Title: Evil Dead
Directed by: Fede Alvarez
Distributed by: Tristar Pictures
Release Date: April 5, 2013
Rated: R
Synopsis: Five friends head to a remote cabin, where the discovery of a Book of the Dead leads them to unwittingly summon up demons living in the nearby woods. The evil presence possesses them until only one is left to fight for survival. (Via IMDB)
Brian’s Review: I threw up the first time I saw the original Evil Dead, and I haven’t been the same since. My dad introduced me to horror when I was ten. I watched Halloween, The Exorcist, A Nightmare on Elm Street. But the movie that really did me in was The Evil Dead. I had never seen anything like it, a horror film that bloody, that gory, that… effective. It’s a low-budget classic, one of my favorite movies of the 80′s. So why wasn’t I as upset about the new remake, when I wanted to practically burn every print of the remakes to Halloween and Nightmare? From the first trailer, to the first batch of reviews, I felt a lot better about this remake. It was in the hands of filmmakers who wanted to do the original justice and make a film that was both nostalgic and fresh. I walked into Evil Dead excited, not sad and disappointed at Hollywood. And the excitement was earned. This is a solid horror movie, just as bloody, just as crazy, as the original, with some new tricks up its sleeve. There were scenes in this film that literally made me drop my jaw to the floor, and there were scenes that made sit up and think, Wow, I’ve never seen that before!
The first thing this remake does right is not try to recreate the original to its very core. There is no Ash in this remake, no five friends just casually meeting up at a cabin in the woods. A brother and sister are the central couple of this remake, with the sister struggling with some mental episodes in her past. There’s not really any romance at all between the five “victims,” which is unusual and kind of refreshing for once. We meet five strong independent characters who are suddenly faced with the unthinkable; the brainy teacher reads from the Book of the Dead, and about seventy-five bloody minutes of havoc ensues. There’s a little bit of set-up, just enough to get us invested in the characters, and then the fun gets going. And when the first character starts “changing,” this roller-coaster ride doesn’t stop until the credits start rolling.
If you’re into these kinds of movies, you’ll have a blast, like I did. This is possibly the goriest movie I’ve ever seen in a theatre; how it got an R rating is a mystery. The destruction of a key character toward the end is so over-the-top grotesque I was shocked at how it passed the ratings board. I’m glad it did, though, because any brand new movie calling itself Evil Dead deserves a movie as bloody, if not bloodier, than the original. And in that regard, this movie delivers. Director Alvarez has a lot of style, but not so much that it gets in the way of the scares. He lets the horror play out at just the right tone, one between humor and terror, and excels at racketing up the suspense at every turn. He’s also really good at paying attention to the small details. It’s not the explosion of a head that makes us scream. It’s the character pulling a tiny nail out of his neck, or the chainsaw just nicking a bone in the leg. There are at least ten cringe-worthy moments like these in the movie. The make-up effects are top-notch, and I also appreciated the music, which had some nods to the original. The actors are fine, although Shiloh Fernandez, who was also in the dreadful Red Riding Hood, is a little too bland in the lead role. He’s pretty, but not much more than that.
The horror remake craze started ten years ago, with the terrific Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with Jessica Biel. I thought that was a great remake. I gave it four stars, and my newspaper editor at the time was flabbergasted when I put it on my top ten films list of 2003. This year we get the remake of one of the last seminal horror films, Evil Dead, which simply works. Pretty much every other remake wedged in between the years 2003 and 2013 has been crap, or worse, blasphemous. With the release of Evil Dead, can we finally nail the final coffin on horror remakes, at least for a little while? I really hope we don’t eventually have to see remakes, of the remakes, of the classics. Go out and enjoy Evil Dead, but starting now, let’s focus on original horror. We all know it’s out there.
