In Defense of Sam Raimi’s Sophomore Feature, ‘Crimewave’
Picture this: you’re a 22-year-old from Royal Oak, Michigan. You’re a DIY filmmaker who’s been making Super 8 movies with your friends for years. Finally, you and your buddies got serious and raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars to make a gross-out little horror movie in the woods. Against all odds, said gross-out horror movie gets picked up for distribution. Stephen King, yes, THAT Stephen King, calls it “the most ferociously original horror movie” he’s seen all year. Your directorial debut, which you made with your pal Bruce Campbell and a non-union crew, becomes a sensation. Notorious and controversial, but a sensation nonetheless. Congrats, you’ve made movie history before you’re legally old enough to drink.
What now? How do you top that? You don’t want to be boxed in as a miscreant troublemaker of freak cinema; you want to prove your stuff. Horror wasn’t really your thing anyway. Your real passion is slapstick.
Well, guess what? One of your assistant editors from that last movie, he’s just co-written and co-directed his own debut feature, a black-comedy neo noir titled Blood Simple. It’s getting rave reviews. His name is Joel Coen, and he’s developing a script with his brother Ethan that could be perfect for you. It’s a farcical slapstick caper that’s also an homage to old gangster pictures and the Three Stooges.
Perfect. You’ve found your next project, and you’re working with some of the most promising indie filmmakers of their generation. This picture will have everything: humor, action, romance, mega set pieces that’ll take you to the next level and prove to the world that you’re capable of more than making video nasties out in the woods with your friends.
It’s going to be a slam dunk and elevate the three of you to the next level. How could it not?
If you couldn’t guess, the resulting film, Sam Raimi’s notorious sophomore effort, Crimewave, did not continue the Boy Wonder’s hot streak after The Evil Dead. Nor did it do any favors for The Coen Brothers. Instead, Crimewave was a disaster, a flop whose doomed production is notorious these 40 years after it released escaped. The movie’s failure was so bruising to Sam Raimi that he made Evil Dead II to save his career. The Coen Brothers made their own sophomore effort, the cult classic Raising Arizona, and haven’t looked back since.
In the arc of Sam Raimi’s career, Crimewave is a failed experiment that saw a gang of young, hungry filmmakers who weren’t ready for the next stage in their careers. Coming off of the independently financed The Evil Dead, Raimi hadn’t worked in a studio system or found himself accountable to executives. Even with the clout he accrued from his breakthrough hit, Raimi was humbled immediately. The studio in question, Embassy Films Associates, refused to let Raimi cast Bruce Campbell in the lead role of Victor Ajax, the dorky technician who stumbles onto a murder plot.
Before The Evil Dead 2 crystallized Campbell’s on-screen persona as the hunky goofball, Campbell had struggled to find work since playing Ash Williams and didn’t have the studio’s faith. Raimi managed to keep Campbell on for the production by casting him as Renaldo the Heel. Thank God he did, because Campbell is the only principal member of the creative team who’s been forthcoming about Crimewave’s production, while Raimi and the Coens have rushed to forget about it.
Even with the restraints and micro-management Raimi suffered, the dysfunction of Crimewave’s production is the stuff of legend. Filming in Detroit with a crew that was half-union, half-Sam Raimi’s pals, Crimewave almost immediately ran over budget and over schedule. Part of that was due to Raimi’s history as a DIY filmmaker who didn’t know how to budget for a union production. Another part was bad luck of supernatural proportions. Brion James (Blade Runner), one of the two principal antagonists, trashed his hotel rooms after claiming to see the “ghost” of his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. The production had to pay thousands in damages.
Not to mention that the production failed to secure proper filming permits for some of their locations, and they were actually tearing up the Detroit highway during the climactic chase scene. Apparently, the damage left by the high-octane pursuit is still visible on parts of the road to this day.
Second AD John Cameron put it best when he said, “If you survived [Crimewave], nothing in the business could ever be as hard again.”
The production was so troubled and hectic that it lent the film a surreal quality when the film was already surreal enough. Paul L. Smith (Dune), who plays the other baddie, had his voice dubbed over with what I can only describe as a faux-Bluto/faux-Fat Albert impression. Louise Lasser (Bananas), the biggest name in the cast, insisted on doing her own makeup. Rumored to have been abusing substances during production, Lasser ended up looking more cartoonish than the bumbling, psychotic villains chasing her.
