December 05, 2000 - Sam Raimi, the creator of the Evil Dead series and modern day auteur demigod, moved his camera. For a while, that's sort of all he did, experimenting with his Coen brother buds in sicko effects and indulgent camera tricks. It's what he's good at... Nay, great at. Every episode of the Evil Dead series has two unforgettable moments -- the ShakiCam motion of evil tracking through the woods like a beast alive in the darkness, and the unsettling, heart-stopping moments where Ash disfigures himself to add a mechanical limb. They didn't call these puppies the "Ultimate Horror Experience" for some love story -- it's all about feeling the horror deep in your skull and tight in the pit of your stomach. Spinning, lurching, cranking, leaping motion that gets you right in Ash's twisted, blood-soaked face and makes you sick -- that's the camera, pal.

So if you're going to make yourself an Evil Dead videogame, I'd suggest going with an engine that moves the camera. It doesn't have to be much -- like, maybe zoom in close enough to something so I can see what the hell it is, or cut to a close-up on the character's face tight enough for me to give a damn about what's happening. Otherwise, you'll end up somewhere lost in the darkness with this thing, a boggy horror Resident Evil rip-off bumbling along on a punch-drunk fighting system through a few tepid shocks and hoaky one-liners courtesy of Bruce Cambell's spare weekends. True enough, I love that man -- Duke Nukem wishes it had this man's brilliance as the voice behind all those catch-phrases they stole from him -- but even he couldn't put in much more than a phoned-in effort on this dead and bloated game.

Gameplay
A Shemp-fight fan boy effort by Iron Head Studios to hit every convention and catch-phrase of Evil Dead on the way down the road to Resident Evilsville, Evil Dead: Hail to the King carries on the legacy of putting Ash through incredible pain and ridicule as Deadites gnaw at his bones and rattle his noggin to conquer his soul and repossess the Necronomicon (the Book of the Dead). Picking up the pieces of the split endings of Army Of Darkness (effectively ending the debate over which of Raimi's finales is the real director's cut), it's off and running back to the cabin where it all started, then through a pan-dimensional wormhole back in time to the era when it really all started.

It's an awful lot of story, and that's part of the trouble with this game -- it tries to make a plot out of what was originally just a goof to play around with a camera at Uncle Phil's cabin. There are so many loose story threads in the game that it trips itself up trying to get there. Some of them are incredibly stupid -- so many times, you catch yourself thinking, "Maybe I shouldn't give the magical amulet to the creepy-looking grandma with a glowing haze surrounding her... ohh, whoops -- She's a ferocious hell-beast, and I've just given her omnipotent power." But then again, this is Ash, a stockboy in housewares -- not the brightest guy to have the world on his shoulders. Still, These movies weren't about plot, and as nice as it is to get to the root of all the evil, it's still got to have Ash cackle like a stooge while hacking through vile hell beasts. That's the Evil Dead experience.

The man has a chainsaw strapped to his severed hand -- anybody who is that lethal should kick some serious ass. But Ash hasn't got a prayer against the army of darkness of this game, since the fighting engine is practically crippled. With crud animation and zippo strategy, fighting essentially boils down to Ash raising his hand and hoping Deadites run into his fist. He's ambidextrous weapon fighter, but this guy couldn't swing a hatchet to save his life. So you figure, screw the axe and forget the chainsaw. Nothing can reckon with the trusty BOOM-stick. Yep, that would be the case, except that guns do hardly a dent of damage, even when powered up -- the Boom-stick doesn't boom!

You can praise Resident Evil all you want, but RE's quirky control copied into this game is where Evil Dead went wrong from the beginning. From the turn-in-place first-person control to the jumpy pre-rendered camera angles to the inaccurate targeting, Evil Dead has an uphill climb. Of course, Mikami had the foresight to go with gunplay instead of hand-to-hand combat, whereas Heavy Iron trusted the chainsaw to connect -- and it swings and misses. The control is generations behind Resident Evil is now, with a missing 180 degree quick turn and bad collision detection that traps Ash in corners fighting when he should duck out and fuel up. Without quick control, the gameplay drools down to be a button-masher for the entire first disc, with constantly re-spawning enemies getting up in your face without anything to say but "Boo" and "Arrr." . Also, the bosses throughout are endurance tests with little logic, and even when the gameplay reaches for something new, like a battle against an undead camp counselor in a cavern where you clang the support poles to cause a cave-in, there's not much fun in the wonky collision detection and button-mashing. The game gets better with the second disc's story twist, where Deadite soldiers at least try to surprise you by leaping out of the ground and faking their death, but against Resident Evil, it's seen all and done all -- where's the car keys for the Olds, because I want to go home.

