Evil Dead IV? No – how about a remake instead?

The EVIL DEAD trilogy came to an abrupt end back in 1993 with the release of ARMY OF DARKNESS, the third film in the series. The film originally ended with a sequence meant to set up a sequel set in the future; although the scene survived in European prints, it was deleted in the version released by Universal Pictures in the United States. Since then, director Sam Raimi has gone on to direct some big-budget Hollywood blockbusters: SPIDER-MAN and SPIDER-MAN 2.

The new Penny Blood magazine scores a bit of a scoop in its fifth issue: an interview with actor Bruce Campbell, who played Ash EVIL DEAD, EVIL DEAD 2, and ARMY OF DARKNESS. Campbell says that he and Raimi don’t talk much about a sequel, because Raimi is too busy, but Campbell believes that there will be a fourth EVIL DEAD film — a remake, not a sequel.

“It’ll be a whole new story,” Campbell told Penny Blood. “It won’t be Ash. It’ll be the evil book, and it’ll affect a whle new group of people in a different situation. More like a reinvention.”

Well, it’s sad that we will never see EVIL DEAD IV (or ARMY OF DARKNESS II, as it probably would have been called), but this sounds like an interesting way to extend the series. After all, there’s no reason not to take the basic phenomenon of the series and force some new characters to deal with it.

Let’s hope Sam Raimi can take some time off from SPIDER-MAN movies to go back and make a worth follow-up to the franchise that first put him on the map.