Evil Dead

 

One year after Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard gave us their masterful tribute to horror, The Cabin in the Woods, we get a remake of what is perhaps the essential "cabin in the woods" horror film of the past 30 years - Evil Dead.  The original launched the career of a young filmmaker named Sam Raimi, and started its star Bruce Campbell on the way to legendary cult status.  Something tells me this movie won't have the same effect for its director, or for anyone in its cast.  It's slicker, sleeker, and definitely a lot sicker than Raimi's film.  But it's also kind of hollow, and certainly not as imaginative.

This is a remake that has had all the fun, atmosphere, terror, and memorable characters removed from the equation.  What else is there?  Well, a lot of well-executed gore.  Done with pretty much all practical effects and as little CG as possible (if any), the blood and gore effects are certainly something to behold.  A person's tongue is split by a knife, chunks of flesh and facial tissue are removed, appendages are chopped off with wild abandon, and the blood flows so freely, it's literally raining from the skies by the time the climax comes around.  How the movie avoided an NC-17 in its present state is a mystery, and yet another notch in the MPAA Hall of Shame.  It's obvious that first time director, Fede Alvarez, has a knack for this kind of shock imagery.  Now all he needs is to learn how to generate terror in his films, because as bloody as the thing is, it's just not scary in the slightest.  That's because behind all the severed limbs and screaming demonic ghouls, there's just no soul to this picture, and absolutely nothing to care about.

While there have been some changes made, for the most part, the basic premise remains the same.  Five college friends have arrived at an old cabin for the weekend in an effort to help one of the group, a young girl named Mia (Jane Levy), kick a drug habit.  The other members of the group include Mia's emotionally distant older brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez), friendly nurse Olivia (Jessica Lucas), David's girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), and Kurt Cobain lookalike, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci).  The weekend is not going well, as Mia seems to be having a harsh reaction to kicking drugs cold turkey.  Things get even worse when the group's dog uncovers a trail of blood leading to a cellar door.  Said door leads to a room full of dead cats hanging on hooks, signs of some kind of ancient ritual, and a creepy looking book made from human skin that contains various spells for summoning demons and beasts, as well as handwritten warnings scrawled across its pages not to read the book.

Naturally, Eric winds up reading the book, and even reads the ancient scripture that is supposed to summon the ancient demons out loud to himself as he glances over the forbidden tome.  Did I mention that the characters in this movie are as dumb as dirt, and constantly make bad decisions just so there can even be a movie in the first place?  The evil is summoned, possesses Mia, and soon everyone is dying in a lot of nasty and elaborate ways.  The movie telegraphs some of its violence in not so subtle ways.  At one point early in the film, we get a close up of Natalie carving raw, bloody meat with an electric meat cutter.  Why, you ask?  Because later on, she'll be using that same device to chop off her own arm when it becomes possessed by the evil spirit and starts to rot away.  And it's also established early on that Olivia the nurse carries a lot of needles in her little medical bag.  How much money you want to bet she'll be using those needles for torture instead of medical uses long before the credits come?

Evil Dead lacks a character we can get attached to, or a meaning to exist outside of being a technical demo for gory special effects.  Since Ash, the lead character from the original movie has been removed, we don't have anyone we can root for.  All five of the young people staying in the cabin are written as being incredibly stupid, and some even lack the most basic of character traits.  That's because director Alvarez only cares about the bodily fluids splattering on the walls, floors, ceiling, whatever.  He couldn't care about raising tension, building character, or giving us something to care about.  He's all about the "money shot", and that's all this movie is.  One messy scene of killing and torture after another.  There are some tiny bits of dark humor sprinkled here and there, but they are nowhere near as clever as the humor touches in the earlier films.

 

This movie obviously wants to be an endurance test.  Can you watch it all the way through?  Can you handle all the images of torture and disembowelment?  I actually had no trouble.  In fact, the movie became kind of boring once I realized there wasn't really anything behind it, and it was just another empty and unnecessary remake.  Even when the film starts to go in a different direction from the original during the end, it's still not that interesting or exciting.  This is what happens when you pump up the violence, and decrease everything else that made the earlier film work.  You get a bloody film with no heart.

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