Graphics
You can trust the Resident Evil structure to ruin just about everything it touches except Resident Evil. Here in Hail to the King, the pre-rendered backgrounds and camera angles are no fun at all to fight in, and they sure aren't pretty while in it either. Evil Dead shouldn't be pretty -- it should be gross and putrid and dripping puss and blood splatters and carnality. It should be good. But it's also got to move, and that's not happening here. Trusting the backgrounds alone to convey horror when what we really need is Zombie-Cam or Demon-Cam or Severed-Hand-Cam, the game flatlines when it's supposed to be scary and funny. So in scenes where horribly decrepit Oakie redneck corpses leap out of the ground, the camera can't draw you in by zooming up to their mangled face or spinning around to catch Ash's pop-eyed expression. Instead, we get a distant far shot run off the game engine, then back to Ash's screen and into battle. No big thrill, no cold chill.

I'll be ecstatic when this pre-rendered camera crap is dead, because it sputters out whenever Evil Dead has a chance to start being enjoyable. By the second disc, the graphics are much cleaner, and the beasts are rendered with more character -- the monster designs sort of stayed true to the original movie with the huge mangled hags, but then went nowhere in the animation department to show us what beastly freaks these things are. When the last half of the game goes creative, there's a fair bit more color and life in the mostly drab world here, but it's still stuck within the Resident Evil control for the fights to be more fun. Battling the skeletal warriors would have had its moments if the game didn't constantly trap Ash somewhere in the brief loadtimes between cameras, or if at least the game showed enough up ahead for Ash not to run headlong into an instant death on the angle switch.

Despite the hype, there were some really chintzy corners cut for this game. In FMV or in gameplay, everything is grainy and tough to see, with chunky detailing and 3-step animation across the backgrounds. Once or twice, there's a scene with a surprise, like a blood-spewing faucet, but the detail-work mostly went into backgrounds drawn for a much bigger canvas, and you just can't see a damn thing in here. It's pretty sad when Ash wading knee-deep in entrails and guts that doesn't look anything like guts or entrails. That's important stuff to me! The FMV is rendered from what looks like the Dreamcast engine of the game -- same character models drawn slightly higher resolution with no lip synching, no camera motion, and not even a close-up of Ash's face. This series became a cult favorite because of the things Bruce Cambell can do with his mug, and without that, no amount of witty one-liners can sell boring visuals.

Sound
At least there's one bright, shining spot in this bloated project -- whatever dime THQ spent on music went to a good cause. Tommy Tallarico Studios put together a 42-piece orchestra and a 40-person choir for some of the gothic tones and tunes of this game, and from the opening operatic number on, the quality is high. What's better is that the big musical numbers are spread out sparingly, and in the place of generic mood music is an ambient boom and monstrous growling soundtrack. Treading around in the woods, Ash hears voices constantly ringing in his head... "Join us."

In the talking heads dialog scenes, Ash isn't as up on his game as he was for Army of Darkness, but partly it's because he's got nothing to work with. The straight man voice-overs of all the minor characters are pretty weak, as if they aren't paying attention to the conversation and just need to rush through their lines. Even Bruce puts in a bummer second role as his mirrored self, his screwy darker half he's been battling from the beginning -- there's just not a lot of pep in this villain. Still, Ash has some handy lines all ready on the tongue, including a few hysterical comebacks all new for this game. They even rewrote a few of his most groovy lines -- going up against a gigantic tree monster, Ash backs up and revs the chainsaw. "Yo, Treebitch. Let's go." Suck on that, Duke Nukem.

Closing Comments You wanted this one to be good. I know, buddy, I was there too. But as much as I give respect to Bruce Cambell, it's tough to follow his every move when so often he steps in crap. He can't save every flaming shipwreck -- I know, I saw the Twister rip-off Tornado. And as far as I wanted to believe that Evil Dead had the fandom to support a big game production like this -- a game that was supposedly made by die-hard fans of the series -- that ringing alarm in my head kept banging away every time I approached this game to play it... "Don't trust a Resident Evil clone. Never, never, never..." Sure enough, she's an nasty one. Raimi may have wanted to add to the legacy of the Evil Dead series with a new chapter of Evil Dead, but he may as well have done a videogame version of "For Love Of The Game" -- at least baseball games have enough sense to swing only one bat. Instead, all we've learned from this new Evil Dead is that, eight years after our last meeting, Ash is blind like Urkel, as nimble as a truck on ice, and couldn't fight a playground toddler if his life depended on it. Great, can't wait to see what the next chapter adds... -- Marc Nix   Presentation Continuing the story of Evil Dead, only this time, they're trying to actually have it make sense. Perhaps biting a bit too much flesh off to chew? 7.0 Graphics Gruff and grainy, with tactless animation and detail work blown on pre-rendered cameras and limited FMV. 4.0 Sound Brilliant orchestral soundtrack and ambient noise, and Bruce Cambell at his best. Well, near best. 8.5 Gameplay If therewas never a Resident Evil, we would never be plagued by choppy, hacked Resident Evil clones. A blessing, or a curse? 4.5 Lasting Appeal Ash just isn't having much fun plowing through these creepy crawlies, and neither am I. 3.0 OVERALL SCORE (not an average) 4.5 Click Here for Ratings Guide