I'm just gonna go ahead and do something I should've done days ago, which is reprint my Evil Dead review from another website.
Sam Raimi's iconic debut feature film, The Evil Dead, was first remade in 1987. This new version was about seven minutes long, cut out every character except Ash and his girlfriend, and reduced the movie to the barest of bare essentials. Then it ended and was immediately followed by the wonderfully zany romp that is Evil Dead II. Unlike it's predecessor, which was an exercise in pure horror, this sequel was about as good a mix of outrageously bloody horror and wacky splatstick antics as has ever been made. The ultimate horror/comedy, if you will. When people think of this franchise, they usually think this entry (or Army of Darkness, depending on what line they're quoting). Ash's chainsaw hand, his "Groovy", his general awesome buffoonery... it all started here. You want to laugh and have a great time, this is the movie for you. If you want something that (while still buried in delightful low-budget camp) goes for broke with a sadistic sense of horror, then you want the original. They're both straight-up classics of the genre, so you're good either way.
The Evil Dead was remade a second time this year, titled simply Evil Dead. Although it is occasionally confused as to which of the above two movies it is supposed to be remaking.
I'll just lay it out flat to start: I was disappointed by this one. I went in with as wide a mind as possible, which was easy enough, considering it had been getting (and is still getting) some very strong buzz and has full support of all the players and creators from the original movie. Yet I spent the entire time in the theater just watching an empty, lost movie try too hard while also being far too dead to really make an impact.
The new concept for the remake is a simple one. After a self-serious (and, in my mind, unnecessary) prologue, we meet our new group of pretty, soon-to-be-dead people. Four friends head out to a cabin in the woods to help a fifth friend go cold turkey on a drug addiction (Sitterson and Hadley's scenes must've been cut for time). It's got a shaky start, with a dozen minutes of poor exposition and even poorer character setup. But the premise is sound. Mixing the madness of the deadites with the madness of going into withdrawal is a novel idea, making for a good combination of crazy. It also one that means they'll actually have a good reason to disregard the ravings of the possessed person as nothing more than drug talk. So, good on the remake for taking a nifty approach to things.
Sadly, they do little more than approach, as the idea is all but dropped in any capacity beyond lip service once our favorite Book of the Dead comes into play and folks start transforming. The problems here start to compound on one another, as it soon becomes apparent how... empty all these characters are. I won't say the group of five in the original were particularly deep (because they weren't, not by a long shot), but at least they had a sense of, well, character. You could tell they liked one another, and they bounced off each other well. This group is too busy being moody and grim towards each other to actually act like they even know one another (beyond constant cryptic and flat comments about each other "never being there for one another"). Plus, our (kinda sorta) lead is about as blank and boring as they come, so it becomes hard to get behind him when they other (barely more interesting) characters start biting.
On that aspect of biting it, I will say this movie delivers. Because this is a supremely gory movie. There's all manner of vivisection, impalement, slicing, dicing, shooting (with all sorts of ammunition), stabbing, amputating, and every other form of bodily harm under the sun. All buried under a fresh wave of blood that never really stops coming, to the point where it's (quite literally) raining from the sky. It's easily the goriest wide release since Piranha 3D. And to add to this symphony of carnage, the vast majority of it was done with entire practical effects (and the CGI they do use is relatively unobtrusive). Credit where credit is due, it all looks fantastic. It makes you wonder what else they had to cut out to secure an R (although I'm one of those who think they missed a real opportunity to just release this puppy NC-17, and make it an actual event film). Kudos again to the remake for not wimping out here.
But then, that's almost part of the problem. Because as the movie goes along, and goes from gore piece to gore piece, you soon realize that this is what it's all about. Because beyond that modern grimy aesthetic and spooky woodland setting, there's very little by way of atmosphere here. And even less by way of scares. Really, beyond a few (somewhat telegraphed) jump scares, this movie never really even tries to be scary. It just tortures the players in a variety of ways, essentially treating all this like a modern action movie, where you replace an exploding car with a nail through a forearm. The trouble here is that it creates a way to just disconnect from the mayhem on screen, to the point where it has very little effect. It's like watching a long video of great gore gags. All well and good on its own, but when you've got nothing else to really pull you into what you're watching, then it just turns into an effects showcase, not an actual movie. Which means that I can watch something that would otherwise make me cringe and squirm in my seat, only to just sit there totally still and marvel at the effect.
