![]() ![]() Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1992) were increasingly comedic premises where the gruesome turned into the goofy. And yet, no movie in the series has really challenged the first Evil Dead’s grotesquerie in the ensuing decades. The Evil Dead’s UK videotapes were removed from circulation until a further 66 seconds of the movie were exorcized, and a heavily censored version could be re-released under a new unofficial classification (as per the NVALA): It was a “video nasty.”Įver since then, Evil Dead has been synonymous as a franchise with splatterfest imagery and violence so gratuitous that its depravity is the stuff of legend. Practically off the back of Evil Dead alone, the Video Recordings Act was passed in ‘84. That fight would be small potatoes though when compared to what happened after the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Organization, a pro-censorship group, got their hands on the VHS. To receive an “X” rating in the UK, Raimi and company eventually agreed to shave off 49 seconds of grossness. ![]() There the film’s lurid imagery of possessed flesh being obliterated by axes, chainsaws, and even a tree branch in one especially grotesque sequence, was perceived as the very definition of obscene. What the movie instead discovered was the humorlessness of the British Board of Film Classification. In 1982, Sam Raimi’s innocently titled The Evil Dead attempted to cross the Atlantic and find greener pastures in UK cinemas. This article contains Evil Dead Rise spoilers. ![]()
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