Review by Dustin Hall
The Evil Dead remake is a fucking fantastic modern horror movie. However, is it “The most terrifying film you will ever experience?” That’s a tough call. There’s lots of jump and squirm about in this movie but, on a personal note, I went to this film accompanied by a friend who’s a huge pussy when it comes to horror films (for reference, he refuses to watch Paranormal Activity 2-4 because he was plagued by weeks of nightmares following the first) and he walked out absolutely unphased. Laughing at some parts, in fact. And for a film that is supposed to have abandoned all of its camp elements, that could be seen as a problem. So let’s break it down.
Oh, and, Spoilers, obviously. We’ll try to keep them minor in nature.
First off, you can’t talk about Evil Dead without mentioning its pedigree. Evil Dead has somehow managed to become a horror franchise, despite its lack of milking the cash cow. With half as many movies as Freddy and a third as many as Jason, it has remained as one of the best known names in the genre. And when that giant, red, Evil Dead logo blasted onto the screen, the audience went nuts. Perhaps I’m biased in this, but I consider the original movie to be one of the Holy Grails of horror. Sure, some prefer the 2nd movie, but for myself it will always come down to that original story of helpless horror at a cabin in the woods, those video nasty days as a banned film spoken about in hushed whispers, and the avant garde film-making of a young Sam Raimi who did not have a single fuck to give beyond scaring the shit out of people. But now we have to acknowledge that for a young film audience, the movie looks dated, the errors in the film stand out just a little too much, and Ash, our sole-survivor, is associated more with quips and slapstick than with horror. Maybe, for that, it is time to revisit the original concept, and see if there’s still anything to it. Anything that can leave an audience pissing their pants.
With that in mind, it was a ballsy move, opening the film with a scene based on absolutely nothing from the original film. Rather, we are treated to a bit of backstory about how the dreaded book (not actually the Necronomicon, in this edition), got to the cabin. We see the last moments of the previous group of survivors, and the final possessed from that group. There’s barbed wire, strange witchcraft rituals, deformed hillbillies, animal corpses abound, human immolation, and then a point blank shotgun blast to the face. Boom! The title: EVIL fucking DEAD. A great start.
As the movie settles in, we’re treated to more familiar fare. The new crew of five, David, Eric, Mia, Olivia and Natalie (their first initials spell d-e-m-o-n, *wink*), have already arrived at the cabin, and are ready for their weekend. This time, rather than a simple party or vacation, the kids are brought out with a bit more purpose. Mia (Jane Levy, Fun Size) is a recovering drug addict, and her friends have brought her out to isolate her and cut her off cold turkey. Her estranged brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez, Dead Girl), has returned from isolation to help her out, and acts as our focal center. The plot device works really well. All of Mia’s stories about seeing things in the woods are played off as either lies or panic attacks by her friends, and adequate excuse for everyone to actually ignore the distraught victim in this situation. When Mia finally becomes our main possessed, everyone blames her self abuse, her lashing out, everything on drug withdrawal. Having lived with someone who suffered similar mental breakdowns before, I appreciated the portrayal of the withdrawals and the panic attacks very much. They are based in genuine experience, and lend themselves well to the story.
With all of this drama building up the momentum to the eventual release of our demons, we have plenty of moments to learn about our characters. But still, not all of the five come off equally. David, Eric, and drug-addled Mia are all fairly fleshed out, but our two remaining female companions Olivia and Natalie are superficial at best. Olivia’s only role is ‘nurse lady’ and has little development beyond that, while Natalie, David’s girlfriend, has maybe five lines the entire film. Maybe if we’d known more about them, the horror elements surrounding them might have worked better.
Ah, yes, the horror. How about that.