And then you've got the fanservice. By which I mean the callbacks and whatnot to the original movie. These are to be expected, because, after all, it's a remake. Gotta include some love thrown to yesteryear, especially when you've got the original writer/director, producer, and actor as your producers. The trouble is, most of these callbacks simply don't fit. The camera wandering crazily through the woods or the quick zooms/cuts in the shed seem too out-of-place compared to the style of the rest of the movie. They exist only to say "Hey! Remember how that other movie looked? How iconic it became for how it moved around the screen? Have a little of that here!" And then it gets into the stuff related to Evil Dead II, which just gets weird. Because this new movie isn't goofy, or funny, or any of that (well, there was certainly a lot of laughter in my audience, but I'm not sure the movie intended that). It never tries to be. It's got that same super-grim-and-serious attitude that so many modern horror movies have. But when you try to throw in callbacks to chainsaws and missing limbs (and deadites that spout off insults and swears straight out of The Exorcist), it creates a very off-putting juxtaposition. This movie just doesn't know what it wants to be, stuck as it is at that crossroads between wanting to do its own serious thing in relation to the original, and throwing in gags and callbacks that fans of the franchise of the whole are expected to cheer at and automatically declare "Awesome!". Even if, like I said way above, people seem to be remembering a different movie than what this is supposed to be remaking (do people even remember the chainsaw appears in the original The Evil Dead for all of six seconds? And that Bruce Campbell is just "the guy who survives" rather than "Ash, king of the world!" in it?)
Remove the fanservice, remove the gore, and what do you have? Not much at all, really. An empty movie populated by empty characters, occasionally introducing a neat idea but never going anywhere interesting with it. Beyond the bit at the beginning about drug addiction, there's also the ending, which, for a moment (after a supremely stupid plot twist that actually made me facepalm in the theater), actually looks like it's going somewhere truly new and cool. Stuff starts happening that is actually pretty unnerving, and it starts building a new sense of dread largely absent in the film until then. But then, the reveal happens, and it's... pretty lame. The whole exercise turns into another missed opportunity, and little more than an instance to show off some (again, still freakishly impressive) gore. While tossing in a fairly bland attempt at a pump-your-fists-and-cheer moment.
I got an uneasy feeling while watching the movie, in the sense that I don't think it quite got what makes the original work as well as it does. Sam Raimi's original was a shoestring budgeted affair, and it showed. It's comparable to the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in that it fills the screen with a frenzied and maniac sense of energy that never lets up, and more than makes up for the monetary limitations. It's pure grindhouse schlock, and it knows it. And it plays it off wonderfully, with the waving camera and tortured actors bringing in a wonderfully nightmarish atmosphere. This new movie, a big, shiny studio affair, is simply too slick. It tries to ape the energy, but it doesn't have the soul. There's no sense of really caring about what's happening, only wanting to hit the right beats and get on with the red stuff. It's a disheartening thing. The original worked because of all the pure, unfiltered talent and heart being put into it. This new one doesn't work because it doesn't even know what it wants to be, let alone how to really push itself out as anything other than an exceedingly violent, mainstream horror release.
Now's the part with the disclaimer: most people like this movie. The friends of mine I went to see this with are longtime fans of the series (wearing appropriate shirts and all), and they loved it. The audience cheered and cringed at all the right parts, and they were commenting in a supremely positive way when they left the theater. So I'm in the more uneven minority on this movie. It very well could be another case where I'd like a movie considerably more if it were it's own thing, and not a too-tired retread of better material. And even with all my gripes, I could still see some real talent on display here. This new director they found to make this has some serious chops, and knows how to frame himself some grisly stuff. I have high hopes for where he goes from here, assuming he manages to free himself from the need to keep trying to travel in older, stronger footsteps. I also hope he keeps that effects team close to his heart, because they're keepers, the lot of them.
All in all, the new Evil Dead is a solid gore delivery system, but it offers next to nothing beyond that. It tosses the violence at you from every angle, doing all it can to mask its emotionally and functionally hollow core that keeps trying to use nostalgic instances as a crutch. Maybe that'll play to the rest of you better than it played to me, and I encourage folks to give it a look. After all, hard-R horror is to be supported, since there's simply not enough of it going wide these days. But beyond the red stuff, it has no staying power past the brand name it carries. And on that, I hope they manage to get their act together for the (recently announced) next entry. Because the world always needs new Deadite action, assuming said action is worthwhile and memorable.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1584160 times)
