In a recent gamer magazine, I came across an ad for the new Evil Dead game:
A Fist Full of Boomstick.
The graphics don’t look all that impressive, but the screenshots and the trailer are pretty cool. It looks to be a hell of a lot better than that crappy Hail to the King game that came out a few years back. I liked the basic premise of it, but the gameplay just sucked.
In this game, apparently the evil has taken over and the world (or at least this little town) is overrun with possessed deadites, and of course Ash has to run around with his trusty chainsaw and shotgun and fight to survive. Looks good, and makes me wish I had a better game system than my PS1.
Why can’t Bruce just admit he just doesn’t want to do another Evil Dead movie instead of making up crappy lies, because obviously, people want more.
I saw him give a lecture at a convention. He explained that he’d be all for it, but Sam isn’t necessarily. He also said that the studios weren’t planning on shelling out the money for a fourth instalment.
I suppose you could take that with a grain of salt though.
In the entertainment industry, as in every other business, the dollor is king. If a product is profitable, the studio will make more; if not, not. According to IMDB, the last Evil Dead movie, Army of Darkness, cost $11 million to make and only took in $11.5 million at the box office. While DVD and VHS sales figures show demand for the Evil Dead franchise (1.8 million units of all three titles sold 1998-2000 Source: VideoScan), that’s not sufficient incentive to persuade a studio to pony up the money to produce another Evil Dead film, which would be sure to cost more due to director Sam Raimi’s recent success and general inflation of production costs.
His Web site had a FAQ that echoes the content of Meatros’s post, but it’s no longer there.
There was a very steep progression from horror to comedy in these movies. ED4 would pretty much have to be at the same level as Army, and I bet Sam Raimi feels it would be too derivative.
I’ve heard all those excuses before, but I’m pretty damned sure the real deal is he’s sick of being pigeonholed as Ash. That, and creatively, Sam’s been wanting to branch out and try to expand himself as a director (look at his past two/three movies…much more detatched from the Three Stooges inspired schlock from his early years). All that stuff about not finding a studio to support it and all that jazz just sounds like excuses. Sam’s unwillingness, I get, but why not admit his own? That’s all I’m saying.
Still, this game looks like a lot of fun. Did anyone play Hail to the King? I only played it a few times, and everytime I only got about twenty minutes into it before it became so monotonous, I had to turn it off. Fight deadite, get life, use life, fight deadite, repeat. After you get past this part, was there anything redeamable about it?
It took Raimi quite a few years to get out of the horror-movie ghetto, so I doubt he’s eager to jump back in. He admitted once in a interview that while he was persuing funding for “Darkman”, he agreed to do “Army Of Darkness” afterwards purely to secure his financial situation.
He did say awhile back that he was going to do another low-budget independent movie with Bruce Campbell in the lead, but that was before “Spiderman” took off into the stratosphere.
Re: Hail to the King (the game), Campbell said to consider it ED4, in that it picks up the storyline nicely. I watched a friend play (part of) it, and though the gameplay looked like crap, there was some funny stuff in the cut scenes.
Well, that’s basically what Stuart Gorden (Creator of Lovecraft derived B-movies like Re-animator and the horror-porno * From Beyond *) has been doing lately.
** Dagon** and ** Beyond Re-animator ** were both straight to video, and ** Dagon** was recently shown on Sci-fi.
However, ** Dagon** started to look like an evil dead movie towards the end ( When Paul picked up the gasoline, I expected him to say “Groovy!”) and I’ve heard ** Beyond Re-animator ** was pretty bad.
Frankely, I think ** Revtim ** is right. ** ED** was horror on a low budget, ** ED 2** was dark comedy on a bigger budget and ** AOD ** was comedic action-adventure. I’m not sure what ** ED 4 ** could do differently (and we’d still have to decide which ending of ** AOD ** to use)
I played it too and I agree. The gameplay is crap, but the cut scenes are funny. The graphics aren’t anything to write home about, and I’d only suggest it if you are a hardcore fan…and even then…
Wait a sec… I think kaylasdad99 is on the right track here with the Sci-Fi mini series… I mean Hell, they picked up Tremors while having a Dune series running at the same time.
How many giant-underground-worm shows do we need?
Sci-Fi will play anything… Remember Black Scorpion?
Now, where can we start an online petition?
Okay, a mini-series (or ongoing) on Sci-Fi. How would you pull it off? I know I’ve thought of it before, but I have to admit, I’m not exactly sure what I’d do. I kinda like the new game’s premise that the Evil just infects the town, so Ash is simply trying to escape but has to cut through a hoard of the suckers. Of course, this in itself makes more mini-series if it’s limited to the one town, so I don’t know how much that would do.
But, seeing as both games seem to deal a lot with time travel as well, I figured that could play a little part in it as well. My premise, though, was for Ash to be pulled into the post-Apocolyptic future from the original ending. At some point in time, the Evil gets out and helps to decimate the world, or at least starts to ravage an already decimated world. Humanity kinda retreats to a more medieval type of existance, with lilttle technology and the rise of magic and the like. The Necronomicon is found by that time’s Wise Men, who put together a little spell and pull the “Chosen One” into the future to help defeat the Evil again. The Evil somehow gets wind of this, so somewhere mixed in the spell, Ash’s face is changed to help disguise his presence. This helps with the whole “new actor playing the character” thing. It happens all the time with movie to television adaptations, but with Bruce having such a big tie to the character, I doubt they could simply just pull a random person in and just claim “HEy, it’s Ash.” At the same time, whereas I think he’d be up for playing the role for the initial ten minutes or so of the film, I seriously doubt Bruce would ever want to play the part of Ash again (outside of a few voice snippets, of course).
And, just for shits and giggles, we can go ahead and have Ash’s girlfriend get sucked into the vortex with him as well, only to be captured by the Evil. So, not only is this a quest to fight the monsters, but it’s more of a reluctant battle in hopes of saving his girlfriend (which, honestly, are the only types of battles Ash seems to fight).
A bit contrived, yes, but what do you think? Any other ideas?
As much as I’ve enjoyed Evil Dead and Army of Darkness I’ve got to say that enough is enough. How many Deadite movies can be made before they become stale and uninteresting? We’re all better off if they end the series on a high note intsead of running it into the ground. As much as I love Ash I’d rather see Bruce doing something else.
