Daily Archives: 2/27/2006

The Evil Dead (1981)

Well, Carmen and I haven’t gotten out to see many first run movies lately, but tonight Pixar’s Monday Film series stumbed on an old favorite: Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981). Back when this film was made, Raimi was a mere 21 years old. In some ways, this shows: the movie has a fairly slim plot involving five young people heading off to the woods to relax on a brief vacation, only to find that the house they are staying at was once the retreat of a professor delving into the occult. When they play back some recordings of his they find in the basement, demons are summoned, and mayhem commences.

The movie stars a very young Bruce Campbell in one of his first roles, and begins a long association with Sam Raimi. As I said, it’s a pretty thin plot, but what sets it apart is Raimi’s visual style. It features buckets of blood and gore, demon possession, dismemberment, shredding flesh, a girl is molested by trees and vines, and general strange crap like you’ve never seen. I remember seeing this as a teenager, and have seen it at least once since on DVD, but it was great to see it in a real theater on 35mm film stock once again. The print was great, and despite showing a bunch of badly composited full moons over footage of a dilapidated mountain cabin, it holds up pretty well. It shows remarkable creativity in its use of lighting, cameras, fog, and camera position to give a strange, creepy feel to what could have been a merely pedestrian movie experience.

Raimi has made better films (such as one of my personal favorites) but it’s great to see this early work from a popular director. If IMDB is correct, Raimi has begun production on a revisit to this story, and it will be interesting to see what a budget and twenty five years of directorial experience will bring to the show.

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M4 Message Breaking Project

You might have noticed if you are a long time reader of this blog that I’m fascinated by codes and ciphers, particularly the kind that were developed before computers really came on the scene.   That’s why I’m finding the M4 Message Breaking Project interesting: they are attempting to break three two as yet unbroken code intercepts that presumably use the Nazi 4-Rotor Naval Enigma machine.

Years ago when Simon Singh’s The Code Book came out, he ran a cipher challenge that invited readers to compete for a $10,000 prize by being the first to break 10 codes.   I broke 7 out of the 10 (all the ones I thought I had a shot) including a 3 rotor Enigma encrypt.   Breaking the 4 rotor variant with a much shorter message is a significant challenge, and they’ve managed to break one of the three already.

I’ve got their distributed client running on my machine.   We shall see how it goes. 🙂

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