Evil Dead series

(On Cable TV, October 2020) As some of you may guess from the title alone, Hail to the Deadites is a documentary celebration of Evil Dead fans, either in appreciating the film trilogy (the series wasn’t yet broadcast during the making of the film), weaving it into their lives or creating derivative works. It’s… either endearing or embarrassing. Part of the problem is that the documentary refuses to engage critically with the franchise—there’s not much discussion of what it means (perhaps because it’s fun enough that it doesn’t need to mean anything) and perilously little discussion of where the series may have done better (the tree sexual assault scene is mentioned, and then forgotten). Writer-director Steve Villeneuve focuses on fans instead and the result can be uneven: excessive fandom is more concerning than impressive (in my own cosmology, being an outspoken fan of a genre or medium is fine, but being an outspoken fan of a specific work is more troublesome) and the examples unearthed by the series often cross the endearing/embarrassing boundary. But what’s more frustrating is that, aside from having Bruce Campbell turn up for a typically charismatic interview, there isn’t a whole lot here that distinguishes Evil Dead fandom from just about any other horror franchise fandom: Any similar film about, say, the Nightmare on Elm Street series would have felt much like the same, with superfans obsessed by the series in mostly the same ways. I don’t really want to rain on those fans’ parade, though: they’re having fun, so let’s just embrace that fun. Hail to the Deadites, in that lens, feels like the kind of “extra DVD” documentary that you’d include in a series box set: Entertaining, but not essential.