If it were up to me, as it should be, this would be the number one film. Yeah, yeah, it has an almost incoherent plot, and Spider-Man: Homecoming does multiverse cameos vastly better, and it forgets that character development is even a thing…Yeah, I know. But now, imagine if your favorite film growing up was Evil Dead 2. See? Whole different framework.
Multiverse of Madness is, I contend, Evil Dead 4. Everything is there! Obviously, it’s directed by Sam Raimi, the mastermind behind the original Evil Dead trilogy, and of course Drag Me to Hell, A Simple Plan and 2002’s Spider-Man—that’s a great start. Then of course it features all of Raimi’s signatures, from the appearance of his Oldsmobile Delta 88 (the original car from the Evil Dead movies) to a cameo by Bruce Campbell (the star of all three Evil Dead movies), and indeed the camera rushing forward to suggest impending danger (the core camera move in the Evil Dead movies). But more than that—and there are people who pooh-pooh this because they’re wrong—it’s a horror movie!
Sam Raimi somehow snuck a horror movie into the MCU. I know I’m right, because when showing my 10-year-old all the MCU movies, this is the only one he asked to stop watching because it was scaring him too much. So, fact. It’s made like a horror movie, it’s framed like a horror movie, it’s directed like a horror movie. It’s actually a bit scary in places!
But perhaps more importantly than anything else, there’s the scene in which Bruce Campbell plays Pizza Poppa. After insisting that America Chavez pay for her pizza roll, Strange casts a spell on him that causes him to squirt mustard in his own face, then beat himself up with his own hands. Which, as you will know, is a callback to Evil Dead 2’s greatest scene, when Ash’s hand becomes possessed. And that makes this Evil Dead 4, and I don’t care that you think the film shat on Wanda, because none of that matters. Thank you. —John Walker
