So Not Groovy

Rating: 1/10 (29 April 2013)

Now I'm not one of those people who automatically writes off remakes. There are plenty of remakes, including a handful of horror remakes, that I would say manage to be a marked improvement over the original. The Thing (best horror remake ever), The Hills Have Eyes (not great, but still better than Wes Craven's) even Dawn of the Dead (I realize many horror fans would call that sacrilege, but its just a fact. The original had a terrible color scheme, terrible acting and was just all around Romero's weakest zombie opera until the extremely regrettable Diary of the Dead, while the remake of Dawn was really the pinnacle of the short- lived fast zombie fad.) However, this was one of the worst horror remakes I've bothered to check out. And its not because its not graphic enough (a concept more foreign to me than the director of this movie.) If modern torture porn has taught us anything, its that convincingly painful visuals aren't enough. It takes grit, imagination and a certain hard energy to really get under the skin and into the mind of its viewers. And this had none of those things. It was far too slick to feel real, the demon voices were not nearly weird and disturbing enough no matter how hard they tried to ripoff The Exorcist, and the acting was far too flat to sell either the demonic possessions or the terror that the non demonic characters were supposedly experiencing. Now I used to consider the acting to be the weakest part of the original Evil Dead, but as I was trudging through this drek, I came to find myself missing even the most obnoxious performances from the classic. Beyond that, this movie was just dumb, dumb, dumb. The original, while not being the most tightly constructed or intellectually satisfying piece of horror ever, at least didn't contain any plot holes that were too horribly glaring. This movie just didn't make sense on any level. First of all, the reason that they're in this ridiculously creepy cabin is because the main girl is trying to quit heroin cold turkey. In order to design a more terrible place to go through withdrawal, you'd have to be H.R. Giger. Then, when they find blood under the rug and a basement full of dead cats, they still don't leave. Now in the first movie, there's nothing that amiss about the cabin, and the demons are awoken when they unwittingly play a tape with the incantation. In this, the one guy looks through the book, sees a bunch of warnings covering up the words of the incantation so he pulls the old leave tracing trick to reveal them and then says them out loud even though no one else is around. Really? Who would do that? And the stupidity doesn't stop with the characters being almost cruelly moronic, it extends to other plot points as well. Such as the fact that their in a decrepit cabin in the middle of the woods, yet they're using things such as electric meat cutters and hot water. These things are totally out of place and are painfully contrived to setup the gratuitous carnage that the director was hoping would carry this turd through. Forget the fact that its more humorless than the original, as humor really didn't become as much of an element until the sequels anyway. This just needed to be effective in some way, any way, and it truly wasn't. I realize Sam Raimi wanted to finally make some real money off of the Evil Dead name, but as a producer, he could have demanded better than this. And the reason he didn't wasn't because he's lost his knack for horror (the last movie he directed was Drag Me to Hell, which was only rated PG-13 and was way more effective than this gorefest.) Groovy this is not.