He’s back… the man who made the Deadites and that fabled Book of the Dead, The Necronomicon, a fright fan household name. Yet ever since he struck professional paydirt with an oddball Western starring a then hot Sharon Stone, Sam Raimi has wondered away from his horror roots. Over the course of the next few decades, he made two thillers, a baseball themed drama, and then literally re-invented the post-millennial popcorn comic book superhero blockbuster with his Spider-man movies. And now he’s tackling the family film (?) genre. That’s right, his recent release for Disney’s (??) Oz the Great and Powerful has just broken $80 million at the box office on its opening weekend, securing his legacy as both commercial king and ruler of the crepshow.

It may be the first time in mainstream movie history that gore is getting the high sign from marketers. If you’ve been paying attention to the advertising for the new Sam Raimi approved remake of his classic Evil Dead, you’ll understand. Currently making the rounds is a commercial featuring nothing more than brief glimpses of the film and multiple reaction shots—teens, the target audience, and even a couple of older people offer up their first look faces as the trailer (one assumes, red banded) unspools before them. Mind you, we don’t see the splatter, but the implication is clear: the update of the classic ‘within the woods’ workout is one shocking, disgusting blood feast where body parts and arterial spray are beyond the norm. The grimaces and gasps say it all.

A greedy fatcat speculator (Arthur Hohl) has cornered the silk market. The association of mill owners (led by handsome, British-accented Neil Hamilton, three decades before he was Commissioner Gordon for TV’s Batman) decides to import the precious cargo from Japan to Seattle and then deliver it by train at a frantic pace to New York, where it will go to all the sweatshops and save the season’s high-fashion line. The train becomes a hurtling steel microcosm of capitalistic competition, as secret agents for one force or the other try to block each other’s moves, like the game of checkers played by the hick railroad detective (Guy Kibbee) who gets excited at the prospect of solving his first murder.

One interesting aspect of this one-hour whodunit, directed by Ray Enright at a B-movie clip that barrels through all its nonsense before you can think about it, is that there are several detectives working against each other to unmask whomever killed the extraneous corpse in the locked-railcar scenario. Some of the detectives are bad guys who, while theoretically on the same side as the killer, realize they are mere pawns who will have the murder pinned on them—especially since they think they really committed it. They’re all the puppets of that long-distance mastermind who might, for all we know, get away scot free.

“I’m the biggest fraud in the Islamic world! I’m Sinbad the Sailor!” exclaims that titular hero, portrayed as a laughing, silver-tonged rogue by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.. He channels his father in the theatrical, gestural nature of his performance but less so when the film cuts to an obvious stunt double during leaps and somersaults. This RKO production is notable for two other qualities. One is the shocking color, which makes every moment a voluptuous dream. For once, the trailer’s hype is correct to herald a “Technicolor spectacle of dazzling splendor”. The other is John Twist’s elaborate dialogue, which sounds like it’s reaching for Shakespeare via baroque orientalism. In other words, this is a gloriously stylized movie, down to the painted backdrops and model ships.

Disney should have expected this. After all, when you hand the reigns of a dark, sometimes disturbing fantasy to the man who made The Evil Dead, The Evil Dead 2, and the original Spider-man franchise, you have to expect something a bit…odd? Parents be warned - your wee ones are going to be startled at the level of scares present in this so-called “prequel” to the famous MGM musical. Without access to much of the original Oz material however (Warner Brothers is, apparently, just like the House of Mouse when it comes to licensing out their gold standards) we are treated to a slightly surreal reexamination of the entire mythology. Gone are mentions of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow or the Tin Man. In their place are various witches, a wondrous little china doll, and a monkey that makes his evil flying baboon counterparts seem like the aforementioned filmmaker’s diabolical Deadites.