the Shape says that Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II is less a sequel than it is a remake/expansion of the ideas in his original 1982 low-budget shocker Evil Dead, a movie that was billed as horror but had enough elements of humor to almost qualify it as some kind of deranged comedy. Evil Dead II works on the exact same premise as the original, but it puts the comedy front and center, turning the film into a raucous blood-and-guts riff on the Three Stooges (which Raimi has admitted was a major influence on his work). Slapstick comedy has always been based on some form of pain and violence, and Raimi simply takes it to the next logical level. So, rather than simply getting poked in the eyeballs or bopped on top of the head a la the Three Stooges, in Evil Dead II eyeballs get popped out of their sockets and fly across the room and land in people's mouths. The violence in Evil Dead II is extreme in both its gruesome detail and its sheer volume, but it is impossible to take seriously because it is so over-the-top and ridiculous. Heads are lopped off with shovels, hands are sawed off with chainsaws, bodies are dismembered, headless corpses run amok, gallons and blood and bile spew from holes in a wall--yet all of it is designed and filmed in lavishly cartoonish proportions that lend all the proceedings a slightly surreal quality. The whole film is an assault on the sense that it also very, very funny. If Evil Dead II is slightly better than its predecessor, it is because it is slightly more daring and outrageous. The first Evil Dead was an exceptionally well-made low-budget horror film based on one idea. It essentially ran out of steam near the end, which made it all the more obvious how simplistic it was. Evil Dead II is not much different, but Raimi's stronger focus on the comedic aspects of his material raises it to another level,and thats all the Shape has to say about that!!1 