Sam Raimi Books

Geez, I love this stuff! I have the entire first season and I have been watching them every night. Okay, Lucy Lawless is hot! Really, she is, but to tell the truth, I find Xena to be funny and have a purpose. Gabriella is a perfect side kick. I watch these to get away from "it all" and it works. I want to buy ALL of the seasons if they are offered. Can't buy all at once, but I will purchase them, one by one. Where are they??? Thanks for a great show!

This, the best & third entry in the Evil Dead series, is an absolute blast! It's funny, exciting, scary, well acted, beautifully designed and choreographed, and, most of all, imaginative to the extreme!

Bruce Campbell is fantastic here (as usual), but here he's really allowed to excercise his funny bone, and man does he stretch (in more ways than one). You'll be laughing and cheering along with him the whole way through!

As for plot: Ash, our scrappy hero from the first two Evil Dead movies, is sucked through a dimensional vortex thingy (courtesy of Necronomicon, the demonic book of the dead) and finds himself lost in time...the middle ages, more specifically. Before you know it, he finds himself saving the kingdom and setting things right when the Necronomicon's evil minions, the army of darkness of the movies title, start causing trouble. Epic, silly gold!

Having abandoned genuine scares in favor of all-out slapstick, Army of Darkness, the third entry in the Evil Dead series sees Bruce Campbell lost in time, low on gas, surrounded by evil and facing the Medieval Dead with only a chainsaw, a '73 Oldsmobile, his trusty boomstick and a lot of attitude in a film that owes more to Ray Harryhausen than George A. Romero, albeit with an R-rating (it's one of the last films to use stop-motion extensively, with more sword-wielding skeletons than Harryhausen managed in his entire career). Never quite as much fun as you'd like it to be, it's certainly aged much better than expected - initially regarded as a disappointment, today it stands up rather well, especially when seen away from its two more small-scale predecessors. Joe LoDuca's unapologetically old-fashioned epic score is a lot of fun too, particularly cues like `Manly Men' and `Building the Deathmobile.'

There's no shortage of different editions of the film on DVD, and the fact that Amazon have lumped all the reviews for them in one big identical heap that appears on every editions page doesn't help sort them out. Seeing the two versions of the film side by side on Anchor Bay's 2-disc DVD (issued as the Special Edition and the Boomstick edition) - the US theatrical version with the S-Mart ending and the longer director's `Bootleg cut' with the original `Planet of the Apes' ending, the differences in the longer version are mainly extended scenes rather than deleted ones, though the use of a few alternate takes means that some of the most quotable lines from the shorter version are lost ("Good, bad, I'm the one with the gun." "Maybe my men can hold them. Maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot." "Hail to the king, baby.") and the picture quality is a lot softer. It has to be said that both versions have their merits: there's a bit of repetition in the long version (Marcus Gilbert's every other line in the last half hour seems to be "We are deserted!") and while a lot of good stuff was lost when the film was trimmed for the US, the shorter version IS a lot snappier and the S-Mart Dedite ending is quite fun even if it doesn't set up the will-it-ever-get-made Evil Dead 4 promised in the original ending.

In one word this movie is fun, completely over the top and with a lot of silly moments, but there is a reason for all that stuff! Director Sam Raimi making fun of himself and of all the "Horror" he had put Ash trough in the previous two movies (the evil dead and the evil dead 2) that was still silly, and over the top!


Ash being pulled by the power of the Necronomicon gets sent to a weird version of medieval England (even though he is in the states) where he has to get the Necronomicon to get him back in time. What is totally ridiculous about this movie (aside from EVERYTHING) is that Ash is such a moron that he just gets thrown back in this evil time by the Necronomicon, but when he hears mention of the book, its like he never heard of it before, but he is smart enough to build himself a robot hand, and make explosives.

This is not a movie that you would watch for the really smart dialog, or for a well made horror flick, or even a sci-fi adventure that makes any kind of sense, but laughing out loud fun!!!

I will be honest and say this movie is cheesey as hell, and is a bit different. But it is a lot of fun, and brings back many fond memories of when I was younger and Ash was my hero. My cousins and I loved this stuff.

If you don't have a sense of humor, or if you can't stand old movies with dated special effects, don't watch.

And if you're not a fan of the one-liners, get out of here. I think they are damn funny in this movie.

When I saw this HD DVD featured on Amazon, I thought it was a recent movie. I purchased the movie and upon watching it, realized I had rented it several years ago, 1993 I think. The date the manufacturers are putting on the box is the day it became HD, not necessarily the year it was produced. Yes, you can package something HD and it will look better for all intents and purposes, and this one does, but nevertheless this one is very forgettable.
The plot is a different spin on a "Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain. Bruce Campbell plays a manager in a department store who is catapulted in vintage Pontiac back to the days of Camelot. The plot involves a book that unleashes dead zombies that attack the castle and the plot gets sillier and sillier. Adding profanity, including the "f" word in an attempt to make this asinine infantile excursion into something more adult completely missed the mark. This performance by Campbell is probably why he has been relegated to second and third tier supporting roles in subsequent movies.

