Ash vs Evil Dead
Stan, new episodes weekly on Mondays
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Season two finds dirtbag Deadite-slayer Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) living his sleazy dream. He's running a beachside bar in Florida, filling college kids full of booze, lording it over Pablo and Kelly (Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo), and creeping on women of all ages. Alas, it's not to last – up in chilly Michigan, the mysterious Ruby (Lucy Lawless) is engaged in a life-or-death struggle with creepy monsters that are determined to get their hands on the Necronomicon.
The truce with the Deadites has been broken, and Ash, Pablo and Kelly are soon packing shotguns and chainsaws for the long trip north. But when they arrive in Ash's old home town it's clear that Ash first needs to deal with some ghosts from his own past.
Chief among them is his dad, Brock (Lee Majors), and once the obligatory Six Million Dollar Man reference is out of the way, it becomes clear that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. Brock is also an obnoxious, selfish womaniser, and he's much less interested in seeing Ash for the first time in 30 years than he is in getting Ash's old PE teacher into bed. It's another neat bit of casting in a series that has done very well on that score – Santiago and DeLorenzo have provided perfect foils for Campbell's consummate jerk.
Tonight, as always, the fountains of gore are in keeping with the spirit of Sam Raimi's original Evil Dead flicks, and the hectic action includes nods to everything from The Exorcist to The Three Stooges. Next week Australian director Tony Tilse (Stan's Wolf Creek) calls the shots in a thoroughly disgusting episode penned by co-executive producer and Home and Away veteran Cameron Welsh. Exuberantly silly fun.
The White Helmets
Netflix
An affecting documentary following the incredibly courageous work of volunteers for Syrian Civil Defence, a civilian organisation that has saved the lives of some 60,000 people trapped in the rubble of buildings destroyed by the war in Syria.
Filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel (who made the Oscar-nominated Virunga) follows a group of White Helmets in Aleppo, capturing the urgency with which they respond to aerial bombings, not knowing whether the buildings will collapse on top of them – or whether the buildings will be bombed again while they're inside.
Living in a war zone keeps them in sometimes frantic fear for their own families, but a baby they rescue from a collapsed building becomes a symbol of hope for the future.