RECENT WATCHES: Evil Dead (2013)

For as long as I've cared about it, I've heard rumors about “Evil Dead 4.” Fans obviously demanded it, even if “Army of Darkness'” box office didn't exact support it. Over the decades, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell would plant just enough hints about such a project to keep it from slipping totally into fan boy daydreams. As Sam became more and more of a big deal, the likelihood of a fourth “Evil Dead” movie ever actually reaching theaters seemed more unlikely. Instead, the remake route is what it took to get “Evil Dead” back to the big screens. Naturally, Sam and Bruce would shepherd the new version of their classic film through production, with newcomer Fede Alvarez behind the camera. The resulting film would sharply divide fans of the original, with some loving it and others being more indifferent.

Realizing that spending a weekend in a spooky cabin is probably not your average college student's idea of a fun vacation, this “Evil Dead” updates the premise in at least one important way. Following the death of her mother, Mia has become a drug addict. Hoping to get her clean, her friends Eric and Olivia – as well as Mia's estranged brother David and his girlfriend Natalie – take her to an isolated cabin for detox. The group is unaware that demonic rituals have been performed in this location. In the basement, Eric finds a disturbing book and reads from it. And thus, the demonic, possessing spirits are unleashed again to take over another group of young people and destroy their minds, bodies, and souls.

The original “Evil Dead” is remembered as a gore-fest, which is not unfair at all. However, what made Sam Raimi's original film scary was more so its creepy atmosphere, a growing sense of foreboding, the isolation of the setting. No matter how hard it tries, Fede Alvarez' film can never capture a similar feeling. A lot of that has to do with how the original “Evil Dead” was made by a bunch of wackos in the woods and the new one is a professional, 17 million dollar studio production. 2013's “Evil Dead” has the same overcast, brown-and-gray visual palette as many of the big horror remakes from the last decade did. Though there are a few attempts to replicate the original's use of a first-person-perspective, ominous “force,” Alvarez utilizes it much less than Raimi did. The result is an “Evil Dead” shockingly low on atmosphere.

Instead, 2013's “Evil Dead” doubles down on the gore. In fact, explicit violence is seemingly the only trick the remake has up its sleeve. It tries every tactic to make the violence disturbing, to the make the audience cringe. So a needle is driven into an eye and slowly pulled out. Lips are carved open with a piece of glass. Nails are repeatedly shot into someone's face. The meatiness of a human arm is emphasized as a girl is forced to saw it off, the severed arm eventually dangling by a gristly thread. And, of course, the infamous tree rape is reprised. In fact, it's made more explicit, with some barb-wire-like thorns being added to the mix. 2013's “Evil Dead” is trying so hard to shock and unnerve, that it soon comes off as desperate. (That the possessed victims also go on vulgar tirades only furthers this assumption.) By the time blood is raining from the sky, and our protagonist is wedging her arm under a car and tearing it off, we are numb to the film's constant gory assault. The only moment that genuinely made me cringe was when a hand is smashed apart with a crowbar. That was pretty cool.

2013's “Evil Dead” is one of those remakes that feature a number of gratuitous winks at the original. Yet these often seemed inserted more because they are expected than because they make any sense. The opening sequences features a man we can assume to be Professor Knowby but it's never actually expounded on. While the original film introduced a surprising amount of lore around its Book of the Dead, the remake mostly just has the accursed tome set-up events later in the film. Mia is given a necklace highly reminiscent of the one Ash gave Linda in the original... Except this necklace never does anything, making you wonder why the film pauses to introduce it. Once again, we see the evil infection spread through a hand, a twisted ghoul peering out of a trapdoor, even the P.O.V. shot of a sink faucet are recreated. Yet the approach is dispassionate, the filmmakers inserting these nods seemingly because they assumed fans would be annoyed if they weren't they. Nothing sums up this approach better than the literal last minute cameo, which does not connect with the rest of the film in any way. It's just shoved in there.

Ultimately, I think my biggest problem with the remake of “Evil Dead” is that I simply do not care about any of the characters. While the original's cast might've been loosely defined. You at least were invested in who lived and who died. The heroes of the remake range from boring to actively annoying. Though Jane Levy is a likable performer, Mia is introduced as an explicitly bad person. Her habit to go on tear-strewn car drives while screaming profanity does not endear her to the audience. Spending most of the movie as a Deadite, her arbitrary transformation into an Ash-like hero is totally unearned. We never connect with this character in any positive way. Shiloh Fernandez' David is a bland, White Guy McHero horror protagonist and his girlfriend, Natalie, is a similarly thin perfect blondie angel. The kids of the original didn't really realize what they were awakening until it was too late but Lou Taylor Pucci's Eric picks up an obviously evil book and keeps reading from it, long after the point he should've realized that was a bad idea. Only Jessica Lucas' Olivia seems to have any degree of likable personality, as she at least offers empathy towards Mia. Naturally, she's one of the first characters to die.

Early in the pre-release buzz of the new “Evil Dead,” rumors began to percolate that the film wasn't truly a remake but a stealth sequel. This is certainly possible, as the film never directly contradicts anything from the original trilogy. (Though how Ash's car got from 12th century England back to the cabin, I don't know.) It has long since been revealed that the plan was originally for Levy's Mia and Bruce Campbell's Ash to meet up in an eventual sequel. While 2013's “Evil Dead” was certainly a box office success, with reviews that were somewhat mixed but generally leaned towards positive, these plans have yet to materialize. Ash's story instead continued and concluded on television with no sequel to the remake forthcoming. Ultimately, the new “Evil Dead” left me cold, featuring plenty of blood and guts but little in the way of what made the original interesting or endearing. [5/10]