Speaking to Damon Wise of the Guardian, Bruce Campbell has some advice for fans of the Evil Dead trilogy that made him a household name, at least in houses with a heavy geek peopulation: don't hold your breath. "I just finished a 22-city tour of the States and that question would come up all the time. I'd say, 'OK, who wanted Indiana Jones 4?' I did this at 10 different cities and maybe two hands would go up. I'd go, 'There's your answer, right there.'" Campbell, who can currently seen giving disspipation a good name on the cable TV series Burn Notice, warmed to his theme: "Harrison Ford can't even hold the whip any more! Look, if you think it through, those Evil Dead movies were very difficult to make. Every single one was a nightmare. Physically, mentally, financially - just difficult, troubled shoots. So what would make us want to go back into that world again, go through all that pain and agony as middle-aged men? The last time we made one was 18 years ago. Army Of Darkness was made 18 years ago! No one seems to do that math. Am I going to be in a wheelchair by the time we do it? My greatest fear is that we go through all that time and effort, make this part four, and people will go, 'Oh, it's OK. But it's not as good as Army Of Darkness.' Which is what will happen! It's a guarantee!"
Campbell, who seems like the kind of guy who's more likely to shrug than to trash his hotel room when he sees that Wise described him as "strangely handsome", began production on the first Evil Dead movie thirty years ago, when Campbell was twenty years old and director Sam Raimi was nineteen. Shooting would drag on for more than a year, which is a long time to spend hanging out in the woods getting drenched in karo syrup. (It wouldn't be until 1982 before the finished product starting creeping into theaters.) The two had been making little amateur movies together while in high school; from the start, their preferred specialty was slapstick comedy. When they "actually decided to make a movie for real, and we were actually taking people's money out of their pockets to do it, we knew it had to be something they could get their money back on. So we chose horror, which was a completely different genre for us. And I'm still trying to get back to where I was. I'm making horror movies that are not horror movies." The more Raimi and Campbell went back to the well with the Evil Dead sequels, the more they indulged their Three Stooges side, and the head-splitting mixture of gore and whiplash physical comedy left fans happily freaked out. That road eventually took Raimi to the promised land of the Spider-man franchise, but somewhere along the line, Campbell turned into one of those guys who plays supporting roles in big movies and starring roles in small pictures, such as the bizarre horror comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, in which he gave a remarkable performance as a geriatric Elvis Presley turned monster hunter. "I've had my years of getting annoyed with Evil Dead questions," Campbell says, "but now I really do realize, in retrospect, that people only ask about what they're interested in. And if they only see horror movies, they're only gonna see me in the eight or so horror movies I've done. I haven't actually done that many, less than 50%. But Evil Dead was pretty notorious and it was very popular, so it's guilt by association: I'm the horror guy. But there are people who've watched TV shows that I've done who don't even know I've been in the Evil Dead movies. If you stick around long enough you can just move on."
Campbell is in England promoting My Name Is Bruce, the comedy in which he plays a libelous version of himself who is obliged to do real-life battle with a Chinese war god. (The movie was released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S. last week.) A BBC interviewer actually compared the film to JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme's recent visit to a metatextual reality, and while the connection may strike Campbell fans as a little off the wall--Campbell has been parodying himself so enthusiastically and for so long that he's practically the pre-AARP version of Leslie Nielson--it is fun just to see these two guys mentioned in the same sentence. Although the project didn't originate wirth Campbell, he embraced it with sufficient enthusiasm that he poured his own money into it and even opened up his own property to serve as a back lot. "Any time you make a movie that's under $200 million, you're going to put some of your own money into it. It got to a point where the composer would say, 'Y'know Bruce, let's get some real strings here because it'll sound great'. And I'd be like, 'Really, do we really need them... well [mimes signing a check]...okay'."
