Sam Raimi’s relationship with Hollywood has always been iffy. Two of
the director’s first, independent films—The Evil
Dead (1981) and Evil Dead II (1987) are still
some of his best. They don’t skimp on references to classic Hollywood
productions, but they also feel like the low-budget schlock-fests that
they are.
However rough, those fantastic Evil Dead films demonstrated
Raimi’s relentless creativity, and soon e nough, he found himself
directing a Hollywood-financed picture: 1990’s misguided
Darkman paired a crazy cast (Liam Neeson, Frances
McDormand) with a stupid story, resulting in an unmemorable fizzle.
Going back to what he knew, Raimi made Army of Darkness (1992), which is still his best film—a near-perfect
action-adventure-comedy, with a healthy dose of goofy horror.
But then Raimi quit horror altogether, instead mainstreaming it as a
working Hollywood director, making some good movies (1998’s chilly
thriller A Simple Plan, 2000’s The Gift)
and some crappy ones (1995’s messy western The Quick and the
Dead, 1999’s For the Love of the Game, which was
originally titled Jesus Christ Another Fucking Kevin Costner
Baseball Movie You’ve Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me).
But then—and nobody’s quite sure how this happened, but it
did—Raimi snagged the job to direct Spider-Man (2002), a ludicrously successful comic book movie that he only improved
upon with the excellent Spider-Man 2 (2004). But by the
time 2007’s weary, bloated Spider-Man 3 rolled around,
Raimi found himself once again flummoxed by Hollywood: “They really
gave me a tremendous amount of control on the first two films,” he
confessed to Empire. “But then there were different opinions on
the third film and I didn’t really have creative control.”
So once again, Raimi’s retreated to what he knows: Drag Me to
Hell (see review, this page) is the first honest-to-god horror
flick he’s directed in over 20 years. Compared to the massive
spider-films, Hell is a tiny, low-budget genre flick, and one
Raimi seems genuinely excited about. (“I love it when at a horror movie
you can sense the audience bonding together,” he geeked out to the
New York Times earlier this week.) Here’s hoping Raimi’s return
to the genre he knows best doesn’t disappoint—and that he’ll be
able to retain his creative control for his next movie, 2011’s
Spider-Man 4.
