Two stars. Rating: R, for profanity, strong bloody violence and relentless gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.5.13
Teaser posters for Evil Dead insist that it’s “the most terrifying film you will ever experience.”
Bold words, and an audacious
claim.
And complete nonsense, as well.
This pallid remake isn’t the slightest bit scary. It is, instead, little more
than a gross, predictable and thoroughly derivative splatter-fest in a horror
sub-category that needs to be retired, for at least a decade, in the wake of
last year’s vastly superior The Cabin in the Woods.
It’s hard to believe that the
idiots populating this storyline — five clueless twentysomethings who obviously
don’t share a single brain cell between them — were co-concocted by Diablo
Cody, who won a well-deserved Academy Award for scripting 2007’s smart, sassy
and savvy Juno.
Then again, Cody similarly
insulted viewer intelligence with 2009’s Jennifer’s Body, so it would seem
she has a blind spot when it comes to well-executed horror. As in, she couldn’t
write the genre to save her career.
But getting back to that boast
about “terrifying.”
No less an authority than Stephen
King — who knows a thing or two about scary stuff — made the following astute
observation in his 1981 nonfiction book, Danse Macabre:
I recognize terror as the finest emotion, and so I will try to terrorize
the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if
I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.
It’s an important distinction. A
truly “scary” movie is one that lingers: that sends you home as a quivering
mass of goose-flesh, unwilling to turn off the lights and go to bed, unwilling
even to hide beneath the covers, for fear of what might stare back when you
finally surface to peer around the room. that's “scary.”
King may settle for gross-out,
but he always tries for genuine terror; as a longtime reader, I can attest to
this.
Far too many of today’s horror
filmmakers, in stark contrast, obviously can’t be bothered to try for anything
as noble as terror. It’s much too easy to sever limbs, spew bile and toss
buckets of blood at the camera lens. As for character development or logical
behavior, they’re obviously inconsequential distractions.
Fede Alvarez is a truly lazy
director. He’s also a hack writer, as co-scripter of this mess with Cody and
Rodo Sayagues. Evil Dead marks Alvarez’s feature debut, an opportunity the
young Uruguayan filmmaker apparently “earned” on the basis of shorts such as Panic Attack and El cojonudo.
Based on the results, he
squandered the opportunity.
Evil Dead has nothing to
recommend it: no fresh ideas, no impudently original methods of debasing a
human body, no inventive camera moves. Indeed, cinematographer Aaron Morton’s
lone stylish visual — a pell-mell “shaky-cam” charge through a dark forest — is
stolen shamelessly from 1981’s original Evil Dead.
Back then, newbie writer/director
Sam Raimi and cinematographer Tim Philo achieved that vertigo-inducing effect
by bolting a camera to a 2-by-4 held by two production assistants, who then ran
like hell to get the desired “crazed pursuit” motion. Raimi and Philo concocted
the technique out of desperation, lacking the budget for anything else. The
irony, of course, is that he wound up with a gonzo effect that contributed
greatly to his film’s manic intensity. And has been imitated ever since.
Raimi also delivered a cheeky
script that gained additional dark humor from a career-making performance by
Bruce Campbell, as that film’s hapless hero, Ash Williams. Ash’s increasing
agitation is hilariously handled by Campbell, who also delivers the necessary
vigor to Raimi’s dialogue. Even when matters finally go over-the-top crazy,
we’re always firmly on Campbell’s side; he’s a plucky, cheeky,
desperate-enough-to-try-anything protagonist who deserves to survive.
The five losers in Alvarez’s
remake, on the other hand, can’t be dispatched quickly enough. They’re lifeless
and soulless: little more than dialogue mannequins who woodenly intone their
scripted lines with no passion — or credibility — whatsoever. We couldn’t care
less about them as people; they actually become more interesting when, one by
one, they morph into deranged, demon-infested killing machines.
Anyway. The story, such as it is:
Longtime drug addict Mia (Jane
Levy, well known from TV’s Suburgatory and Shameless), determined to kick
the habit, orchestrates her own intervention by dragging some friends to — all
together now — a deserted cabin in the woods. To her surprise, the group
includes her brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez), who has distanced himself from
the family, under circumstances that this script clumsily tries — and fails —
to explain with any conviction.
The rest of the gang comprises
David’s willowy blond girlfriend, Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore); and another
couple, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Olivia (Jessica Lucas). Eric has some
unresolved issues with David — yet another under-developed plot point — while
Olivia, with nursing training, expects to handle any medical issues erupting
from Mia’s attempt at cold-turkey sobriety.