After Raimi went over budget, Embassy kept him on a tight leash. They demanded that he cut down the shooting schedule, excising whole scenes, and also demanded that Raimi add the bookending segments where Ajax is on death row. After principal photography wrapped, Embassy fired Raimi’s editor and cut their version of the film in an attempt to de-Raimi-fy the final product. Then, Crimewave played in a select few theaters before being unceremoniously dumped onto cable television. The film, which cost well over the original $2.5 million budget, grossed just over $5,000.
Crimewave was instantly and thoroughly disavowed by the creative team involved, some of whom have managed to poke fun at the whole ordeal, like Campbell, and some of whom were deeply affected and traumatized. To the extent that Raimi goes on record about the film, he called the whole production a “horrible, horrible, horrible, depressing scene.” If the Coen Brothers have even publicly acknowledged the film, I couldn’t find it.
The infamy of Crimewave’s production has dwarfed any discussion around the film itself, which is usually only given a cursory glance by fans of either Raimi or the Coen Brothers. It’s never found a resurgence or even been picked up in the so-bad-it’s-good circuit. Unlike other potential career-killers that bombed on release, whether it be John Carpenter’s The Thing or Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, Crimewave hasn’t amassed an army of defenders or found its audience yet. It gets noticed by outlets like Celluoid Dream, but lumbers in the middle of too-weird-to-kill-but-too-baffling-to-champion. It’s certainly a black sheep in the careers of everyone involved, and there’s bound to be little overlap between The Evil Dead’s audience and this.
As someone who’s been on hectic sets and troubled productions, my read on Crimewave is informed by the context of not only the film’s merit, but the empathy I have for Sam Raimi. The craziest projects that I’ve been part of have only been a fraction of the stress and the stakes that Raimi and company went through. I can only imagine the phone calls that he was taking, how nervous he must have been sending off the dailies to the producers. The headaches, the doubt.
Raimi has always been an inspiration to me and aspiring filmmakers alike. He was just some kid from Michigan who became an A-tier director through sheer talent. While The Evil Dead is the North Star for every movie geek with a consumer-grade video camera and a dream, Crimewave is that critical setback we face where all naive ambition meets hard truths. No matter how much raw talent you have, there’s an endless amount of hard truths waiting for you in the film industry. So the fact that Raimi picked up the pieces, returned to his roots, and made the comeback of his career with The Evil Dead II is its own inspiration.
With all that said, I’m inclined to defend Crimewave and even celebrate it. It’s a baffling film that’s falling apart at the seams, but it bears all the style, humor, and unrestrained vision that made me fall in love with Sam Raimi’s movies. It’s more confident than its Hindenburgian reputation would suggest. Even with all the scissors that Embassy took to the film, it’s still undeniably a Sam Raimi film, and the Coen Brothers’ influence is felt.
Even the disappointed critics of the time begrudgingly acknowledged how hard Crimewave goes with its set pieces. Time Out called the action scenes “accomplished.” The New York Times, in an otherwise annoyed review, referred to the climactic car chase as “something of a technical feat.” To that, I can verify that the streets of Detroit were not sacrificed in vain. Throwing caution to the wind, Raimi created a chase sequence that was dangerous, maniacally cartoonish, and kinetic. That’s not even my favorite set piece in the flick. The most memorable, and the exact kind of sequence that compelled Sam Raimi to make this, is when the hitman Faron chases Louis Lasser through a series of plywood walls that fall like dominoes. It’s homicidal antics vis-à-vis Buster Keaton.
Is it inspired? I’d have to say yes. Am I surprised that Evil Dead fans didn’t go for this in 1985? I’d have to say no.
The most rewarding part of watching Crimewave all these decades later is seeing how this hijacked movie still shows the early promise of Sam Raimi and the Coen Brothers, both in narrative and style. The tale of an obtuse everyman who becomes entangled in a comically convoluted murder plot has been perfected by The Coens in seminal masterpieces like Fargo and The Big Lebowski. The oafish, crazed hit men wouldn’t be out of place in Raising Arizona. The tongue-in-cheek throwback to Warner Bros. gangster flicks is especially pronounced in Sam Raimi’s Darkman, to which Crimewave is something of a predecessor.
