Directed by:
Fede AlvarezCinematography:
Aaron MortonComposer:
Roque BañosCast:
Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Jessica Lucas, Lou Taylor Pucci, Elizabeth Blackmore, Stephen Butterworth, Jim McLarty, Phoenix Connolly, Bruce Campbell (more)VOD (5)
Plots(1)
A secluded cabin. An ancient curse. An unrelenting evil. The original producers reunite to present a genuenly terryfiing re-imagining of their original horror masterpiece. Five young friends have found the mysterious and fiercely powerful Book of the Dead. Unable to resist its temptation, they release a violent demon on a bloodthirsty quest to possess them all. Who will be left to fight for their survival and defeat this unearthly force of murderous carnage? (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)
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Reviews (10)
Well... Nothing new under the sun. Nothing good either. There's suspense in only about two scenes (Natalie going to get sugar and water, the final hiding), otherwise it’s more or less boring, disgusting things that aren't really disgusting because they get old right away, and the promising idea with the rehab is brought down by the stupid behavior of everyone - the living, the dead and the half-dead.
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Great potential undermined by low IQ. The film’s characters repeatedly behave like naive idiots and deal with situations
by taking unreasonable steps, just like in the worst horror B-movies. However, plenty of positives outweigh this
shortcoming (literally): violence, blood and gore are deliciously elaborated, many scenes are very intense even for
hardened horror fans, the pace of the film is killing (!), the bloody rain in the climax is impressive and the siren sound,
subconsciously causing panic in the audience, is just perfect. One of the better remakes of the horror classics we grew
up with.
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After watching the movie, I thought about how I would evaluate it. Surely, I can’t rate it higher than the original. But I gave that one a single star just for the brutality of it. I admit that I was a bit too harsh back then. Now I know that the brutal irony of the original deserved at least two stars, because it was missing in this movie and so it was just a brutal flop. So brutal, in fact, that they must have used hectoliters of fake blood. I think that Alvarez did a solid job, and a true horror fan must be really excited. It’s just a shame that they wanted the remake to be so different from the original that it ended up just as a pretty disgusting horror movie with actors who have stubs for arms and legs and surprisingly, they last longer than any of us could ever imagine.
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Before I begin, I find necessary to explain my relationship with Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead trilogy. The first one is a very decent serious horror movie that today suffers from its low budget and poor (though good at the time) effects and make-up. The second one, with its exaggerated comedy is beyond me, and Army of Darkness, well, that one’s a joke already. In short, to me the original Evil Dead doesn’t have that cult status, which might be one of the reasons why I liked the new version so much. In any case, I refused to look forward to the remake at first because I was expecting something like the new Nightmare on Elm Street, i.e. a generic and sterile commercial product that’s only exploiting a known brand. But the intense and exceptionally good trailers convinced me (and also a lot of people who otherwise only watch horror once a year or so, and who now are complaining about the excessive brutality – quite a paradox). And well, the truth is that the film is exactly what the trailers promised: a brutal, intense and dirty horror ride that has no recent competition in the cinemas (which actually isn’t too hard, when the most serious competitor in modern gore horror is weak stuff like The Collection). But Evil Dead is not only violent and bloody carnage, it’s also dominated by a bleak and depressive atmosphere, basically from the very first minute. We meet the characters already in the middle of a depressive forest, which we don’t leave until the end. It has incredible pace, it’s intense – for me it was the most fun I had at the cinema in the last year (maybe with the exception of Tarantino’s Django). Script-wise, it’s nothing original, of course – what can you really expect from the premise of “students in a cabin in the forest” a year after Cabin in the Woods? It’s better to bet on a classic and give fans exactly what they want. My only complaint is about the characters, in particular one of them. Natalie is introduced in the first minutes and we don’t see her again for about half an hour (and there are only 5 characters!), after which she takes on that world very effectively. But it’s not a big enough problem to take away one star, because otherwise, the new Evil Dead is precisely what I expected from it. It’s just what I wanted and my congratulations to Alvarez for his work. And I also congratulate all the viewers who appreciate his enthusiasm as a fan (minor script problems notwithstanding). For the rest of the public, we are probably twisted and amoral beings who don’t understand art. But we should come to terms with it already :) PS: To close, I’m adding a quote from the review in “Bloody Disgusting”, with which I fully agree: "This is your Avengers, this is your Avatar, this is whatever you’ve been wanting a ‘big’ horror movie to be for over a decade. Not a perfect movie, but a near perfect experience."
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I have already seen more useless remakes, and I quite understand that after the festival of Raimi's bloody surrealism and genre phantasmagoria, which culminated in the brilliantly unruly and nonchalantly campy Army of Darkness, Fede Alvarez wanted to go his own way. In the first half of the film, thanks to the dense atmosphere and unruly gore violence, he is quite successful, but it can't be tightened without irony, especially with the eruption of clichés at the end. Exaggeration is missing just like Ash's hand, blood sprays all the way to the next hall, but it all just fades out over time. When the new version came up with a "new" story, it should have tried to at least get something out of it (drug dumplings motif). It did not do so, and so the result is barely above average. This composition of old familiar motifs simply lacks any added value other than beautifully hysterical babes. But while all of Evil Dead was a totally misogynistic trilogy at its core, Alvarez eventually ruined it completely unnecessarily. Bleeding girls with a chainsaw are cheesy, but they can’t beat Ash with a shotgun...
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