Nah. You can if you want. The original Evil Dead is an awesome old school horror movie, especially if you love trees and cute girls. But you really don't need to watch the movies.
You need to start with Army of Darkness. Its the 3rd in the series but it is by far the best and makes Evil Dead 1 and 2 that much better after you see it. Also the story line is goofy enough that it doesnt matter if you get it out of sequence.
Bruce Campbell lives in Jacksonville (OR, not FL) and he used to come into the restaurant where my brother worked about 15 years ago or so. He was a pretty accommodating guy, really easy going and laid back (even when my brother got all tongue-tied and star-struck the first time he waited on him).
I have been to Evil Dead the musical. Even got blood on me during a chainsaw scene. We enjoyed the hokeyness of it all. I think our favorite song was "All the Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons"
Just finished the season. It was definitely patchy. The stuff when they visited the uncle and Ash was trippin' dragged a bit, but getting back to the cabin helped the show re-find its mojo. It's funny, I loved all 3 movies but the usual mean-spirited gruesome Raimi sense of humor makes me wince a bit now. I mean, when kids get killed with ice-skates to the head? The way they killed the blonde girl in the cabin? The sudden shifts in tone were so fast they made my head spin. And I've got to say I was pissed at Ash at the end. But these are the people who killed off Xena in the most demeaning way possible to end the series [Xena the series, I mean - unfortunately Lucy Lawless's character doesn't get her head chopped off in this series], so what do you want? And the soundtrack was almost as awesome as Fargo. (And as someone who actually lives in Michigan it was cute that they actually bothered to ship bottles of Faygo and bags of Better Made chips all the way to New Zealand.) Re: Army of Darkness: it's got non-stop great one-liners but it's PG rather than R. I'd say Evil Dead II is the best - it's sort of the Venn Diagram overlap between the straight horror of the original and the straight action-comedy of Darkness. But Bruce Campbell is the shit. He's like fine wine and his line deliver is pure perfection. There were more laugh-out-loud moments in that series than I can remember and they were all him.