I can pinpoint the exact moment that the audience stopped being scared by the proceedings. The tree rape sequence, alluded to in the trailer, was well done, the possession of our first two victims were shocking and stirring and brutal, the suspense leading up to their reveals adequately administered. But it was when the remaining three teens run off to the shed to lick their wounds, and they fix everything up with duct tape, that’s when you’ll hear the first giggles. And then when a human arm gets severed, and they have to fix it… with duct tape. Yeah, a few more laughs. And finally, when they need to get someone back on their feet, and so the remaining characters, with no medical training ever insinuated, make a defibrillator out of a pair of syringes, some wire, a car battery, and some duct-fucking-tape; I am not even fucking kidding, the audience loses it. For a movie that worked so hard to eliminate all elements of camp and be taken so, so seriously, moments like these just worked to pull the audience right back out. Toss in the stream of obscenities that Mia spews out, like Reagan in the Exorcist, and you’ve got some more giggles. We may have fainted at that kind of behavior 40 years ago, but now the audience just laughs every time a demon talks about sucking cocks.
Maybe the threat was just too generic. The Candarian Demons are replaced by the generic demons of the book, itself just a grimoire and not the Necronomicon, from which we can read the demon’s name is ‘Shaitan’. Christian demon lore *yawn*. Or maybe it was the plot point of needing to kill five souls in order to raise an abomination from the ground, the same plot just used in Evil Dead parody/homage Cabin in the Woods. Regardless, it just didn’t bring enough home to make us afraid of the trees, and the dark, and the isolation. Maybe nothing can anymore. Or maybe I’m asking for too much, hoping people will be afraid of any film today they way they used to be of the video nasties.
The fact that the film loses the ability to scare the audience at any point is too bad, because there is so much to love about the new Evil Dead. The reverence for the old material is there, which is great, and the new additions really shine. Visually, the film is marvelous, with clear visuals that hide none of the action or gore. The camera, much like Raimi’s original work, is constantly moving, pulling the audience along with the characters, deeper into a scene, or right up to the gore. It feels fast, it feels alive and intense. It just looks and feels fucking awesome, frankly. And the gore is top-notch, in ways we haven’t seen in a lot of films in a long time. Blood spatters everywhere, body parts get removed, the chomping and slurping and slicing of flesh pouring out of the speakers is enough to put your hair on end. You can tell that Director Fede Alvarez loves horror movies, and set out to make the best one that he could. And goddamn, is it quality.
It was stated at the beginning of this review that Evil Dead was a great modern horror movie. And it is, no doubt. It just lacks a psychological edge, that push that makes you afraid when you’re alone in your room after a viewing. But as far as horror remakes go, Evil Dead kicks the shit out of them. Nightmare, Friday, Texas Chainsaw, they all missed the time and care and strive for excellence that Evil Dead had crammed into it. And I look at shit like Insidious and The Apparition, The Unwanted, how it’s all just generic crap still riding off of the coattails of The Ring, and Evil Dead kicks the shit out of all of them too. And maybe, then, it’s not that Evil Dead is amazing so much as that no one else is doing anything worth a shit in the horror genre with all of the tools at their disposal. With all of the long history of horror to draw from, and the limitless FX potential we can achieve, the make-up, the CG clean-up, the access to the digital technology of sound, and video, and the willingness of young talent to break in via a good horror flick. You take all of those awesome components, and what are people making with it? More knock-offs of The Ring, and some shitty video game adaptations. Not that we can claim another 80’s remake to be original, but at least it tries to put something scary and coherent on display. At least it looks and sounds professional, and at the same time, doesn’t pull away from the spectacle of the pain and misery and blood on-screen. And at least it can make an audience cheer to the rev of a chainsaw.
Evil Dead, at the very least, takes all of those elements, and takes a loud, slick, no-holds barred approach to horror. It wants to take all of the things we can do with film, and it wants to push the envelope as far as it can go. It makes a statement, and that statement is, “I’m going to shove this chainsaw down someone’s throat. Literally down their throat. And you’re going to watch it. and cheer. Fuck you.”
And for that alone, I’m going to tell you to go and give these guys your money this weekend. I may not have shat my pants, but I think it lives up to the name of Evil Dead, for at least having some balls.
Evil Dead opens in US cinemas this Friday, and pretty much everywhere else worldwide in the month ahead.