EVIL DEAD (2013)

If the new remake of Evil Dead proves anything, it's that there's really no point to remaking old horror movies.  Sam Raimi's original classic The Evil Dead has been given a slick update, donating its "the" to the new Wolverine movie and adding enough blood to keep the Cullen family sated for  millenia.  While watching the film, I felt the desire for two things: to rewatch the original, and to see director Fede Alvarez’s next film. While skillfully made and heaping with gore, Evil Dead has little life in it.

The plot is the same in structure, if some of the characters are different. Mia (Jane Levy) ventures to the cabin in the woods with her estranged brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) and their friends (Jessica Lucas, Elizabeth Blackmore, Lou Taylor Pucci). Mia, an addict, has decided to dump her drugs and go cold turkey while her friends look after her at the cabin. They happen upon a ritualistic collection of dead animals in the basement, as well as a strange book with mysterious incantations and numerous warnings not to read them. Naturally, one of these lunkheads reads one, and all hell breaks loose.

While there are a few good scares at the beginning, the midsection of the movie is predictable. It doesn’t have the constant rollercoaster of invention that the original did; it’s content to have certain characters wander into rooms and meet their respective ends in ways that are less shocking than we expect.  The attack scenes are particularly sloppy; a word of advice, kids: when someone attacks you with a crowbar or nail gun, the best thing to shield yourself with may not be your hand.

The drug-recovery plot, while it gives the characters a legitimate reason to stay in the cabin, also gives the movie a lame cookie-cutter redemption arc. In my day kids used to go into the woods to do drugs.

The acting is unexpectedly mediocre. It’s not bad enough to be campy; it’s just bad. In a movie that tries to be kinetic, the performers seem strangely sedated. Even Pucci, who was so good in Thumbsucker and whom I believe is designated as the resident wisecracker here, barely registers above zero.

The tone is just about right. Alvarez begins with an earnest, somber mood and gradually ramps up the ridiculousness until blood is literally falling from the sky and severed limbs are flying across the screen. I can see why Raimi is happy with the film; it stays true to the kind of movie he was trying to make. While it’s more professional-looking and loses a bit of the low-budget charm of the original, the gore is so incredibly over-the-top that it becomes enjoyably campy anyway.

It’s only in the third act, when the movie has shaken itself free of its drug-addiction and family-forgiveness plot, that it begins to take shape as a true Evil Dead film and a memorable horror movie in itself. The blood flows a little more freely and the energy picks up considerably. A character’s response to the demon threat “I’ll swallow your soul!” is completely appropriate.

A few things about the film are worthy of the madness of Sam Raimi’s original trilogy. I loved Roque Banos’s wild score, which sounds like Danny Elfman on steroids. I like the way the demon shouts expletives and insults at the characters, as if it’s seen The Exorcist. Alvarez effectively lifts the speeding-through-the-woods camera motif from Raimi’s original. And there’s still a soft spot in my heart for any scene where a character reads aloud mysterious ancient chants from an old book.

** 1/2 out of ****

NOTE FOR FANS: Stay through the end credits.  Trust me.