Evil Dead (2013)

Horror remakes are a dime a dozen these days. The people who make such films seem to think that just about everything the genre can do has been done, so they just keep digging back into the well of “classics” and bringing them to the screen anew. In this case, Sam Raimi’s influential and actually good story of teenager carnage has been revamped for today’s teenagers who have never heard of it. Keep in mind, this is not THE Evil Dead, but merely an Evil Dead movie done in the same vein. I see it more as a sequel than a remake, but you can look at it however you please. The same basic idea has been used here, though done in a different way. In this movie, several young people go to an abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere to help one of them quit her drug abuse. She winds up getting possessed, though, and all hell literally breaks loose.

How much you enjoy this new Evil Dead will depend entirely upon how much you can handle explicit violent behavior and how much you are devoted to Raimi’s original film. I personally have always admired it as the piece of campy grit that it is, but I welcomed the new ideas of this movie, since a shot by shot remake would have been beyond pointless. Nobody in this movie is named Ash, there is no sinister chanting, no swing ominously banging against the house, etc. I also greatly appreciated its sincerity. The original film’s two sequels, which I’ve never cared for, turned intentionally idiotic humor to full blast and made those movies into dark comedies that just weren’t funny. This new movie is deadly serious and I was thankful for it. In other words, this Evil Dead was made in the spirit of the original film, but is its own creature and not simply a checklist of things fans expect to see. For that, it is actually worth something, but for horror fans only. Everyone else won’t make it twelve minutes.

Now, then, the biggest misstep this movie makes is in its slickness. Part of what made the original film so scary was the way it took advantage of its low budget. Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before it, The Evil Dead was a claustrophobic nightmare of a movie that used abrasive camera tricks and oatmeal-filled gore effects that still shock today. This new movie utilizes very expensive tools and effects, making the movie look very nice, but not really accessing the chilling atmosphere it needed. This is not a scary movie. It is a gross one, for sure, and perhaps occasionally startling, but it is not scary in the slightest. Still, it can be forgiven for this lack of frights because it makes up for it with a good dose of originality. Plus, it actually delivers on its promises, giving viewers exactly what they came to see and doing it with good timing and flair. This is good horror and average entertainment. Just don’t miss out on the classic.

7/10