Evil Dead Trilogy [DVD]

Product Information

edition that Anchor Bay has access to and very little, if much was done about colour timing and the like. As detailed above, this DVD does have a number of little editing changes supervised by Sam during the remastering process, but they are professionally done and most people would be hard pressed to spot them. Contributors include horror film magazine editors Alan Jones and Allan Bryce, of Shivers and The Dark Side publications, respectively. The franchise of three Evil Dead films and a TV series all began here and it was the most horrific of them all. But The Evil Dead doesn’t play for shock; it is a gruesome film but it’s different in the sense that it wants to torture the main character to the point of insanity.

The Ladies of The Evil Dead Meet Bruce Campbell (29min) - this time Campbell is added to the group of girls.

On balance, the Ultimate Edition comes out top, although each release has some of its own exclusive extras, so they're both worth owning. The US R1 Anchor Bay The Evil Dead Book Of The Dead DVD designed by Tom Sullivan wasn't released until seven months later on March 5, 2002. Life After Death: The Ladies of the Evil Dead (15min) - this featurette tells of how the three ladies in this film decided to get together and learn about horror conventions and how to (make money and) be guest stars signing autographs just as Bruce Campbell has over the past million years. Indeed there are certainly several moments of gross-out horror, the like of which you would rarely expect to see in today's films. It’s interesting to see the personalities of the actresses, especially Ellen Sandweiss who comes across as a bit bitter towards life in general.

Back in 1988 he was presenting this often-entertaining Channel 4 show with a bouncy little trimmed bouffant. For the vast majority of the film, the widescreen version was simply the full 1:37:1 open matte transfer with the top and bottom cropped off, creating a 1.

But I found I was able to let go of all my past DVDs (and laserdisc) thanks to two releases, which add up to a pretty definitive package, including best looking transfers of both versions, wide- and full-screen, and all of the many, many extras. Although much of the content is different, the widescreen transfer is identical to the Book Of The Dead DVD above, but the open matte transfer is new and also looks the same. It is also worth noting that this edition does not contain the short film Within The Woods as had previously been announced. There is some good spread among the front channels but it’s much too pinpoint rather than blended across the screen.

Also, the Ultimate Edition has all the DVD extras from the Limited Edition, so really, it's a lot cheaper and easier to locate that DVD edition than to locate the Limited Edition blu-ray. You could make a case for the widescreen one, too, since Raimi made it and prefers it, saying that's how it should've always been shown (and would have been matted for theaters).

I don’t own the original 1999 Anchor Bay full-frame DVD so I can’t compare it to that; but if disc 2 is any representation of that (and given Anchor Bay’s track record for re-releasing films consistently without updating image quality, it probably is), I’d have to say that the full-frame version looks quite similar to the 1.

I also find the beginning excruciatingly slow – it takes almost 40 minutes for anything to really happen.

won’t have a problem, but us English Canadians must deal with the bilingual packaging which clutters up the artwork and the back side. The reason I suggest the this DVD over the others, is that its the only version to include an open matte version of the film, in addition to the standard 1. But Lions Gate was good enough to come up with new label for it to match the rest of their artwork, which these packs often don't bother with. They take the opportunity to innovate more, get crazier, even sillier, and take things to more outlandish, epic proportions.