"I can smell your filthy soul!"
Evil Dead (2013) is an attempt to remake the low budget, horror film classic The Evil Dead (1981) with a higher budget and more gore. This film is director Fede Alvarez's first feature film and it is produced by the creators of the original film: Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Robert G. Tapert.
Five friends decide to spend the weekend at a cabin to help Mia kick her drug use. All goes to hell though when your stereotypical nerdy guy of the group finds a strange book of the dead and starts reading from it. While this sounds like it could be funny, it's actually completely serious and a return to the series' origins as straight horror.
There's a couple things that this film did better than the original. By way of making the events a little more plot based rather than the madness and haphazard way the events unfold in the original. I liked how in this film you can actually follow the evil possessing each member of the group one at a time. It actually starts with the tree rape scene (which gives that scene slightly more meaning than in the original) and then as Mia gets possessed/infected it slowly passes on to each of the other characters as they come in contact with the gruesome version of their former friends.
I also liked the change to the premise of this film, having all the main characters come to the cabin to help a friend detox is actually a really smart change (and I'm guessing the original pitch that made anyone actually consider making this film) Unfortunately beyond the pitch the film doesn't really do anything with this, it could have been used in a really interesting way through out the film as Mia (the girl who is detoxing) is the first one to get possessed and start acting strangely and they could have carried this into the plot of having the other characters really not believe her and have drugs as a bigger element of the plot (thinking they've all been drugged or something) when shit gets really weird but the film doesn't. Instead it just gives us a little bit of an interesting change at the beginning and then drops it almost immediately after that.
Okay lets talk frankly here for a moment, I understand that to make a film these days it's a lot easier to get financial backing by making a remake or a sequel of something else that was successful. I don't like it, but I understand. That's fine and all all: you're a hot young filmmaker just starting your career and you get the opportunity to make a multimillion dollar film with a lot of hype around it. You have to use the title, sure. But after that you pretty much have free reign to make whatever film you feel like. What I don't understand is why you would literally cling to the events that happened in the original [and the original remake: Evil Dead II (1987)] like they were your bible! Do your own thing! This is a solid example of the worst way to make a remake: by doing everything the original did but trying to make it edgier and more "modern."
Another thing this film does is the "who's the protagonist" game that the original Alien (1979) does but, you guessed it, this film does it far worse. Now lots of people have seen Alien so many times that it's easy to forget (and the sequels don't help) but one of the cool things the original Alien did was one by one start killing off characters until you were left with the most unexpected character as your protagonist. This film tries to do that also, one by one killing off all the characters in attempt to make you guess who is the new "Ash" of our series. The only problem? The first character they kill off is our protagonist! Way to make us care about our character film, kill her off (and make her possessed and evil) very early on so that we automatically don't care anymore! By the time she comes around again, I really couldn't care less about this character.
Okay nit-picky sure, but I hated the design of the Necronomicon in this film. [Oh sorry it's the "Naturom Demonto" in this film because it was called that in the original and this film decided to copy that film down to useless details like this.] Yes the illustrations were cool, but they surely didn't look like they were etched in blood. And unlike the original, they had what appeared to be English translations of the book all over it, right on top of the pages ...in what appeared to be red ballpoint pen!
Probably the worst thing about this film is the Logic. Everything that The Cabin in the Woods (2012) was poking fun at with the way characters act in horror films, is right here in this one. So much so, that I was quoting lines from The Cabin in the Woods while watching this one: "Ok, I'm drawing a line in the fucking sand here. Do not read the Latin!" The original didn't even have it's characters read from the book, they play a tape of a man reading it! Also the funny thing about having the Necronomicon translated is that you can read ahead to what's coming! But of course, it takes most of the film before the characters realize that the linear events that are happening in real life are also in the book you've been reading one page at a time.
This film has really bad writing, I've briefly mentioned the logic problems, but worse are the characters and the dialogue. Admittedly, this maybe the result of English being the second language for the director, but the actors have as much responsibility to make their lines work as anyone else. Such cookie cutter horror characters, and blatantly obvious mistakes they make really bring this film down big time.
And finally this film has such an excess gore and almost every bodily fluid you could imagine for really no reason. At first I was thinking this was a tribute to the Italian horror flms like the original kind of did, but unlike those this film tried to make all the bodily fluids as realistic as possible? What is the point? Is it really all just for simple gross-out moments? Come on director, you're better than that! On a brighter note, you could probably play bodily fluid bingo with this film and everybody would be a winner! Hows that for a drinking game?
Despite everything else there's a couple of moments in this film that I felt had a really good sense of suspense and horror, but with such bad characters and dialogue it's hard to think anyone would actually be scared by this movie as a whole. It's just super jarring to have such laughably bad lines next to intensely serious moments. Here comes a tangent, but to me this really shows off how good The Cabin in the Woods was, because that film nailed the bad lines next to horror thing. Oh, is it not fair for me to look at The Cabin in the Woods in comparison with this film? They're the ones who decided to make a remake of the original immediately after The Cabin in the Woods was released which literally calls out all the clichés and lesser parts of the horror genre.
Scares aren't the only great thing about this film either, there's some genuinely "cool" moments I found as well (at least as a horror fan). I actually liked how it started raining blood in the third act, and there was this awesome shot at the very end where a body kind of sinks or gets absorbed into the bloody/muddy ground, it's a downright awesome looking visual. All of this kind of depresses me because if this obviously very talented director was given the chance to make his own original feature there's enough here to prove to me that I would have loved it. But instead he jumps on the chance to make a completely unnecessary remake!
Evil Dead (2013) is pretty much everything The Cabin in the Woods (2012) was trying to make a statement and warn against, and yet here it is one year after The Cabin in the Woods was released. Pretty depressing actually if you ask me.
1.5/5 Stars.
Happy watching!
That's it for my Evil Dead streak on the 31 Nights of Macabre Movies, tune in tomorrow for a brand new indie U.K. horror film that is getting a lot of hype, The Borderlands (2013).
But if you want more Evil Dead goodness check out my friend Daimeon's reviews of the the whole Evil Dead series!
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