Wednesday, 2 January 2019

My Review of The Evil Dead and how I first experianced it

So yesterday I posted a link to my YouTube video on the film White Zombie, so I am back today talking once again about Zombies but a diffrent kind of Zombie and a diffrent kind of film. Anyways back when I was a kid in the United Kingdom there were quiet a few films that were banned. These were called the Video nasties and were films which were criticised for their violent content by the press, social commentators and various religious organisations.

Following a moral campaign led by Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association films began to be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. A list of 72 films was released films that the police would cease from video rental shops and which it would essentially be illegal to sell or rent. The Evil Dead didnt stay on the list long but when it was released it had content cut out of it, infact you couldnt get the whole film complete free of cuts until the year 2000. The DPP72 is something I have talked about many times before in the past on both this blog and on my previous blog before the site which hosted it closed down, I guess this is because censorship is something that I have always been quiet passionate about but it wasnt until now that I decided that I wanted to make a YouTube Video on one of the DPP72 films. The reason I wanted to make a video about The Evil Dead is because I felt like I had something slightly novel to say about the film and about my experiance originally watching it, you know that with the internet and YouTube there are so many users that pretty much every single film, song and book in existance must have been talked about a million diffrent times, by a whole bunch of diffrent people and because of this sometimes you feel like why should I talk about it? What do I have to offer on the subject that no one else does, and this is why I often feel happier talking about what a game or film means to me, about how I came upon it and how it affected my life instead of just reviewing it because after all anyone can review an item but not everyone will have experianced it in the same way.



Ok so if you have watched my YouTube video then you will have noticed that the footage I am talking over in it is all over the place, for a start the picture is of an incredably low quality but beyond that it jumps from color to black and white, the picture suddenly brakes into moments of static , there are foreign sub titles on the screen at points, well there is a reason for this and that is because the first time I saw the Evil Dead it was on a VHS cassette which had all of these issues a poor quality picture , foreign subtitles the whole shebang so I figured that I would mess with this footage to try and recreate for you the sort of feeling I had while originally wathing this film. Sure it wont be exactly what I watched as a youngster but I have tried to recreate the experiance at least in a short form to try and give people an idea of what watching this film back in that point of time would have been like for me.

The film was brought to my house one night by a childhood friend of mine who had borrowed it from his Sister.. It was a pirate VHS tape with the name of the film written on it in pen and it felt sort of both special and naughty to be wathing it , hey I was only like 14 at the time and the shoddy quality gave the film a sort of even more scary vibe it felt like this little bit of ghoulish horror which had been dug up from somewere and passed from hand to hand, it was scratchy and rough around the edges and somehow this actually added to the whole experience. You would think all of the issues put me off but no actually they kind of drew me into the film and made watching it feel like an event.

At the time I appreciated the film on one level but on watching it again and again I have noticed more things about it for one I think the film is full of fantastic camera work, the evil in the film is given this amazing sense of presence via the movement of the camera. I could talk about this film all day but I would rather people watch my Video after all I put a lot of work into it, so consider this me saying pretty please.... Oh and by the way have a happy New Year.


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