Crimewave takes cues from pulp novels and comics, from its dynamic cinematography to its elastic sense of reality. The Evil Dead introduced audiences to Raimi’s manic, almost psychotic camera work, but this was the first time Sam Raimi was able to construct a heightened reality and showcase how expansive and eclectic his style was.
The single person holding the unwieldy tone together might be leading man Reed Birney. An accomplished theater actor who now has a Tony Award under his belt, Reed might not have Bruce Campbell’s charms or impeccable chin. But, he brings a nerdy, endearing quality to the material and shows Raimi’s predilection for geeks with a heart of gold 15 years before casting Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. It helps that Birney, being a skilled and professionally trained actor from the world of theater, knew exactly the movie that Sam Raimi was making.
In the years since, Birney has discussed his initial reluctance to work with the Evil Dead guy, but came to embrace Raimi’s vision. He specifically cited the scene where his character first encounters Nancy, played by Sheree J. Wilson (Walker, Texas Ranger), which sends his tie flying in the wind in the most Looney Tunes moment of the flick. Birney locked into the make-or-break moment for audiences.
If you share Raimi’s sense of humor and adore the willfully corny nature of this movie, you might find yourself endeared to it. If you find this moment eye-rolling or cringe-inducing, then the rest of Crimewave won’t be kind to you. It’s the same kind of good-natured goofballery peppered throughout the Spider-Man trilogy.
In fact, Reed Birney claimed in an interview that a fight scene on a subway train was cut from Crimewave and repurposed years later as the iconic L Train battle in Spider-Man 2. Reed even has a dance scene at a jazz club here that’s eerily prescient of a certain sequence from a certain third Spider-Man flick.
Also, just because Embassy took a weed-whacker to The Coen Brothers’ script, don’t be under the impression that Crimewave’s screenplay doesn’t have some gems. Most of the best lines come from Bruce Campbell, who surely wasn’t happy to play Second Fiddle but nevertheless had the most quotable role in the movie. “I’ve never seen you before,” he says to Sheree J. Wilson. “I like that in a woman,” he says with a smile. Ironically, Renaldo the Heel is far closer to the rougish charm of Bruce Campbell’s current schtick than the Ash Williams of the first Evil Dead.
When promoting Evil Dead II during an interview with Johnathan Ross, Raimi was asked what he had intended with the then-recent disaster of Crimewave. “I wanted it to be the ultimate picture of entertainment,” the embarrassed Raimi replied. “To thrill, chill. Make the audience laugh, cry, scream. They screamed… for their money back,” he added with a characteristic grin.
For someone who found incomprehensible success by their early 20s, Sam Raimi has had to suffer serious setbacks over the course of his career and has had to habitually reinvent himself. After Crimewave, he made a sequel to The Evil Dead that smuggled in all the pastiche humor that he secretly pined for. Following the box-office disappointment of Army of Darkness, he became a journeyman director who made everything from westerns to crime dramas. After the backlash to Spider-Man 3, he returned to his roots with Drag Me to Hell. Even with all these pivots, these “failures” are as integral to the Sam Raimi mythos as his successes.
All of them capture the spirit of a Hollywood outsider whose penchant for earnest goofballery simply couldn’t be suppressed. Sam Raimi and his peers still consider Crimewave a failure. Worse than that: the thing that nearly killed their careers. The terror of its production was enough to scar them for the rest of their careers. It’s been 40 years. Would it be controversial to say that the movie still kind of slaps? Just like poor Victor Ajax sitting in the electric chair, I’m here to rush in (four decades late) to declare that Crimewave is innocent.
Sam Raimi might have been better off making Evil Dead II, but Crimewave is still a testament to his singular talents. It might not be the ‘ultimate’ picture of entertainment, that title goes to Darkman. But for a movie that nearly killed his career, Crimewave is irrefutable proof that Sam Raimi was an unstoppable force. It’s also a source of inspiration to me for both where it succeeds and, oddly enough, where it fails.
Categorized: Editorials
