Evil Dead: Twilight Edition

Rating: 1/10 (4 July 2013)

A Hollywood remake of the indie low-budget classic horror film that introduced the world to Sam Raimi didn't need to be done. Unfortunately fans of the original, despite their disgust at the idea of a remake, are not going to be able to keep their curiosity from leading them to watch it. We hope that maybe, just maybe, this new Evil Dead will be the same woods and same cabin but new characters to become their victims. We hope that it will enhance the original or that this new director will make it more bloody and brutally extreme, as Alexandre Aja did with The Hills Have Eyes.
The new Evil Dead begins by trying to give the cabin a reason for feeling haunted with an out-of-place back-story in the vein of The Exorcist. Not the original Exorcist but one of the sequels or even the prequel. A little girl is burned alive and shot in the head by her father. Sound horrific? It would have been if the special effects used to create the scene were at least a little better than something out of a Silent Hill video game. The horrible CG after effects make the scene a joke. This also takes away one of the key elements that made the cabin such a mysteriously cold and uncomfortable place. Instead of leaving it's audience to use our own imagination for possible reasons this place is so uninviting, we now have a reason and that reason isn't anything better or scarier than not knowing anything at all.
After the opening title we are introduced to Mia and her friends. Turns out Mia is a drug addict and has come to this cabin with her friends, one of them being a nurse, to over-come her addiction cold turkey. Why has this become a good reason for going to a cabin in the woods in horror films? Anyone who has survived withdrawal from any substance between heroin to crack-cocaine knows that this is the dumbest idea anyone could ever think of. But as in the original Evil Dead films, it's not like anyone with any brains has ever bothered to try to stay in this cabin. This can be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is that this cabin is sitting on a sound stage and the forest surrounding is fake. If there is one thing that truly elevates horror it is reality. In the original, the forest set the mood and the trees were characters. It brought a very real feeling of solitude only found in nature and that feeling came through the screen. It added an eerie presence. Shooting a cabin in the woods horror movie on a sound stage is treating your audience like children going to see a family-friendly fantasy film. The director might as well slap us in the face and call us stupid.
Fede Alvarez tries to get serious with over-dramatic scenes that are so poorly written and executed they wouldn't even pass in a network television drama. The acting and dialogue are something more suited for the Disney channel. These scenes that are suppose to give us insight into these characters are something only children under the age of 12 years old would believe. Is this not an R-rated extreme horror film for mature audiences? Alvarez doesn't seem to know the difference. Perhaps he should go work for the Disney Channel and leave the horror genre alone.
When we do get some practical effects with the gore, it is not anything we haven't seen before and seen done better. The few jump scares are forced and it seems as if Alvarez is desperate to use every trick in the book to try to scare us. The thing is, if it's in the book it means it's been done before so no matter how hard you try or how many different techniques you steal from other films, it still doesn't fool anyone who knows the genre. Shiloh Fernandez is one of the worse actors I've seen on-screen in a long time. If the filmmakers wanted to cater to Twilight crowds, why not just throw Taylor Lautner in the film? He would have done a better job acting than Fernandez anyway.
In the end it is not an unseen force or presence lingering in the woods that has been awoken by a foolish character reading from the book of the dead. In Alvarez's vision, it's something that looks like an Asian ghost girl from Ju-On: The Grudge, which we got used to seeing back in 2004 and is far from scary now.
For fans of the original Evil Dead films, this will be as horrible of an experience as it was for Star Wars fans to witness The Phantom Menace or Indiana Jones fans to watch The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This new Evil Dead is nothing short of a movie abortion. You won't see more horribly written and performed dramatic scenes aimed at a mature audience on-screen. As for the director, Fede Alvarez should not only never be allowed to work in any aspect of the film industry, he should be taken to Guantanamo Bay for 3 years of torture followed by a slow and painful death. Any critic who gave this film a positive review should be fired and publicly shamed because they are the reason this industry is dying.