Evil Dead II

Released six years after The Evil Dead, the cult hit sequel Evil Dead II sees the hero of the first movie, Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) back at the cabin in the woods with his girlfriend Linda. When a tape recording unleashes evil spirits and his girlfriend is first possessed and then dismembered, Ash is left alone to fight the evil and at times his own body until the daughter of the cabin’s Archaeologist previous inhabitant joins him in the battle against malevolence.

I saw the original Evil Dead for the first time a few weeks ago and loved it. It was intense, gruesome and funny and last week I was also impressed with the remake which while not so funny, was just as intense, much scarier and more gruesome than I could manage. Evil Dead II is different again from its predecessor in that it forgoes a lot of the traditional horror and indeed most of the scares, in favour of creating a hilarious and downright bonkers movie which is entertaining from start to finish.

Robocop

The first of Dutch Director Paul Verhoeven’s three English language cult sci-fi films, Robocop is a movie that owes a great debt to the comic book character Judge Dredd and was inspired by Blade Runner. In the near future Detroit is a city on the verge of collapse. There are no jobs and criminal gangs run the streets. The mega-corporation OCP runs the battered up police force and hopes to create a new super-city in the ruins of Detroit. To clean up the streets they design an automated robot cop but when tests go badly they return to the drawing board. Veteran cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is out on patrol with his new partner Officer Ann Lewis (Nancy Allen) when he encounters a criminal gang. The cops chase the gang to an abandoned mill where Murphy is brutally killed. OCP use what is left of Murphy’s body to create a new version of their robotic policeman – Robocop.

I saw Robocop when I was in my early teens at remember thinking it was pretty violent and cool. Now aged twenty-six and twenty-five years after the movie’s initial release, I found the film had aged very badly and wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I remembered. The violence though, remains.