As Impressive as it is Disgusting

Rating: 8/10 (9 December 2014)

The plot very simply centers around a group of friends who isolate themselves in a cabin in the woods in order to help one of them quite heroin cold turkey. When one of them finds an ancient book of evil and reads a few passages, though, things turn ugly. Real ugly. Demon ugly. They start getting possessed and turning on one another. General horror ensues.
Formulaic, yes, but wow--what a movie. This reboot takes what was slightly amusing about the original and makes it downright terrifying. It's semi-predictable and the guy who plays one of the main characters, David, is freaking terrible, but it's a fast, intense ride from start to finish that's debatabely one of the best horrors of the decade.
I'm tempted to call this movie a "guilty pleasure," but no--I stand by this movie and feel no guilt for endorsing it. Yes, the gore is absolutely appalling and stomach-churning, and yes it was admittedly predictable, but this movie holds SO much merit.
Let's start with Jane Levy playing Mia. She delivers the best performance in a horror movie like this in recent memory, coming close to Marilyn Burns in "Texas Chain Saw Massacre." She absolutely nails it. And she came out of freaking nowhere. This is her third movie and she's just incredible. Now this isn't an impressive monologue sort of acting job or a wide range of emotions kind of thing--a horror movie like this is almost purely physical acting. She sprints, dives, crawls, and stabs her way across the screen and she does it with appropriately unrepressed terror. And that terror is infectious, transferring right through the screen into the audience.
Next, the effects. Most of the time these days, a movie monster ends up being a CGI blob whirring across the screen (i.e. "Mama"). I thought the days of practical effects were over, especially in the horror genre, but then I saw this. It only uses CGI to touch up scenes and remove cables and such and it totally pays off. I don't usually like buckets of blood in horror movies, and while I still stand by psychological horror more than slashers, this level of shock deserves some kind of attention. It is so in-your-face disgusting because, like fight scenes in "The Raid," it is filmed with the utmost clarity and the actors know how to respond to it because it's actually in front of them instead of being added in post. If you can manage to keep your eyes on the screen while a girl cuts her tongue in half with a box-cutter, you'll see what I mean. Yeah, it's freaking disgusting and borderline sadistic, but this is old school, passionate horror.
Next, Mia's storyline is way more complex than it needed to be and that's totally OK with me. You could legitimately view this entire movie as an alle(gore)ical tale for battling drug addiction. This whole layer of the movie is totally unnecessary, but, if you're into that kind of thing, much appreciated.
Lastly--I can not fathom the amount of fans of the original who disliked this movie. A lot of the complaints I'm seeing is that the acting is bad, the violence is sadistic, and Ash isn't in it anymore. First off, the acting in the original is absolutely awful--and I understand that it's supposed to be a joke for the most part, but trashing the new one for that is hypocritical. Now the violence--the only reason the original wasn't more violent is because they didn't have the budget to make it so. The original contains a possessed woman being hacked into like seven pieces and then flopping around and the only reason it happens off screen, is because the effects would have been too complicated for them to show on screen. If anything, the reboot is equally as sadistic, but more fully realized. And Ash. He was a man of his times, he really was. If they tried to put a character like him into a modern movie, it never would have worked. A man's man, funny 70s action hero thrust into a horror movie. Yes, it was funny, but why try to recreate it? He had his time and trying to rehash that would have only resulted in more fan-boys whining that they didn't get it right.