Here's a question I occasionally ask of the "Ain't It Cool" chat room: which is better, Peter Jackson's Bad Taste and Dead Alive (aka Brain Dead) or Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead trilogy? Strangely, most of the Jackson buffs more or less ignore The Evil Dead and most of the Raimi buffs more or less ignore Jackson's stuff. Those who are known to like both seem to be reluctant to show any preference. I theorize that the gulf between the two is fundamental, that your adoption of one over the other signifies something key to your personality. Count me as a member of the Peter Jackson camp. Both series boost over-the-top gore, both are meant as monster comedies and both never ever stop moving. What I feel distinguishes the two is that Raimi uses humor to distance himself and the audience from the horror aspects of the film. He wants to say that it's okay to laugh at the cheesy special effects and the cheesy acting. He wants to use irony to rise above his ultra-low budget.

Jackson doesn't have any horror at all in his films; the whole thing is a comedy from the outset. There isn't some level that he is working on top of; he doesn't want to scare you at all. He views the gross-out humor of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead as the wheat and the satirical/sociological context and horror behind it as the chaff. The gore is really the end point; Jackson views cannibalism, dripping pus, crawling intestines et cetera exactly the way that he views fart and poop jokes. Or boner jokes for that matter. When his zombie mother falls to pieces in front of the primpy society dames she wants to impress, we're laughing at her humiliation the same way that we laugh at that gag in "The Drew Carey Show" where Drew accidentally shows his bosses a safety video doctored with explosive sound effects by his friends as a practical joke. Or when Mimi is trying to keep a straight face in front of the higher-ups to keep her position as Drew's immediate supervisor, but she has just put on vibrating panties for her boyfriend and Drew has just come into control of the remote.

At its heart, Dead Alive (and all that I say is true of Bad Taste as well, but Dead Alive is streamlined and perfected) is classic lowbrow humor. I wouldn't recommend it to horror movie fans as much as fans of American Pie or There's Something About Mary. Actually, it's better than those movies. The social and psychological aspects of sex always bring an unnecessary weight to the gross-out. American Pie and There's Something About Mary can't help but make some sort of comment on how men relate to women, women relate to men, men relate to other men, women relate to other women, and they can't help but make some comment on our collective values as a culture. With the '80s sex comedies, it's usually true that the "crappier" they got, the more you could see them as cynical anti-comedies, as condemnations of soulless hedonism. But I'm going off on another tangent. The gross-out gore in Dead Alive is a purer, simpler kind of gross-out. It's exclusively about bodily insecurity; there isn't anything really antisocial about the effect.

Focusing on gore as a gross-out isn't only better than the sexual gross-outs, it's better than toilet humor as well. Somehow it's not nearly as nauseating. I think it's because it's more abstract, harder to relate to. But like pretty much all toilet humor, there is something infantile, and thus rather innocent and harmless, about it. It's not mean or cruel, it's just gross.

Jackson's gore comedies have a perspective; he's interested in doing something new. He's an artist in a true, literal sense in that he's challenging how we view graphic violence. Dead Alive is unrated, but I wonder how 8-year old boys would view it. Would they be desensitized, disturbed or frightened by it? I don't know. I think that they may find it hilarious. It may be the first actual adaptation of "The Hearse Song". Dead Alive certainly can't be more damaging than the R-rated The Exorcist, Se7en, Silence of the Lambs, or the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Those pictures aestheticize death; they turn death into a high art. The gore effects don't resemble anything Tom Savini has done either. Savini has a way of decontextualizing cannibalism and necrophilia. His bodies are soft; when they are being eaten, chunks of flesh come off the bone like slowly roasted pork. And when they are being stabbed, you feel the squishiness, the softness of the body. Murder is sexualized here. The gore doesn't have the macho sadomasochism of Passion of the Christ or the hipster sadomasochism of Ichi the Killer. Dead Alive, while having buckets upon buckets more grue, doesn't share anything resembling those viewpoints. There isn't anything really disturbing about it; they're just grossing us out and making us laugh. This is what throws the censors into a tizzy; they have no idea how to deal with it. It doesn't correspond with their preconceptions of how violence is read. Now, The Evil Dead has the sort of gore that Dead Alive does. It has the same basic philosophy behind it. It's not sexy, it's not beautiful, it's not yummy, it's not even mean. It's just a good old fashioned gross-out. You're just supposed to laugh at it.