This, the best & third entry in the Evil Dead series, is an absolute blast! It's funny, exciting, scary, well acted, beautifully designed and choreographed, and, most of all, imaginative to the extreme!

Bruce Campbell is fantastic here (as usual), but here he's really allowed to excercise his funny bone, and man does he stretch (in more ways than one). You'll be laughing and cheering along with him the whole way through!

As for plot: Ash, our scrappy hero from the first two Evil Dead movies, is sucked through a dimensional vortex thingy (courtesy of Necronomicon, the demonic book of the dead) and finds himself lost in time...the middle ages, more specifically. Before you know it, he finds himself saving the kingdom and setting things right when the Necronomicon's evil minions, the army of darkness of the movies title, start causing trouble. Epic, silly gold!

Having abandoned genuine scares in favor of all-out slapstick, Army of Darkness, the third entry in the Evil Dead series sees Bruce Campbell lost in time, low on gas, surrounded by evil and facing the Medieval Dead with only a chainsaw, a '73 Oldsmobile, his trusty boomstick and a lot of attitude in a film that owes more to Ray Harryhausen than George A. Romero, albeit with an R-rating (it's one of the last films to use stop-motion extensively, with more sword-wielding skeletons than Harryhausen managed in his entire career). Never quite as much fun as you'd like it to be, it's certainly aged much better than expected - initially regarded as a disappointment, today it stands up rather well, especially when seen away from its two more small-scale predecessors. Joe LoDuca's unapologetically old-fashioned epic score is a lot of fun too, particularly cues like `Manly Men' and `Building the Deathmobile.'

There's no shortage of different editions of the film on DVD, and the fact that Amazon have lumped all the reviews for them in one big identical heap that appears on every editions page doesn't help sort them out. Seeing the two versions of the film side by side on Anchor Bay's 2-disc DVD (issued as the Special Edition and the Boomstick edition) - the US theatrical version with the S-Mart ending and the longer director's `Bootleg cut' with the original `Planet of the Apes' ending, the differences in the longer version are mainly extended scenes rather than deleted ones, though the use of a few alternate takes means that some of the most quotable lines from the shorter version are lost ("Good, bad, I'm the one with the gun." "Maybe my men can hold them. Maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot." "Hail to the king, baby.") and the picture quality is a lot softer. It has to be said that both versions have their merits: there's a bit of repetition in the long version (Marcus Gilbert's every other line in the last half hour seems to be "We are deserted!") and while a lot of good stuff was lost when the film was trimmed for the US, the shorter version IS a lot snappier and the S-Mart Dedite ending is quite fun even if it doesn't set up the will-it-ever-get-made Evil Dead 4 promised in the original ending.

In one word this movie is fun, completely over the top and with a lot of silly moments, but there is a reason for all that stuff! Director Sam Raimi making fun of himself and of all the "Horror" he had put Ash trough in the previous two movies (the evil dead and the evil dead 2) that was still silly, and over the top!


Ash being pulled by the power of the Necronomicon gets sent to a weird version of medieval England (even though he is in the states) where he has to get the Necronomicon to get him back in time. What is totally ridiculous about this movie (aside from EVERYTHING) is that Ash is such a moron that he just gets thrown back in this evil time by the Necronomicon, but when he hears mention of the book, its like he never heard of it before, but he is smart enough to build himself a robot hand, and make explosives.

This is not a movie that you would watch for the really smart dialog, or for a well made horror flick, or even a sci-fi adventure that makes any kind of sense, but laughing out loud fun!!!

I will be honest and say this movie is cheesey as hell, and is a bit different. But it is a lot of fun, and brings back many fond memories of when I was younger and Ash was my hero. My cousins and I loved this stuff.

If you don't have a sense of humor, or if you can't stand old movies with dated special effects, don't watch.

And if you're not a fan of the one-liners, get out of here. I think they are damn funny in this movie.

When I saw this HD DVD featured on Amazon, I thought it was a recent movie. I purchased the movie and upon watching it, realized I had rented it several years ago, 1993 I think. The date the manufacturers are putting on the box is the day it became HD, not necessarily the year it was produced. Yes, you can package something HD and it will look better for all intents and purposes, and this one does, but nevertheless this one is very forgettable.
The plot is a different spin on a "Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain. Bruce Campbell plays a manager in a department store who is catapulted in vintage Pontiac back to the days of Camelot. The plot involves a book that unleashes dead zombies that attack the castle and the plot gets sillier and sillier. Adding profanity, including the "f" word in an attempt to make this asinine infantile excursion into something more adult completely missed the mark. This performance by Campbell is probably why he has been relegated to second and third tier supporting roles in subsequent movies.

