Oh good God... where to begin. Let’s start by saying that I respect the original Evil Dead movie (maybe a bit less now) because even though I hate the horror genre with a PASSION, The Evil Dead basically started it. It was original, which earns it a lot of points in my book. But not only that, it was an exercise in low-budget, campy, yet entertaining horror. THAT is what directors should be doing with the horror genre nowadays; not revisiting old classics and neutering them like this. Basically, Evil Dead represents the worst tendencies of the genre-- excessive gore porn, gratuitously unimaginative decapitations, and the WORST. DIALOGUE. EVER. Let us begin... the anus asunder-tearing.
Evil Dead is the 2013 remake of the horror classic, which really should have been left alone. I don’t understand people who call themselves horror fans, yet loved this movie. If someone remade Raiders of the Lost Ark or Die Hard, it wouldn’t matter if it was any good-- THAT’S JUST NOT FUCKING DONE. You don’t touch a classic, a plain and simple fact that seems to have eluded Sam Raimi, who has gone back to his most famous film and redone it with better special effects George Lucas-style. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a genocide. Why can’t directors just leave their movies and their franchises alone? When will Hollywood learn that reboots never work?
Anyway... Evil Dead basically takes everything you loved about the original and flushes it down the toilet. Instead of practical, claustrophobic pacing, we are given an unabashedly stupid story about a group of five kids (it’s always five) who stay at a cabin in the woods in the middle of nowhere in order to help one of their group overcome her crippling addiction to generic movie drugs. Sure, this is a new take on the now-monotonous story, but it just drives the point home that this movie should never have been made. It just tries so hard to be different from the original, but overall it’s just an unremarkable movie that spends so much time setting up death scenes that it doesn’t bother to even PRETEND to be creative.
Anyway, long story short: They find a book bound with human flesh in a dungeon filled with cat bodies. Of course, the next logical step is to read the fucking thing out loud, ignoring the warnings scrawled in blood all over the pages and summoning a shitload of demons from hell... or whatever. First the crack addict gets possessed (and they can’t tell for a while, because... she’s a crack addict) in the exact same way as the original did it: Rape by tree branches. She then proceeds to go full raging methhead on them, forcing the gang to lock her in the basement. Then some other girl gets possessed, which the director uses as an excuse to have someone literally try to cut their face off with a shard of glass. If that doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, well, I guess the legions of horror junkies who eat this shit up have gotten to you already. Anyway, the last female character gets possessed, leaving the two guys to fend for themselves. And they do so surprisingly well, even after getting shot at least two dozen times with a nail gun. They’re such troopers.
But the biggest sin this movie commits is the finale. After burying his crackhead sister alive, the main character digs her back up (assuming that the demon is gone from her body) and tries to revive her using an improvised defibrillator. And, even though she had been in a car accident, burned by boiling water, buried alive, and possessed by the devil, she miraculously recovers. But then another one of the baddies is back, and the main character has to shoot a gas tank to kill it, but that kills him in the process. So now the main character is dead. And we’re supposed to start rooting for his druggie sister immediately without even questioning why the director JUST KILLED OFF THE HERO OF THE MOVIE. Seriously. It’s fucking stupid.
This atrocity tries to be campy horror, but all it achieves is being horrifically campy. It goes absolutely over-the-top, with a rainstorm of blood, incredibly gross and pointless vomiting sequences, and a complete lack of good taste or entertainment. Also, it somehow feels the need to cause every character to lose a hand at some point. Fucking brilliant shit right there, man. It does nothing more than set itself up again and again for the most blatant, banal, and generically egregious decapitation sequences ever put to film. This is a total fucking embarrassment to the genre, and all but kills the memory of what the once-great horror genre was like back in the 70s and 80s.
Oh, did I mention that the dialogue is terrible? Characters say bland horror movie dialogue as if they just want to get through the movie without putting in any actual effort. And not only that, but they do it in the most boring way possible: Monotone delivery with Kristen Stewart’s facial expressions. Watching these useless and interchangeable characters rattle off their memorized lines without one iota of acting capability is bad enough, but when they’re telling pitifully generic backstory about supposedly heartbreaking deaths in the family via wordy exposition? Oh God, somebody slit my wrists.
Final Score for Evil Dead: 2/10 stars. Really, unless you’re a psychopathic killer who gets off by watching people get decapitated, I see no reason to watch this movie. It’s offensive to all five of my senses. Yeah, I could SMELL the bad emanating off of this thing. The bottom line: This is a grossly misguided, unnecessary, boring, gory, ugly remake of a far superior movie. But it’s also a perfect analogy of what horror has become. I just never thought the genre would stoop this low.
No comments:
Post a Comment