Damned if I know. I only watched 2 & 3 on account of the first one not having Bruce Campbell's enormous chin.

But Bruce Campbell was in the first one.

The Wandering God

Really? Damn. I guess I better check it out. Somebody told me Ash wasn't in the first movie. :/ Shows what they know.

The Ash Williams that we know wasn't in Evil Dead.

The first Evil Dead wasn't trying to be funny, it was just trying to be scary (I think), and failed due to a low budget. The second movie squeezes the entirety of the first one into five minutes at the beginning which was sort of funny in and of itself, and the rest of the movie was just hysterical, so the budget didn't really matter (though I think it had a larger budget.)

Like, y'know, El Mariachi was trying to be a movie with big action scenes but its lack of budget made it fail, but luckily Rodriguez threw some humor in there and so the final thing wasn't too bad, and then he retained the humor for the sequel Desperado and with a much larger budget made like the "best action movie ever made" (as will be applied to a bunch of other movies). But I wouldn't say that Desperado was a worse movie just because the action scenes overrode the humor (well, that is debatable of course, it's so over-the-top its funny in a lot of places, but anyway).

I mean, I think of it like that. Evil Dead probably would've been made funny if Raimi had realized that would go over big and the final product wasn't going to be very scary, and I don't think that Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness being really utterly hilarious was a mistake just because he started out with something he was attempting to make "scary". Luckily with Drag Me Down To Hell I think he hits both nails on the head at the same time (with dual hammers, I guess?)

Also, I don't really care if you call Boondock Saints a cult "classic" or whatever, I wasn't really attacking the film's quality (it's okay) or whether it will stand the test of time (here, there might be a problem, because six million movies have copied the Tarantino method so much that even Tarantino himself can't come out with a movie without people comparing it to Pulp Fiction, and I'm under the impression the number of movies similar to The Boondock Saints will only keep increasing), just the fact that it's only a decade or so old. At least use some oxymoron like "modern classic" to differentiate a movie made recently from a real cult classic classic like The Toxic Avenger or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which are a lot older.

I mean, I don't even think the movie is a cult film, since everyone I know (well, male friends) has seen it and I'm guessing that a LOT of other people have seen it. And if they happened to be a male aged 15-28 probably liked it, unless they hated it.