The Unseen Force: The Films Of Sam Raimi provide a behind-the-scenes, movie-by-movie survey of the career and work of innovative film director Sam Raimi. He made his debut in 1982 at the age of 23 with the independent horror film "The Evil Dead" which was so successful Raimi went on to direct two sequels. Included by film expert John Muir are more than thirty firsthand accounts and interviews with filmmakers that have worked with Raimi, from the cinematographers who shot the early films, to the producers, screenwriters, actors, special effects technicians, and music score composers who collaborated to make his films the stuff of box office legend and the focus of a devoted following of dedicated fans. The Unseen Force is a welcome and greatly appreciated contribution to the annals of filmmaking and filmmaker histories.

This book is a must have for fans of Sam Raimi. It provides in-depth coverage of all of his movies with information from interviews with members of the cast and crew on each of the films.

The author gives his own commentary on each movie and discusses Mr. Raimi's development as a director. I was already a fan of Sam Raimi because of the Evil Dead films and Spider-Man. After reading this book I am interested in checking out some of his other movies as well.
This is the fifth book I have bought by John Kenneth Muir(Horror Films of the 1970's,Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre,Films of John Carpenter and Wes Craven:the Art of Horror) and I would recommend each of them to horror movie fans and movie fans in general.

Having read Bill Warren's "Evil Dead Companion", Bruce Campbell's "If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor" and Josh Becker's "Evil Dead Journal" (available online at beckerfilms.com) the story of the production of Sam Raimi's classic 1981 film "The Evil Dead" is becoming somewhat tedious. That said, I still managed to learn some new "Evil Dead" info in Muir's book. The main draw of this book is that it gives all of Raimi's films equal coverage, rather than focusing on his two franchises. The aforementioned books by Warren and Campbell are probably better choices if you're simply an "Evil Dead" trilogy fan and Mark Cotta Vaz's books on the production of "Spider-Man" and "Spider-Man 2" (which has a pretty skimpy chapter in "The Unseen Force", but to be fair, the author couldn't have seen it in time for publication) focus mostly on the conceptual stage and offer little insight into Raimi as a director. It's nice to see "Crimewave", "Darkman", "The Quick and the Dead", "A Simple Plan" (Raimi's best film, as far as I'm concerned), "For Love of the Game" and "The Gift" getting some attention rather than used as context for the cinematic adventures of Ash and Peter Parker. The writing is scholarly but enjoyable, and Muir's interviews with Ian Abercrombie, Betsy Baker, Douglas Beswick, Brent Briscoe, Gary Cole, Kevin Conway, Willem Dafoe, Peter Deming, Chris Doyle, Phil Gillis, Daniel Goldin, Richard Grove, Lance Henricksen, Joe LoDuca, William Mesa, Simon Moore, Verne Nobles, Tim Philo, Robert Primes A.S.C., Thell Reed, Cliff Robertson, Amy Robinson, Chelcie Ross, Ellen Sandweiss, Randy Ser, Thomas Smith, Dana Stevens, Tom Sullivan, Theresa Tilly, Sherree J. Wilson and Christopher Young offer a more diversified portrait of Raimi as a filmmaker than previous books (although this is the first to focus primarily on Raimi himself). If there is one area where the book lacks, it is in the actual biographical details. The death of Raimi's older brother Sander, a tragic and defining moment in his childhood, is glossed over, and a few childhood stories in the tradition of Campbell's book would have been nice (nobody from the Raimi family was interviewed for the book, nor was Campbell) but as a look at Raimi's cinematic accomplishments, "The Unseen Force" doesn't disappoint.

I'm biased.

This was one of the best movies of the last century, largely because of the Coen brothers' brilliant use of visual imagery. So, if the visuals are the essence of the film's greatness, why would anybody want to spend time reading the screenplay?

Well, as you'll see from this wonderful book, the writing is also brilliant. The Coens refashioned a lot of the screenplay to fit their vision of the film, so what we see here is literally what is on the screen. I say this to spare those looking for "deleted scenes" any disappointment...despite what's written below.

But it's just wonderful stuff. Strong, spare, funny writing.

Say - what gives??

The wonderful words from The Hudsucker Proxy are all here, in a draft of the script that must have been close to final.

Here you can see how the Coen's scripted the unique talking patterns of its characters, complete with the slang or other verbal maulings the characters use in the movie.

There are also stage directions and other things you would only find in a script which helps you see how much they had visualized before the got the actors together.

Finally, there are a couple scenes that were not in the movie, including a very bizzare ending scene with the two taxi drivers from the cafe ("Bromo...").