Ah, yes; the quintet actually is
a sextet, thanks to the added presence of David’s beloved dog, oddly named
Grandpa. You’d think the pooch would be on hand to do something important,
perhaps even heroic. You’d be wrong.
The gang discovers that the cabin
has been trashed by parties unknown: a group we’ve already seen in the film’s
prologue, when a distraught father helps destroy his demon-infested daughter,
with the help of a mojo woman and a truly weird group of redneck bystanders.
What’s up with them, you may wonder. Beats the heck out of me.
Although this exorcism is
successful, the mojo woman rather inexplicably leaves The Nasty Spell Book in
the cabin’s basement, where it waits to be found by somebody stupid enough to
open it. Honestly, you’d think the mojo woman wanted the demon revived.
Back to the present...
Naturally, our group finds the
book; naturally, Eric unwisely reads its incantations aloud, despite numerous
scrawled warnings against doing so. Mia, meanwhile, has descended into an
advanced case of the nasty shakes, which is the first of this script’s two
reasonably clever touches. Since she’s already acting deranged, nobody believes
Mia when she returns from an ill-advised outing in the woods, babbling about
something “out there” that’s coming to get everybody.
Oh, and by now we’ve already seen
Mia trapped by thorny trees and unpalatably raped by a black, slimy, barbed,
snaky thing vomited into life by the resurrected demon. (Give this sequence
credit for serious ookiness.)
Despite Mia’s new-found ability
to twist her body into bone-splintering contortions, not to mention a sudden
fondness for dangerously violent behavior, the other four merrily ignore this
blindingly obvious monster in their midst ... until Bad Stuff starts to happen
to everybody else. At which point, each time, the remaining survivors ignore
the blindingly obvious menace of the fresh monster in their midst. And so
forth.
As Mia further morphs, she begins
to resemble Linda Blair at her most possessed: a bad make-up decision, since it
reminds us of how much smarter — and more wary — the characters in The
Exorcist were.
So, things get grotty. Rapidly.
Stray items such as glass shards, box-cutters, hammers, crowbars, nail guns,
electric carving knives and shotguns are employed, with predictable results. Gore-hounds
with fond memories of Raimi’s original film will be waiting for the chainsaw to
make its appearance; they won’t be disappointed.
A point about these various
objects of limb-shredding mayhem:
It seems a bit odd, particularly
after the events depicted in the story’s prologue, that this cabin would
continue to have electric power. The script makes no mention of a generator,
and you’d expect that to be a significant plot point. But our five cretins
enjoy bright lights and all other amenities ... until they don’t, once something
— the storm? the demon? — cuts off the power.
Fair enough; things always are
worse in the dark. But one wonders, then, why the nail gun functions. Or the
electric carving knife. I guess this demon selectively grants 110 volts to all
items of probable torture.
The chainsaw, at least, runs on
gasoline; that detail is employed as a tension-laden plot point. Or, at least,
it would be tension-laden, if we cared a whit by the time it gets fired up.
The so-called acting is
laughable. Blackmore’s Natalie just stands around like a helpless twit, waiting
to get attacked. Lucas’ Olivia, ostensibly a “resolute” woman, is merely cranky
and bossy. As the apparent “smart one” who nonetheless reads the damned book,
Pucci’s Eric is a complete cliché, down to the eyeglasses and obsessed,
professorial manner.
The irony is that Eric is a
tiresome archetype that Cabin in the Woods lampoons so well, with Fran
Kranz’s Marty. The parody is so perfect that you’d think Kranz somehow knew he
was making fun of Pucci, two years ahead of time.
As the ostensible hero,
Fernandez’s David is a stoic block of granite: just another dim-bulb character
forced, by scripted contrivance, to remain oblivious and bone-stupid to a
degree that defies common sense ... and our patience.
Because the story spends the most
time with Mia, Levy is able to inject some actual depth into her performance. But
she can’t pull off a miracle; the script obviously wants us to view Mia as a
sympathetic character, but under Alvarez’s weak excuse for direction, Levy
overplays the bitchy card to too great an extreme.
As for the narrative’s second
reasonably clever touch, Alvarez, Cody and Sayagues do deserve credit for a
climactic reverse that kicks off an unexpected and genuinely taut final act:
one that’s even gorier than anything that has come before. Which has been
plenty gruesome.
Alas, too little, too late.
Bottom-line rule: Remakes are
pointless if they can’t top, or at least match, their predecessors. This Evil
Dead would have been a flop three decades ago; today, the genre having moved
on, it’s nothing but moldy, maggot-infested leftovers.
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