The Evil Dead's attitude towards gore predates Jackson by quite a bit actually. Jackson has said in interviews that he's a huge huge fan of The Evil Dead pictures, and it's not unthinkable that they are the inspiration, at least in some part, for his films. The blood even looks the same. Raimi mixed it with two percent milk, and it has a distinguished creamy pus-y color that comes back again in Bad Taste and Dead Alive. Yuck! The gore in The Evil Dead isn't "gratuitous," however. You see it, and then you've seen it, and it's gone. And it's not expansive or overly inventive. It's only one aspect of the film; it's not really the focus of the picture like it was in Dead Alive. Raimi isn't forced to think of new ways to dismember his ghouls. No lightbulb through the head, no gnome on the severed neck, no crawling, farting intestine. Raimi may have gotten there first, but Jackson has built upon it and produced a far superior experience. As a pure visceral geek show, The Evil Dead is OK. Not quite what it's cracked up to be. It seems though that the real purpose of The Evil Dead is as a satire. Dead Alive wasn't satirizing anything really; it was a primitive, laugh-cause-it's-shocking-and-fucking-stupid spoof. In contrast The Evil Dead is interested in tearing apart horror movies and horror movie conventions.

The plot has five college kids going to the woods for a weekend. While there they discover a strange book, with pages made of human flesh and words written in human blood. The book was translated out loud onto a tape recorder by a college professor, who now seems to be dead. Stupidly, one of the kids plays it back. That's when the mayhem begins, as the demons from the Underworld are summoned to take over the bodies of all the women in the cabin. Starting with the demons only taking over the bodies of the women; that strikes me as a bit of a misogynistic joke somehow. I'm reminded of that episode of "Married With Children" where everybody goes camping and Kelly, Peg and Marcy all get their periods at the same time. And so while they are getting all PMS-y, the smell of their menstruations attracts all the animals of the forest. I wouldn't force the reading that the demons symbolize the girls' PMS, I wouldn't argue that definitively, but it seems to fit in some key ways. The women seem to have some kind of mystical link with the natural and supernatural worlds. Their transformation into monsters is even preceded by the appearance of a blood red moon. Ha ha ha ha!

The mystery of femininity is a difficult one to take on overtly and seriously. The Virgin Suicides took it on famously; it was fucking absurd but it was great cinema. Maybe its immediate predecessor Picnic at Hanging Rock pulled it off. Yeah, I liked that picture less; I said on my message board that it's like experiencing a dream where your eyes are wide open and everything is in color and in hyper-reality. It's good for adventuresome filmgoers, for people who want to try out a new drug for the sake of trying out a new drug, but it's painful to watch. But yeah, there isn't anything to condescend to, or rather, to feel guilty about it; it's protected by the style. The Evil Dead presents this subtext straight up, so to speak. It doesn't try to overcome the absurdity; it lets the absurdity take care of itself. This kind of joke works as a joke for a while, but then we are confronted with a scene where the sole survivor, Ash (played by Bruce Campbell), ties down his possessed girlfriend and fires up the chainsaw. Then he debates about whether or not to cut her up into little pieces, thus neutralizing the demon.

I wasn't really bothered by the fact that I was seeing violence being committed against women. It's not like I ever am really; I mentioned the violence in Ichi the Killer before and it's still fresh in my mind. This is a film where a prostitute has her nipples stretched out so a yakuza mobster can slice them off in one clean swipe and the hero is haunted by memories of watching the only girl who was ever nice to him being gang-raped while he stood by scared but with a sizable erection. The Evil Dead certainly isn't Ichi the Killer. Somehow though, I was bothered by horror film critic Brian J. Wright's review of the film where he states that when he first saw it he didn't want Campbell to cut up his girlfriend. The second time, Wright was screaming at the screen for him to lay the saw into the bitch. His change of heart came about, he says, because he broke up with his girlfriend between viewings. I know that Wright is joking (at least kind of?), but it shows that the Rosetta Stone for understanding The Evil Dead, for truly appreciating it, is to view it through a prism of pure cynicism.

