To whoever owned Prime Time Video, I am sorry that I bootlegged this VHS from your store in 1989 or so, because I was renting it so much that I wanted to watch it every single day. It was years until I saw Evil Dead and this movie formed so much of what I wanted out of movies. A camera that flew through walls, actors willing to destroy themselves to entertain you and geysers of bottomless buckets of gore.

Dino De Laurentiis put up the money and asked that the film be similar to its predecessor. Director Sam Raimi and writer Scott Spiegel must have thought, “We’ll show him,” and totally remade the first movie but whereas that one had no budget and felt like some maniacs in the woods near Detroit, this had a budget and felt like, yeah, some maniacs in the woods near Detroit.

This one replays the first one in like five minutes: Ash Williams (the returning Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda head to a cabin for the weekend, but instead of romance, they find the tapes of archaeologist Raymond Knowby and the words from Necronomicon Ex-Mortis that bring demons to their little lovers’ log cabin. Linda gets possessed, Ash decapitates her with a shovel and then proceeds to go bonkers for most of the movie.

Most of the movie is Campbell battling himself, his own hand — and later body — turning against him. It’s the kind of movie where a man can chainsaw off his on hand and then make a chainsaw appendage, say “Groovy” and it’s somehow — even years and years later — cool.

Spiegel and Raimi wrote most of the film in a house in Silver Lake that they shared with the Coen brothers, Frances McDormand, Kathy Bates and Holly Hunter, who the character of Bobby Jo is inspired by.

I’m looking forward to seeing this at the drive-in this weekend if only to feel the sheer joy I once had watching this. I’ve never seen it surrounded by others and can’t wait to see how others react to it. I know that it’s gone from a small movie to an accepted classic in the years since I watched it every day, but it’s still that movie I copied all those many, many years ago.