The harrowing imagery alone makes the “Evil Dead” (*** OUT
OF ****) remake worth the price of admission.
“Spider-Man” helmer Sam Raimi directed the original “Evil Dead” back in
1981. He swirled horror with humor in a
low-budget scream-fest with a no-name cast.
Despite its crappy special effects, this supernatural splatter-spoof
ranks as a cult favorite among gorehounds.
Raimi went on to direct two sequels, and Bruce Campbell attained the
status of B-movie hero. The skewered
cinematography, atmospheric settings, and maniacal urgency made this contrived
85 minute nonsense unforgettable. Comparatively,
in his directorial debut, writer & director Fede Alvarez, abetted by co-scenarists
Rodo Sayagues and Diablo Cody, has preserved the premise of the Raimi classic. Nevertheless, he has shunned Raimi’s ghoulish
but campy approach. Moreover, the Uruguayan
native has ramped up the gore far more than Raimi dared. In fact, Alvarez has knocked the bottom out
with some elaborately orchestrated carnage that makes the “Saw” movies look
tame. One scene depicts a girl
mutilating her arm with an electric carving knife. The MPAA must have felt in a charitable mood when
they gave “Evil Dead” an R-rating “for strong bloody violence and gore, some
sexual content and language.” The visual
CGI effects are designed to make you regurgitate. Make no mistake; Alvarez has conjured up one
hellacious nightmare of a movie. One of
the girls acts as if she were auditioning for “The Ring” (1998) rather than
“The Evil Dead.” She crawls around on
her hands with her hair in her eyes and blood and gore all over her body. Indeed,
the isolated cabin-in-the-woods plot provides an excuse for ample mutilation, rampant
dismemberment, and buckets of blood.
Unlike the original, Alvarez’s “Evil Dead” doesn’t duplicate the bucolic
rape of one of the girls. Alvarez
doesn’t plunge the bole of a tree between her thighs as Raimi did in the
original. Instead, Alvarez has a sinister
witch cough up a skein of black licorice that crawls up and into the struggling
girl’s mouth.
In the 1981 original “Evil Dead,” five Michigan State college
students cruised up to a ramshackle cabin in the middle of nowhere to enjoy
Spring Break. They discover a tape
recording and a book fashioned from human flesh in the basement. One of them recites passages aloud from the
forbidden text. The combination of the Book
of the Dead being opened and its incantations being uttered summons evil. Predictably, all Hell breaks loose. The big change in the remake is Alvarez
provides an incendiary prologue. Two men
manhandle a girl into a basement and lash her to a post. The girl’s father incinerates her while a
crone mutters incantations from the same Book of the Dead. As an opening gambit, this torture scene
prepares us for the pandemonium that ensues.
Level-headed college students made up the original “Evil Dead” group. The remake deploys a group of friends rehabilitating
one of their own. Mia (Jane Levy of “Fun
Size”) has a monkey on her back in the form of heroin. After spending several years apart from each
other, she is reunited with her older brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez of “Red”),
who knows nothing about her addiction. The
two share some bad memories. Namely,
David left Mia to contend with their dying, mentally distraught mom. Not only is Mia a heroin junkie, but also this
isn’t the first time she has tried to conquer her craving. As Olivia (Jessica Lucas of “Clovefield”)
informs David, she and her friends don’t intend to let Mia bail out of the
treatment. For the record, David is the vague
equivalent of Ash (Bruce Campbell) from the original. Alvarez has given all the characters different
names. This time around, Olivia and
company plan to keep Mia isolated in the woods while she endures a cold-turkey
withdrawal. No sooner has this been said
and done than Olivia’s bespectacled boyfriend, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci of
“Fanboys”), finds the Book of the Dead, made from human flesh, scrawled in blood,
and bound by barbed wire. Foolishly, Eric
reads aloud from this tome. Meantime,
Mia stumbles outside into the woods.
Suddenly, vines, branches, and roots trap poor Mia in the underbrush and
hold her captive for an evil witch. This
lesbian witch spews profanity from her vile, wretched lips, and a licorice like
skein of black sludge slithers up into Mia’s mouth. At this point, “Evil Dead” leaves mild behind
and turns heavy-duty.
Alvarez wallows his cast in blood, gore, and more. You know when you see a battery powered nail gun
that somebody is going to use it on somebody else. Before things get really gory, a poor old
pooch is slaughtered, but canine’s death is staged off-screen. Everybody suffers horribly in “Evil Dead,”
and nobody truly escapes without either sacrificing a body part or donating
enough blood to revive a corpse. The
most iconic scene in this savage saga occurs near the end. A one-armed, demon-possessed character gives
another demon- possessed character a lobotomy courtesy of a chainsaw through
the mouth. Essentially, “Evil Dead”
lives up to its title with oodles of evil and death. Further, Alvarez takes his subject matter
seriously enough that you could suffer nightmares from his over-the-top
depiction of malevolence. Of course, we
don’t give a hoot who gets what in the end.
The characters qualify as one-dimensional victims. “Evil Dead” spends most of its time trying to
gross us out with its graphic detail. If
you’re squeamish, you should shun this remake with its bad night in the
emergency room blood and gore. As
remakes go, “Evil Dead” tops the original in terms of its polished production
values, but its authentic looking gore doesn’t surpass its predecessor’s sense
of humor. While the characters have more
to occupy themselves with in the remake, nobody generates the charisma that
Bruce Campbell did the original.
Incidentally, if you sit through the end credits, you will see Bruce
make a cameo.
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