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Evil
Dead (18)
Director: Fede Alvarez
Cast: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas
Rated 18 for: Strong bloody violence, gory horror and very strong language
Plot: Five friends go to an abandoned cabin in the woods. Horrible
things ensue. Stop me if you've heard this one before.
If any horror remake was going to buck the trend of being uniformly
awful, the smart money would have been on Evil Dead. With the unholy trinity of
Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Robert Tapert (the original writer/director,
star, and producer respectively) overseeing the project, a director hand-picked
off of the back of his impressive short film, 'Panic Attack', and a
phenomenally good red-band trailer released earlier in the year, the signs were
that this act of sacrilege could actually turn out to be, y'know, whisper it...
good.
Let's preface this by saying that Sam Raimi's 'The Evil Dead',
genre classic though it might be, is far from a perfect film. Raimi himself
pretty much realised this when he effectively remade it as 'Evil Dead 2: Dead
By Dawn'. Any remake/reboot/re-whatever would have pretty big boots to fill,
but there are plenty of opportunities for improvement.One of the areas that was bound to be improved upon were the visual effects and make-up, and here Alvarez and his crew excel themselves. Wisely deciding to keep the SFX as practical as possible, the gore really is the star of Evil Dead 2013, and will no doubt elicit yelps of glee and disgust, depending on which kind of movie goer you are. Sadly, it's pretty much the only thing that this mediocre rehash has going for it.
Part of the ghoulish, roller-coaster ride fun of Raimi's original
was it's ability to successfully mix horror and comedy. Alvarez and his writing
team (including an uncredited Diablo Cody (Juno) on script-polish duties)
dispense with any comedic aspects from page one of their screenplay, making
'Evil Dead' a grim, dour affair. It's a noble intention to want to purely scare
the Bejesus out of your audience, but all this does is invite the audience to
howl in derision at one of the most uninspired scripts in recent horror memory.
Gaping plot-holes, characters so unmemorable that you could be forgiven for forgetting they're even there, and snort-inducingly bad dialogue all rattle around for the film's mercifully short 91 minutes. There's the nugget of an interesting idea sown by making the film's chief protagonist Mia (Jane Levy) a recovering drug-addict, suggesting that this could all be part of her cold-turkey comedown, but it's dismissed so quickly you wonder why they bothered at all.
Gaping plot-holes, characters so unmemorable that you could be forgiven for forgetting they're even there, and snort-inducingly bad dialogue all rattle around for the film's mercifully short 91 minutes. There's the nugget of an interesting idea sown by making the film's chief protagonist Mia (Jane Levy) a recovering drug-addict, suggesting that this could all be part of her cold-turkey comedown, but it's dismissed so quickly you wonder why they bothered at all.
Sam Raimi's swirling, demonic camera-work is also sadly absent,
excepting a brief nod to "THAT scene" from the original. The grimy,
dour nature of the film extends to the cinematography and set design, which
makes the film, if anything, more comparable to recent torture-porn offerings
such as Hostel and Saw. Oh, and that 'The Most Terrifying Film You Will Ever
Experience' tagline? Not even close. Apart from a few jumps from the school of
Anchorman's Brick Tamland ("LOOOOOUUUUUDDDD NOOOOIIIIISSSEEEES!!!"),
it's not a particularly scary film. As violent and bloody as it is, neither can
it hold a candle to such recent endurance tests as 'Martyrs' or 'Inside'.
After Drew Goddard's excellent, Joss Whedon-scripted 'The Cabin In
The Woods', which de constructed the horror genre even as it lovingly
tipped its hat to it, this kind of movie was always going to have to work hard
to justify itself. The cast, particularly Levy, gamely try to lend the whole
thing some dramatic heft, Alvarez is clearly a gifted director who knows his
way around a set piece, and the last 10 minutes has a delirious glee about it -
it's just that after the preceding 80 minutes, you'll struggle to care.
'The Evil Dead', that horror classic from 1981, was a film to fall in love with. You could see the pain-staking effort that every single person involved in the process had made to make it as good as humanly possible, and as wonky as some of the effects may look now, it still holds up pretty damn well. 'Evil Dead' is just another soulless, braindead horror remake that will be forgotten the minute the credits have rolled. And for a movie preoccupied with the possession of souls, "soulless" is just about the worst thing you could hope for.
'The Evil Dead', that horror classic from 1981, was a film to fall in love with. You could see the pain-staking effort that every single person involved in the process had made to make it as good as humanly possible, and as wonky as some of the effects may look now, it still holds up pretty damn well. 'Evil Dead' is just another soulless, braindead horror remake that will be forgotten the minute the credits have rolled. And for a movie preoccupied with the possession of souls, "soulless" is just about the worst thing you could hope for.
2 Stars.
Written by Dani Walsh.
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