Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-like sequence,
Ash stood in front of a mirror where his reflection
suddenly reached out with his infected right hand, grabbed him, and
maniacally said: "We just cut up our girlfriend
with a chainsaw. Does that sound fine?" Then
the reflection grabbed him by the throat and began choking him, and
he realized he was only strangling himself; when his own possessed
right hand threateningly grabbed his face - he was angered: "You
dirty bastards! Give me back my hand!"
Schizophrenic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Sequence
- Ash Was Attacked by His Own Demonic Hand
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- as the gruesomely hysterical fight between
Ash and his own possessed, tormenting attacking hand continued
- it bashed him over the head with plates, grabbed his hair,
smashed his face into the kitchen sink, punched him, and tried
to beat him up in a schizophrenic frenzy; it dragged his unconscious
body across the floor to try and grab a meat cleaver and inflict
self-harm; to stop his uncontrollable body part, Ash pinned his
hand to the floor with another knife and laughed spitefully at
the evil body part: "That's right. Who's laughing now? Who's laughing now?"; however,
his severed hand kept assaulting him; in the gory scene, he was
forced to grab his chainsaw with his left hand, and to saw off
his own demonic, evil hand (before it infected his entire body),
spattering his face with blood
Ash Sawing Off His Infected Right Hand With a Chain
Saw, Spraying His Face With Blood
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- the lobbed-off hand began flopping around and re-attacked;
to contain it, Ash covered up his decapitated hand with a bucket,
weighted down with books [Note: the top-most book
was A Farewell to Arms]; after the hand escaped into a mouse
hole, Ash attempted to blast it with his shotgun through the wall;
in defiance, it flipped him the 'middle finger"; when he thought
he had killed it for good: "Got
ya, didn't I, ya little sucker!" - he was sprayed
directly in the face with a torrent of blood from multiple holes
in the wall; many of the objects in the living room then began laughing
at him - the mounted deer head, a lamp, the books in a bookcase cabinet,
the wall clock, and various wall hangings, etc. and he hysterically
joined in
- meanwhile, other additional
characters prepared to arrive at the Knowby cabin - Annie Knowby
(Sarah Berry), daughter of Prof. Knowby, and her blonde handsome
boyfriend Ed Getley (Richard Domeier); she was bringing
her father's missing pages from the Book of the Dead;
for a $100 fee, the two were led to the cabin on an obscure trail
(since the bridge was twisted and mangled) by a local redneck named
Jake (Dan Hicks) and his girlfriend Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley)
- Ash fired at the front door and then
approached cautiously and opened it, believing that the evil forces
were possibly on the other side; suddenly, Jake burst through the
entryway and tackled Ash to the floor; Ed joined him to restrain
Ash and knock him out; Annie entered and worried: "Oh my God,
where are my parents?"; she saw the bloodied chainsaw on the
floor, and suspected that Ash might have killed her father Knowby
and his wife Henrietta; to protect themselves, Ash was thrown
down a trap door and imprisoned in the fruit cellar
- Annie listened to more of the Professor's
tape recording which divulged that his wife Henrietta (Lou Hancock)
had become a demonic deadite that he had to destroy (but not dismember)
and bury in the cellar: ("I fear that my wife has become host
to a Candarian Demon. May God forgive me for what I have unleashed
unto this earth. Last night Henrietta tried to kill me....Henrietta
is dead. I could not bring myself to dismember her corpse. But I
dragged her down the steps and I buried her. I buried her in the
cellar")
- Henrietta came to life in the
cellar and horrifically confronted and attacked Ash face-to-face;
after he begged: "Let me out! There's something down here!",
he was released from the locked fruit cellar; while imprisoning
Henrietta away underground, both Jake and Ed were grabbed by the
face - Ed was thrown into a wall and knocked out, and Henrietta's
dislodged eyeball was propelled in the air into Bobby Joe's mouth
- Ash explained to everyone: "There's something
out there. That, that witch in the cellar is only part of it. It
lives out in those woods, in the dark, something, something
that's come back from the dead"; he urged everyone to wait
until daylight to escape; the deadite Henrietta (taking the form
of Annie's mother) begged and tempted Annie to be released from
the cellar by singing a familiar lullaby from her childhood, but
she refused
- fighting back, Henrietta possessed Ed who levitated
and chanted: "Dead by Dawn" and then grabbed Jake and
temporarily knocked him out; to prevent any further harm, Ash was
able to hack and dismember Ed with an axe, producing gobs of green
slime; as the evil forces threatened the cabin, the Professor's
ghostly disembodied head appeared and warned Ash and Annie how
to defeat them, by reciting from the pages of the book Annie had
brought: "There is a dark spirit here that wants to destroy you.
