"It looks superficially like a routine horror movie, a vomitorium designed to separate callow teenagers from their lunch. But look a little closer and you'll realize that the movie is a fairly sophisticated satire. Level One viewers will say it's in bad taste. Level Two folks like myself will perceive that it is about bad taste."
- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

"...a flashy good-natured display of special effects and scare tactics so extreme they can only be taken for laughs."
- Variety

"If The Evil Dead shifts the horror film into overdrive, then Evil Dead II puts its foot through the floor and goes insane."
- Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies

"One of the few sequels that's actually better than the original, a Spam-in-a-cabin zombie classic that scores a 99 on the Vomit Meter and sets the world record for blood-and-slime spewing."
- Joe Bob Briggs, Joe Bob's Ultimate Movie Guide

"Director Sam Raimi strikes again with this manic, and very funny, sequel to his stunningly inventive 1981 low-budget fever dream, The Evil Dead. As in the first film, Raimi lets out all the stops and plays every cinematic trick in the book. Instead of "Dead by Dawn," the subtitle of this film should be "Help! There's a Camera Chasing Me!"
- The Horror Film edited by James J. Mulay

"After the humour-laced horror of The Evil Dead, this adopts the crazy, cartoonish tone of Raimi's underrated Crimewave (1985) and goes for belly laughs. The film is especially well served by Campbell's gutsy performance as he goes from quivering wreck to functioning psychopath..."
- The Aurum Encyclopedia of Film: Horror, edited by Phil Hardy

"Whereas The Evil Dead was a ferocious gross-out movie, Evil Dead II emerges with a lunatically demented comic genius – it's somewhere on the order of George Romero collaborating with cartoonist Tex Avery... It's so outrageously over-the-top that it attains a level of dizzying surrealism. Here blood doesn't just spurt, it gushes like a broken fire-hydrant..."
- Richard Scheib, The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

"... the dialogue is minimal, the maniacal laughter track is set at full-blast, special effects create such novelties as dancing skeletons in the moonlight, the sound effects are spine-chilling, the pacing is breathless, the frenzied camera is always in play, the editing is quick-cut, the extreme gore is equivalent to a horror film funhouse of surrealistic images..."
- Dennis Schwartz, Ozus's World Movie Reviews

"Stylistically and technically, the film is a quantum leap beyond its predecessor... is a wonderfully imaginative hybrid, consisting of Gothic elements (e.g., the isolated haunted house), splatterpunk (before it had a name), Lovecraftian demonology, European psychodrama, horror film spoofs, and-perhaps most importantly - Three Stooges slapstick comedy. The film's peculiar strength... is that it is so difficult to pigeonhole."
- Sam & Rebecca Umland, Video Watchdog

"Raimi's resourceful restlessness ultimately pushes the movie beyond gooey genre pastiche and into uniquely absurd farce."
- Fernando F. Croce, Slant Magazine "Showcasing Raimi's love for the likes of the Three Stooges and MAD magazine and the Keaton-esque comic skills of Bruce Campbell, there is still oodles of gore, but the flying eyeballs and lopped-off appendages serve as the functional equivalents of custard pies and buckets of whitewash rather than anything psychologically retrograde...The Evil Dead II is the sort of film which it is really impossible to describe or summarise. You simply have to come along and experience it for yourself.
- Keith H. Brown, Edinburgh University Film Society

"There are lots of similar bits scattered through the movie, including a wild Ray Harryhausen skeleton dance, a particularly nasty dismembered head, flying eyeballs, animated furniture and clever digs at films as disparate as The Wizard of Oz [1939],Little Shop of Horrors [1960],Rambo [1982],Aliens [1986] and Altered States [1980]...The acting is straight out of '50s B movies. The exposition is clumsy, the sound track corny, the denouement silly. Then again, who said bad taste was easy?"
- Richard Harrington, The Washington Post

"This is so stylishly, hysterically overdone that it stands out as a first-rate comedy gore flick...The overacting finds acceptability within the gushing blood (sometimes green, sometimes red), the flesh-destroying effects, and the wide-angle lens shots that are, well, "groovy.""
- John Stanley, Creature Features