ultra low budget but extremely inventive horror film about a group of friends vacationing in a cabin who accidentally awaken an evil force in the woods via the necronomicon , the book of the dead . 
bruce campbell stars as ash , who eventually becomes the sole survivor and has to battle both the demons from the woods , and his friends who have become demons ( including his own girlfriend ) . 
the results shown on screen are amazing considering the film's tiny budget , constant location changes , and a filming schedule that was sporadic over two years . 
followed by two sequels : evil dead ii ( 1987 ) and army of darkness ( 1993 ) . 
the dvd release of this film from elite entertainment contains the film in it's original aspect ratio of 1 . 33 : 1 . 
the disc contains two versions of the film's audio : a stereo 2 . 0 track and a newly remastered dolby digital 5 . 1 . 
included are two separate running commentary tracks : the first features writer/director sam raimi and producer rob tapert and the second track features the film's star , bruce campbell . 
campbell's commentary is informative and extremely witty , as he has a story to tell for virtually every scene in the film . 
such informative tidbits include : the original title of the film was going to be book of the dead ( and in fact when the film premiered in 1981 that was it's title ) and when they were asked to change the title to the evil dead , everyone thought it was the worst title they had ever heard . 
also , there's a scene early on in the film where the group sits around and listens to a tape recorder which they've found that's explaining about the demonic forces in the woods . 
for that scene , it was written for the characters to be smoking marijuana , so being the wacky kids that they were at the time , they decided to actually smoke marijuana for the scene . 
almost all of that footage became unusable because many of the actor's had never smoked before , and as a result they became " confused " and were unable to perform the scene . 
i wish the entertainment factor was as high for the sam raimi/rob tapert audio track . 
the two people you'd think would be more enthusiastic in talking about this film instead barely have much to say at all . 
don't get me wrong here , when they do speak it's entertaining to hear , but there are many instances where both are silent for long periods of time . 
sometimes after one of those long silences rob will ask " have anything to say sam ? " 
to me , that's not a good sign . 
also , it seems like sam raimi doesn't remember much about the film and it's production . . . 
well , compared to rob and bruce anyway . 
also included on the disc is a photo gallery ( which includes pictures from the film's " gala " premiere ) and about twenty minutes of raw footage from the film . 
this raw footage really shows you how much a film can be improved upon using simple audio techniques . 
overall , the evil dead is a good low budget horror film , superior to many films in it's genre . 
and the collector's edition dvd release is well worth your time if you're either a fan of the film or just a fan of the filmmaking process . 
all special edition dvds should be this thorough and entertaining . 