Your salvation lies there. In the pages of the book. Recite the
passages. Dispel the evil. Save my soul. And your own lives!"
- after Ash's dismembered hand took Bobby
Joe's hand, she became so panic-stricken that she fled outside
where she was assaulted, tied up by branches, and dragged to her
death by possessed demon trees
- Annie and Ash looked at the pages from the book
that she had brought; two passages revealed that in 1300 AD, it
was prophesied that a "hero from the sky" would come and destroy
the Evil" - a foretelling of the film's ending
- during a futile search for
Bobby Joe in the woods, Ash became possessed and attacked Jake, and then threatened Annie back
in the cabin; she grabbed a large bone dagger and accidentally
stabbed Jake when she mistook him for the evil Ash demon attempting to enter the
cabin; Henrietta dragged Jake's body down into the cellar trap door to bloodily
finish him off, creating a torrent of blood; Ash entered and tossed
Annie against a wall, rendering her unconscious; after being
reminded of Linda by Annie's necklace ripped from her neck, he
reverted to his normal self
- all of the characters were now dead except for Ash and Annie, who began to cooperate
together to defeat the evil forces; in the film's denouement, Ash clamped the chainsaw to his severed right
wrist and twirled a sawed-off shotgun into his backside-holster (and
then exclaimed: "Groovy!"); with Annie's help, Ash sawed into the fruit cellar's trap door, and
was able to retrieve the pages from the Necronomicon in the cellar, and toss them up to Annie
- the demonic, monstrous Henrietta emerged and attacked
both of them, before Ash (with Annie's assistance to distract the
demon) was able to dismember and then decapitate the long-necked
creature and ultimately destroy her with a shotgun blast to the
head (Ash: "Swallow this!")
Ash's Battle Against Monstrous, Long-Necked, Demonic
Henrietta
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- with little time left before
the forest demons destroyed the house, Annie had only recited the
first of two passages from the Book of the Dead to disperse the evil
spirits through a rift-portal; as Annie was finishing
chanting the second incantation to send away the evil deadite demons, she
was lethally stabbed in the back by Ash's severed and possessed hand
wielding the bone dagger
- Annie's incantations of the passages from the Necronomicon
were designed to create a rift in time and space to suck up all the
dark forces; Ash congratulated her: "You did it, kid" as she completed
the recitation, but expired; the reading triggered the opening of
a whirling, spinning portal or rift that sucked Ash in (with all
of the evil forces) and propelled him along with his '88 Oldsmobile
and other objects, into a time-travel journey to the Middle-Ages,
ca 1300s, the time of the Book of the Dead
Sucked into Time-Travel Portal
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'88 Oldsmobile and Ash Landing in 1300 AD
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- Ash was surrounded by medieval
knights in armor (Crusaders) on horseback; they believed that Ash
was a fearsome, harpy-like deadite, but when he blasted the head
of a real flying deadite with his boomstick-shotgun, he was worshipped
as a liberating hero and savior by all of the knights and its leader
(director Sam Raimi): "Hail,
he who has come from the sky to deliver us from the terrors of the
deadites. Hail! Hail!...", although he
was horrified and repeatedly screamed: "Nooo!" as the camera
pulled back and the screen turned to black for the closing credits
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Pages From the Book of the Dead
Ash Inside Cabin With Shotgun (Boomstick)
Annie Knowby
(Sarah Berry) With
Boyfriend Ed Getley (Richard Domeier)
Jake (Dan Hicks) and Girlfriend Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley)
The Group Looking Down on Ash After He Was Thrown Into the Fruit Cellar
Deadite Henrietta Knowby (Lou Hancock)
Threatening Ash in the Fruit Cellar
Henrietta's Dislodged Eyeball Propelled In Air
Ed Possessed by Henrietta
Foursome Scared by Demonic Forces In and Outside Cabin
The Professor's Disembodied Head
Bobby Joe Dragged to Her Death by Possessed Trees
Prophecy of Hero Vanquishing Demons in 1300 AD
Annie With Bone Dagger, Used to Accidentally Stab Jake
Jake Stabbed in Abdomen
Ash With Chainsaw Strapped to His Right Wrist to Open Up Trap Door
Annie Stabbed in Back by Ash's Own Possessed Hand Wielding Bone Dagger
Annie Finishing the Incantation Before Dying
The Film's Ending:
Ash's Arrival in Middle Ages
Shooting at Flying Deadite With Shotgun
Ending: "Nooo!"
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