Evil Dead (2013)
Directed by Fede Álvarez
Mia, a drug addict, is determined to kick the habit. To that end, she asks her brother, David, his girlfriend, Natalie and their friends Olivia and Eric to accompany her to their family's remote forest cabin to help her through withdrawal. Eric finds a mysterious Book of the Dead at the cabin and reads aloud from it, awakening an ancient demon. All hell breaks loose when the malevolent entity possesses Mia.
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The problem is that so much is lifted from other films (not just the original Evil Dead, but also most obviously Evil Dead II and The Raid , while The Exorcist is clearly an influence) that nothing feels very fresh or surprising.
We gather that David is afraid in the same way The Exorcist's Father Karras is afraid: afraid that he's been a bad son to a mother who died asking for him in a mental hospital; afraid that he's been a terrible brother to little sister Mia (Jane Levy), whom he abandoned when things started getting rough at home.
Alvarez evokes not only The Evil Dead, but the freaky-deakiness of The Exorcist and the outré "buckets of blood" stylization of pictures like Suspriria and Carrie.
But he has a clear zeal for bloody mayhem, and the chops to make a hodgepodge of borrowed gestures from The Exorcist and Raimi movies seem bracing again.
Soon, though, Mia is looking like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and telling her pals they’re all going to die there.
And let me be the first to say that this new Evil Dead is certainly not flawless Id happily excise the prologue, which offers a mediocre Deliverance fake-out, witch and Wrong Turn inbreds before cribbing more from The Exorcist than Sam Raimi (the whole Your mother sucks cocks in hell! bit).
Sam Raimi, the Detroit-born director of no-budget 1981 classic “The Evil Dead,” understood that, effectively blending camp comedy and scares like no filmmaker since Tobe Hooper redefined the concept of familial bonding with “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Whereas Raimi's initial Evil Dead gave off a sense of its filmmaker's irrepressible fun in making it, Alvarez's version gives off a vibe of ruthless efficiency, earnestly establishing its cred with the brand of grimy grottiness modern viewers expect from remade '70s and '80s horror films (the redos of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and much of Wes Craven's resume) before moving on to gonzo horror with astonishingly disgusting imagery.
While some are pretty cool, like Alexandre Aja’s “The Hills Have Eyes,” others (like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Rob Zombie’s atrocious “Halloween”) have been really awful.
There are also several nods to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho within the shot selection, with Bernard Herrmann's celebrated score also being evoked on occasion.
Director Edgar Wright both pays homage and pokes fun at the walking dead films that inspired "Shaun," specifically George Romero's cult classic "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" trilogy.
There isn't nearly as much gore as in Jackson's Braindead or Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films, but there is one gut-cruncher moment that goes seamlessly from shock to hilarity as the victim is torn apart and the survivors, without missing a beat, use his disembodied legs to beat back the zombies.
A terrible boyfriend, Shaun (Simon Pegg) works at a small appliance store where, Evil Dead fans take note, someone named "Ash" calls in sick a lot.
"Shaun of the Dead" takes a zany, horror-as-comedy route similar to Peter Jackson's early bloody work and Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" trilogy.
Though the filmmakers are capable of staging home invasion sequences, they lack the visual wit of Jackson’s Dead/Alive or Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy.
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Evil Dead is slightly better than the remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Friday the 13th (2009), The Amityville Horror (2005), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010).
This is not merely another rip-off reboot of an established classic, like the recent A Nightmare on Elm Street and Texas Chainsaw Massacre redos.
Just as slasher films had to evolve or die after Wes Craven’s Scream , movies like this need to be smarter in a post- Cabin in the Woods world.
This isn’t some jokey “Scream” film.
To startle a horror-savvy 2013 audience, one used to the atrocities of the Saw and Hostel series and also the genre send-ups of Cabin in the Woods and the Scream franchise, newcomer Alvarez would have had to considerably up the ante.
With the exception of Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu the Vampyre," this may be the best remake of a horror film and is certainly head and shoulders over any recent do-overs, too many of which have bowed to the more commercial PG-13 rating.
But unlike The Texas Chainsaw Massacare (1974) or Poltergeist (1982), the horror film doesnt stand the test of celluloid time.
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You can bet that Sam Raimi watched this movie once or twice while hashing out the script for “Evil Dead,” as Landis executes a run-through-the-jungle shot that looks like the Evil Zoom at normal speed.
In other words, the minimalist approach worked much better than trying to give it a bigger budget, or “less is more” (just watch John Carpenter’s Halloween to see how brilliantly it can be done).