The morality of The Evil Dead is not only saying that if we cease to regard women purely as objects, they will eat us alive. As the film establishes women as a linkage to the supernatural world, celebrating cutting them up is also celebrating the rejection of spirituality. In favor of hollow self-conscious jokiness and mechanical materialism, I suppose. He's thinking about cutting her up with a chainsaw, that vulgarly loud and cumbersome weapon of destruction. There is nothing elegant or sexy about the chainsaw. The ultimate "chainsaw" movie, the one that The Evil Dead seems to obviously be paying tribute to, is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That film was said to operate more on sheer terror than suspense. The sound of that chainsaw was saying that they were fucking over with feelings like fear or uneasiness. You're going to die and that's that. It's a fact, don't bother even worrying about it. There wasn't anything funny about this pitch-black nihilism. It's just cold. The villain had the chainsaw in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What does it mean when we give it to our hero? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre presents materialism as a fact; I think that Raimi uses it as a hipster defense mechanism. The chainsaw is put in the context of a self-conscious film homage, but the underlying philosophy behind its presence seems to be regarded seriously by Raimi. He values the chainsaw for its materialist atheism, for it's utter lack of pretension. In the later Evil Dead films, the chainsaw would even become part of Ash's body.

Ultimately, I guess, that's really what the gore is about also. It's a gross-out, but through grossing us out, Raimi wants us to get used the idea of our bodies being little more than chunks of meat. The gross-out humor in Jackson's Dead Alive went so far beyond the pale that it turned around and became something rather sweet and humanistic. Pasolini achieved it in his "Trilogy of Life" by making the toilet humor feel naturalistic. Jackson does it through hyperbole. Both, I think, are trying to convince us that decay and/or sex and farting are all part of the life process. Important in regarding the violence in The Evil Dead is to note that it happens to the demons and not to the humans. Raimi wants to humiliate the monsters, to show that behind all the spookiness they basically have all the same fluids that we do. The possession of these fluids is intended to be a source of shame, to tie us back into the material world. You see, Jackson's film didn't have a supernatural element to it. People became zombies through a virus carried by a feral monkey. And so, Jackson gets away with staying in the material realm because he never introduces any spiritual element and can then never be accused of refuting it in the film. God and the devil may or may not exist in the Dead Alive universe; nothing will really change if they do.

No wait, there is a supernatural element to Dead Alive, but it doesn't have anything to do with the zombies. The Latina grocery girl, Paquita, falls in love with our hero Lionel after a prophecy from her tarot-card-reading aunt indicates he is to be the man she is fated to fall in love with. The spiritual aspect of Dead Alive simply motors along the plot and the character development, but even that little bit is highly humanistic, imagining a cosmic intelligence designed to guide our lives and help us make them better. In the eyes of Raimi, spirituality represents nothing more than flighty pretentiousness. As a silly lie that clouds our better judgment. Raimi doesn't believe in ghosts, he doesn't believe in God, he doesn't believe in the Devil, he doesn't believe in love. Chopping up his girlfriend is the rational choice. Lionel of Dead Alive hesitates before killing his zombie mother, and for a while he keeps his zombies under animal tranquilizers; but his mother doesn't really represent anything but herself. She doesn't represent all women, much less the immaterial universe. Once he destroys her, he's able to pursue a relationship with Paquita. Cutting the apron strings allows him to join the world of the normals.

