Worst to Best: The Films of Sam Raimi

In a rare early-year treat, Sam Raimi’s Send Help arrives in theaters this week to save the multiplex from the dregs of early February. Its arrival also saves Raimi from a troubled stretch in Hollywood:the two other films he’s done in the past 13 years, Oz the Great and Powerful and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, have been mangled by the franchise machinery. Yet Raimi has proven to be a resilient genre filmmaker throughout his career, one distinguished by his versatility as a director of independent and major-studio projects, along with a super-charged visual style and a knack for old-school physical comedy. The same sensibility behind the groundbreaking, low-budget horror staple The Evil Dead is fully on display 45 years later in Send Help, but it’s been a long and winding road to get there. The ranking below tries to account for his journey: 

16. Crimewave (1985) 
“A Sam Raimi-directed crime comedy, co-scripted by the Coen brothers? Why am I only hearing about this now?!” Perhaps that’s a question you’ve asked yourself and the answer will be obvious once you’ve seen Crimewave, a wounded and wildly incoherent indie that relates to Raimi and the Coens’ later work like a burbling mass of primordial goo relates to me and you and everyone we know. (Okay, there is the Hudsucker connection, but that’s it.) If you can get through the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry’s plot summary, perhaps you’ll survive the film’s garbled machinations, which involve a low-level technician (Reed Birney) who’s framed for murder in the violent fallout between partners at a home security company. Raimi’s flair for manic comedy aligns well with the Coens’ more overtly wacky efforts, like Raising Arizona, but the production ran into trouble with a meddling Embassy Pictures almost immediately. They all moved forward and left this footnote behind. 

15. For Love of the Game (1999) 
Save maybe for the occasional sequence when Billy Chapel (Kevin Costner), a veteran Detroit Tigers pitcher working on a perfect game, uses stylized meditation (“clear the mechanism”) to shut out the noise at Yankee Stadium, you’d never in a million years guess that Raimi was the director of this middling sports drama. By the evidence here, Raimi seems to be a baseball movie traditionalist, earnestly paying tribute to the solemn greatness of a veteran (and his catcher, also on the wane, played by John C. Reilly) capping a season and perhaps a career with a legendary performance in a meaningless game. But as appealing as that sounds—Raimi even brought in Vin Scully for the play-by-play—For Love of the Game is hampered badly by between-innings flashbacks that grinds the narrative into, well, a pitchers duel. 

14. The Gift (2000) 
Having directed Billy Bob Thornton to one of his best performances in A Simple Plan a couple of years earlier—see: way ahead on this list—Raimi turned to Thornton and his screenwriting partner, Tom Epperson, for a twisty thriller that would theoretically combine Thornton’s authentic feel for downscale Southern culture (as seen in One False Move and Sling Blade) with Raimi’s gothic atmosphere. Yet despite a big-name ensemble, led by Cate Blanchett as a clairvoyant whose insights figure into a murder investigation, The Gift feels nearly as constrained as For Love of the Game in trying to reconcile Raimi’s kinetic style with the bottled-up conventions of a mainstream whodunit. (And it’s not a particularly compelling whodunit, either: If you can’t guess the culprit the second after the murder happens, time to hang up the towel, Benoit Blanc.) 

13. The Quick and the Dead (1995) 
Everything about The Quick and the Dead sounds like it’s completely in Raimi’s wheelhouse: An energized spaghetti western where it’s always High Noon, shot with a Looney Tunes freneticism and a cast that features cult favorites (Lance Henriksen, Keith David), future superstars (Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe), and Gene Hackman all-but-reprising his role as the nefarious town honcho from Unforgiven. But despite some fun flashes, like Raimi’s handling of the many duels in a town’s shooting tournament or DiCaprio’s delightful preening as an über-confident gunslinger, The Quick and the Dead has too thin and repetitive a premise to work as more than a stylistic exercise. And Sharon Stone, a superstar at the time, is miscast as the one vengeful woman in a man’s world. 

12. Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) 
Though Raimi’s most expensive project to date opened to middling reviews—including one from yours truly—and only a modest return on investment from Disney, Oz the Great and Powerful looks slightly better now than it did from 2013, when it was on the tail end of a wearying 3D phase and seemed too aggressive in its visual energy and fractured-fairytale mythology. Granted, James Franco is not more welcome in 2026 than he was in 2013, but he’s reasonably well-suited to play a professor imposter who arrives in Oz as its prophesied leader and fakes his way into the role. The Raimi touch is apparent on the margins, like a school of water fairies that bite like piranha, and the women in the cast, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams especially, are powerful ends of the witchy spectrum. It’s just a little difficult for Raimi’s voice to eke through the franchise machinery.