Ash vs. Evil Dead - El Jefe

Sam Raimi returned to direct the first episode of "Ash vs. Evil Dead",
and that "Drag Me to Hell" comic spirit is alive and well. Get a load
of this: so Ash (Bruce Campbell) startlingly realizes he made a big
mistake by getting gassed on grass and allowing a chick over at his
trailer to help recite incantations from the Book of the Dead! So now
the Evil Dead has returned and Ash will have to shake off the dust,
tighten up the girdle, pop in the better pair of dentures, rattle open
the curtain to grab his chainsaw, and freshen up the quips. Incredible
cinematography and superior effects, with all the eye candy horror
aesthetics Raimi now commands after pocketing plenty of green from the
Spiderman movies; "Ash vs. Evil Dead" will get plenty of love as long
as there is value in the product. I still think Raimi and Campbell left
money on the table with the franchise in the early 2000s, but the
series, judging from its pilot, has plenty of visual pizazz and the fun
poked at Ash (his age, pick-up lines, less-than-desirable stocking job
at a Dollar General store) at his (and Campbell to a certain extent)
expense. Raimi loves the close-up and certainly cannot resist using the
rat-a-tat-tat editing style that moves action at a locomotive pace.
What was imperative, though, "Ash vs. Evil Dead" needed to deliver on
the imaginative gore.

Easily the showstopper occurs when a cop (Jill Marie Jones), along with
her male partner, answer a distress call to a house and find a young
woman, who read from the Book of the Dead, now possessed (her mom was
dead from fright!). Head twisting around and the arms with their bones
crackling, this possessed human comes at Jones with a pair of scissors
and takes direct head shots until nothing remains but squirting blood
from the neck wound. Jones' partner is tossed through the antlers of
buck head on the wall, with him eventually crawling around walls until
the demon possession informs her that she is now wanted by them. Soon
his head is gone, too. This scene has a dazzling use of flashlight, as
it spins around, questioning just when Jones would need to defend
herself against the demon who mocks her by having the man she once knew
begging for his life.

There's Raimi not deterred by confined space, more than willing to
shoot a demon attack inside Ash's trailer where he astoundingly
includes both of his co-workers, Pablo and Kelly (Ray Santiago and Dana
DeLorenzo), and the sweet, elderly neighbor (Sian Davis) who now
plunges at them with demonic ferocity and glee. Off comes the head! Not
before a finger nail almost impales Kelly's eye, though! Lucy Lawless
has only one small scene where she encourages Jones, who feels like
what she witnessed and experienced was perhaps a delusion, to accept it
as real. Jones' role is not quite pronounced in the pilot but her
eventual connection to Ash will be determined afterward.

Kelly has a father who gets a visit from a dead wife (her mother)
returning, seeing it on her phone, wanting to go home to find him. Ash,
though, says that their mission is to take out the Deadites. He
embraces the latent badass that returns when Evil Dead are present.