On the most basic level, with the irony filtered out, Evil Dead is a fable warning not to venture out of your backyard or poke around with things that don't concern you. In the similarly plotted Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there was a survivor, but it seems that she'll be warped for life. And Leatherface lives. Not a triumph. In The Blair Witch Project everybody dies. In The Evil Dead, Ash triumphs and kills pretty much all the monsters. Again, this is all a joke, but the underlying philosophy behind it remains sound. Raimi allows Ash to persevere because he doesn't even have the slightest shred of respect for the supernatural world that he's fighting against. He doesn't much like Ash either: the last shot of the picture is cutesy-pie nihilism; it seems to be utterly gratuitous and tagged on to the end of the picture to throw out the structure and rhythm of the whole. Raimi condescendingly transforms the ominous one-take POV shot into an unseen demon, and it's this demon that apparently takes out Ash. And so all the fighting that Ash did against the other demons was for nothing? Yeah, that certainly seems to be part of the motivation for this ending. It also in effect keeps Ash from ever rising above the victim of a horror movie. Raimi doesn't want to deify him by having him survive. By having Ash kill all the on-screen demons, and then killing Ash through a remaining POV demon, Raimi is able to eliminate serious meaning entirely from his film. The only god in the film is him, the man standing behind the camera.Things complicate slightly in the next two installments of the series, as I have indicated by explaining what it means when Ash attaches a chainsaw to his body, but Raimi certainly is still up to his own tricks. In Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness Ash isn't as much raised to the level of an icon as reduced to the level of an icon, and then reduced further to the satirization of an icon. That seems to be the idea anyway.

Raimi seems to be a product of, or an exploiter of, the Spaceballs civilization. The film critic Bill Chambers says that it's a misnomer to believe that the people who go to film school believe that their taste and insight into film is more evolved than the masses. Most of his classmates had the "fuck art" attitude as well. This is very true; in my college's film club there is a surprising amount of people who want to make Christopher Guest-esque mockumentaries. This isn't, of course, because they have something to say that can only be said through the mockumentary format. That isn't even the reason that Guest makes mockumentaries. They do it because that format will cover up their lack of talent and resources. And (this is especially the reason that Guest does what he does) it feels good to jerk off. And what happens if you aren't funny in a mockumentary? Not a whole lot; you don't have a lot at stake, there is no emotional vulnerability there. The mockumentary format is a chastity belt; you're protected behind it from having to have something to say.

The spoofiness of The Evil Dead is emotionally stand-offish as well. It's not a terrible spoof picture; I suppose that my only real beef with it is the fact that the joke is too primitive to make me laugh and I don't like the idea of Raimi electing to do a spoof at all. I'll give it credit for not being obvious. You have to look for the torn The Hills Have Eyes poster, for example. And I have to give it credit for being innovative. Everybody who sees the movie seems to pick up on an all-time favorite shot. Mine is when blood is going through the electrical system of the house, and suddenly starts flowing out of the wall sockets like a drooling vampire. Know that the picture is better than Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Garfield for that matter. But when I look at a bad spoof movie like Scary Movie 3, Blondes Have More Guns or Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, which are neither inventive nor subtle, I realize that they are in fact below criticism. That if you criticize them, nobody cares. They don't have anything personally invested in them. Part of the deal of being an artist is that it gives me license to piss on your work, your life, your religion, your culture, your emotional maturity, et cetera. It can go the other way of course, but when you put up shields of ironic distance we aren't ever going to move anywhere but sideways.

Raimi's films have, in fact, gotten better and better; I would certainly strongly recommend The Quick and the Dead, Spider-Man 2 and A Simple Plan. But I don't know who he is. Spider-Man 2 was especially curious in that it could easily be read as either pro-war and anti-war, so close was his finger on the pulse of impersonal crowd-pleasing mass cinema. You talk about Spider-Man 2 as high quality Hollywood product. It's not inhuman or cold like the Evil Dead films, but it is impersonal. If The Evil Dead was all we had of Raimi, we could write him off as a cynic, but with that which has followed it shows us somebody who has consistently denied his heart and his soul for popular success and shallow "Ain't It Cool News" fanboy adulation. Like the "fuck art" film school kids, I have to wonder what it was that attracted him to the movies in the first place.