Baby, You’ve Gotten Really Ugly
Bruce Campbell is one of the most gracious recipients of some of the weirdest fans one could possibly receive. But it’s also a remarkably huge fanbase for a B-Movie actor, maybe the biggest for a still-living B-Actor. So for many people who, like yours truly, got into the man for his work with the Evil Dead film trilogy (and I’m sure many of them got into Sam Raimi that way too — though my introduction was the Spider-Man trilogy), Starz’ announcement for a television series continuation for Ash vs. Evil Dead and its subsequent premiere on Halloween was something we welcomed with arms wide open, Campbell returning after 22 long years into the role that made us love him and willing to explore further into how Ashley J. Williams (Campbell), the bravado dolt who survived his way through the trilogy’s horrors, is dealing now with his age and memory of what he’s seen and done, joined by co-executive producers Robert Tapert and Sam Raimi dipping their hand once more into campy bloody shlock with their gloriously tawdry sense of humor dripping through the concept.
Usually, the ideas of a somber study of a character’s psychology and adapting the looney style of the Evil Dead franchise shouldn’t be outright repulsive towards each other, though it’s not such an easy mix. Unfortunately, season 1 of Ash vs. Evil Dead makes clear that that the second fact of its mission is a certainty. Its black comic elements and attempts to shade Ash’s identity as a man haunted by his past are actually really well done, but side-by-side, those elements are like oil and water and it feels like watching two vastly different shows.
The disjointed image of a synopsis that those elements kick-off is how Ash, implied to be long after the events in the cabin (the show is inconsistent with what is canon and what is not from the trilogy; but given that this has always been of the entire franchise, it doesn’t bother me and I’m sure fans wouldn’t be either and non-fans would not notice), while having a pot-clouded fling with a girl, reads from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis to impress her and ends up unleashing the Deadite evil into his world once more. After some coaxing from his idolizing market co-worker Pablo (Ray Santiago) into fulfilling his destiny as “El Jefe”, he takes the book and desperately quests to find a way to undo his idiocy, joined by Pablo and another of their co-workers, sardonic Kelly (Dana DeLorenzo).
Meanwhile, a suspended Michigan State Trooper Amanda Fisher (Jill Marie Jones) whose partner succumbed to the Deadite Curse hunts Ash down with the help of an mysterious individual (Lucy Lawless) who shares Fisher’s apparent resentment of Ash’s involvement in surrounding tragedies.
That’s not a bad place to go, really — the idea that Ash is a menace and an omen of doom and the initially episodic nature of the trio’s journeys showcase a lot of that idea that everybody except Ash is just cannon fodder, something that the trilogy doesn’t get to acknowledge (the body count in Army of Darkness is inconsequential, Evil Dead II spends more time with him in solitude than with others, and Ash is absolutely not a protagonist in The Evil Dead so much as just the last man standing). That feeds into both the bloody appetites of the series (while there is a chintzy and even occasionally cringey amount of CGI as would be expected of any TV series due to the obviously high cost, there is an admirable amount of practical effects dedicated to the show — particularly in the first few episodes and the finale) and the intention to have Ash reflect on what kind of man he’s become and what kind of man he has to be.
While the first episode — directed by Sam Raimi himself — does a pretty adequate job of introducing us into the high-energy frenetic style of the series (save for a really ridiculously unnecessary China Doll sequence), the second episode is sure as hell the highest point the series gets to. Not only did it have a gorey and gooey climax to match any of the movies (including intercutting fun reaction shots of DeLorenzo and Santiago getting sprayed with red fluid), but it is maybe the closest the show could come to introducing the idea that Ash is not all there and absolutely giving it weight to the scenario where he has to convince everyone he’s the sane man in an insane world. It even has a sickening smacking sound mix that makes me want to stay away from meat almost as much as the late Antonia Bird’s Ravenous did. And even when we are introduced to Pablo’s uncle Brujo (Hemky Madera), the show is willing to literally stick inside Ash’s head for a moment, looking into his hopes and what he’s lost as a person because of the Necronomicon’s influence on his life, without stalling the plot at all. It humanizes him beyond caricature and explains his obvious reluctance to have Pablo and Kelly become liabilities in his life. And of course, nobody knows Ash better than the two men who made him what he is — Campbell and Raimi.
But they just don’t mesh well. The show is not concerned with making these functions come out of the same tonal place so much as just flip from one to the other when possible and the more the series goes on, the more it dips its hand into faux-Raimi stylisations of canted angles and forceful dolly shots into white-eyed demon make-up with less interest in talking about where Ash is now. And for all the chemistry Campbell has with Santiago (limited) and DeLorenzo (surprisingly a lot, given how much heavy lifting DeLorenzo has to do to make the inertly-written Kelly feel like a person in the second half), the series is not so much interested in exploring how Ash feels about these two people tagging along so much as just nodding to it occasionally.
In the meantime, the story of Amanda and her mentor is just an interruption that constantly gets shoved into the middle of an episode that adds little to nothing towards the overall so much as saying “THEY’RE coming to get Ash soon!”, with clearly the show just fumbling to remind us of their side of the story before being able to sloppily mix them into Ash’s arc for the final leg of his tour to the cabin of the original Evil Dead events. But, man oh man, does Amanda suffer as a character. This is the first time I have watched anything Jones has done as an actress (her previous hit tv credit is Girlfriends, which seems every bit not my type of show), but I’m not sure how much of Amanda’s dysfunction as a character from her inability to carry herself as somebody we could believe to be a cop and her lack of chemistry with Campbell or Lawless and how much just comes from the fact that the writers of this show just have no clue how to write women.
For all the diversity of the lead cast that I’m glad for (a hispanic men and 3 women, one black), the women get the worst of it since the show seems to have done all it felt it needed to with Kelly by the first five episodes and just kept her around as a potential love interest to Pablo, Lawless’ main interest comes entirely from simply being an antagonist to Ash than anything else, and Amanda is rapidly morphed to fit several different molds that Jones has to catch up with, making her so inconsistently written that it’s depressing to find out around the end of the series that she was meant to have some emotional tie to Ash and the audience and we just weren’t allowed a chance to believe in her that way. DeLorenzo and Lawless do some unnecessary tricks to get around their malnourished writing, but Jones doesn’t even get that chance with how much left-field material she has to work with.
The show eventually catches its footing by a pretty impressive final episode that actually expands on the mythology more than expected — a new threat is presented for Season Two, grisly send-offs of characters we were more familiar with than the regular in-and-out extras of the show, a really haunting bit of make-up work to one of the characters based on the Necronomicon’s disfiguration that looks agonizing (the character is question especially sells it with desperate and distant lines of the “Oh god, kill me now” kind that really darken the show for a moment), and while most of the show’s viewers were against Ash’s final decision of the show, I think it works a hell of a lot with the character and seems exactly like the type of easy-way-out selfishness we’re meant to see in him like all over the franchise. The show clearly has its intentions in the right place within the beginning and end, it’s mainly having some trouble ambling and spreading its time in the middle, and one hopes that it begins to figure out better ways of using its potential later on. In the end, being around Ash again - even if it has to be in such a mess of a show - feels groovy.
Salim Garami spends more time than he should complaining about movies on Movie Motorbreath (Where you can read his thoughts on the first, second, third Evil Dead films, and the remake), but you should definitely follow him for more thoughts on Film and Media, as well as short fiction, and certainly follow Panel & Frame for more emerging voices in Film, Comics, Literature, and Art!
