Directed by Fede Alvarez
Expectations: I don’t know. High but also low.
As a die-hard fan of the original films:
Realistically:
The 2013 version of Evil Dead is everything I feared it would be. Instead of encapsulating that rebel, low-budget spirit of the original, it feels incredibly mainstream and not the least bit fresh. I suppose that’s to be expected of a mainstream remake of a genre classic, but I had hopes that with Robert Tapert, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell on-board as producers they’d make sure that they did justice to the legacy of Evil Dead.
What makes Evil Dead a hard one for me to write about is that I can see both sides of the argument. Purists think this should never exist (like most remakes), but modern viewers unwilling to venture into low-budget territory have come to this one in droves. I’m firmly in the purist camp, but I do think they got one thing perfect. This Evil Dead isn’t so much a remake of the original as it is a similar situation with entirely new characters and a lot of cherry-picked elements and shots from the Raimi films. This is definitely the way to go to avoid people like myself bitching about how “the new Ash isn’t as good as Bruce Campbell,” and other such unwinnable arguments. So now there’s no Ash at all. Which is exactly how this movie should be. Ash and Bruce Campbell are inseparable.
In terms of modern horror, though, this is better than a lot of what I’ve seen. I didn’t care too much for it because I inherently don’t care for modern horror, but it does a lot more right than your average mainstream horror film. It’s Rated R and gory, if nothing else. But what that means in today’s film language is that the gore will be incredibly realistic to the point of turning me off completely.
Many horror films of the ’70s and ’80s feature incredibly bloody FX, such as the first two Evil Dead films, and many of these FX look pretty realistic. But even the most realistic of these still looks somewhat fake. The mind — the adult mind, anyway — is never completely fooled, so there was always an element of watching horror to confront our demons and our fears, and to overcome them. Stephen King wrote about this phenomenon in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre. His focus was on the monster movies of the ’50s, but the same principle applies to the entire genre. Horror allows us to deal with extreme fear in manageable ways. But modern horror never feels like it’s working at this level anymore, at least to me. The extreme violence is so realistic that I might as well be attending a deranged anatomy class. It’s tortuous to watch. Evil Dead might not be torture porn in the normal sense of the genre, but it definitely tortures its audience to a certain degree. And I watch horror movies to have fun, something that very few modern horror films are ever concerned with providing.
Oh, and the music is horrible! Generic mainstream music that tries to guide you towards emotions with the subtlety of an atom bomb to the face. For me, that probably killed this movie’s chances more than anything, but I definitely hate this kind of music more than your average bear. And while I’m listing random thoughts: how many fucking times do we need to see the same goddamn Necronomicon page foreshadowing a later event? They show many of the pages at pertinent times throughout, but there’s one page shown over and over again. And when the time has finally come for this overly foreshadowed event to pass, what do they do? They cut to the goddamn page again — mid-fucking-scene! — in case you aren’t paying attention to the exact scene you’re watching AND you missed the last five times they showed the page. WTF! ADD filmmaking at its finest worst.