Evil Dead Review
By: MattInRC
Evil Dead is one of the goriest films to ever grace the big screen. But can it compete with its cult classic predecessor?
We've been lamenting for awhile now on the uneven state of horror films, and for good reason. For every creepy and excellent Sinister in 2012, we were forced to endure a totally predictable and barely watchable Paranormal Activity 4 and The Possession. The problem lately has been simple: mindless horror without story. Sinister proved you could find a perfect balance between the two, generating all the creep-fest while persevering with good character development. It's too bad that nothing else recently came close to replicating Sinister's results; and while we haven't seen Mama yet, we were hopeful that 2013 signaled the return of excellent slasher cinema - until we saw the remake of Evil Dead.
A mixture of A Cabin in the Woods and The Human Centipede, Evil Dead is easily the goriest film to be released in awhile. If you've seen the 1981 original cult classic which launched the chiseled chin of Bruce Campbell, the plot will look familiar but the over-the-top meaningless gore and transparent characters will feel like something from a lesser picture. Five teenagers embark on a weekend to a run-down cabin in the middle of nowhere, not to cause chaos or sexual debauchery, but to clean up the life of the drug addict Mia (Jane Levy). Her friends Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), and his girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) decide to do anything to help, including their short-sighted decision to ignore Mia's pleas to leave the cabin for home. You see, she doesn't want to quit her treatment because she's fallen off the wagon - it's due entirely to a devilish force who's overtaken her body, courtesy of Eric's accidental opening of a flesh-covered book discovered in the basement.
Soon, Mia is the typical possessed victim, speaking in auto-tones and making crackling sounds with her bones as she picks off each friend one by one. As Eric and David become the last survivors, they make a desperate attempt to remove the force from Mia's body before she can complete her goal. Faced with the prospect of killing his sister David makes the ultimate sacrifice before the arrival of the demon signals the end of the world.
Written and directed by Fede Alvarez, the film is gory to the extreme and just plain gross in its constant depictions of vomit. Granted, I understand that demonic possession does require a bit of the bile, but Evil Dead has it in copious amounts, unleashing gallons of it on our actors as they try desperately to get through Alavarez's cheesy and soulless script. There's an insanely graphic opening that confusingly leads to the set up of our characters as they discover the book, become possessed, chop off their arms, shoot each other with nail guns, and endure a blood-filled rainstorm.
Maybe I just didn't get it, or perhaps I don't understand the finer details of American slasher cinema, but I can't be the only one who desires great storytelling from its horror films. The original took place so long ago that only true fans still watch it, which means Alvarez could have rebooted Evil Dead into more intelligent territory. Instead, we get several transparent performances by people we simply don't care about and meet vilolent ends that don't affect us in the slightest. I did appreciate the chilling score by Composer Roque Baños, whose opening theme and end credits created something to close to operatic murder.
When one considers that the first cut of Evil Dead was slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating, it's understandable why casual moviegoers might think it still deserves one. The super-violence is among the most graphic I've ever seen, leading me to wonder how much better it would have been had Alvarez simply balanced things with good character development. This must be the future of horror, plain and simple. With nearly every stone unturned in terms of disgusting ends, the genre must journey down unfamiliar territory: constructing well-built, intensely-horrifying tales that terrify not just for their 'torture-porn' qualities, but generate empathy for their characters along the way, which could make their deaths all the more effective.
With Evil Dead, we're left wondering what could have been the best horror film of the last decade, had Alvarez lived by the most important rule in Hollywood: if you reboot it, turn it up a notch. It's been all but assured to rake in big bucks beyond its $17 million budget, but don't we deserve better? Evil Dead is rated R for everything except nudity and drug use and has a runtime of 91 minutes.
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