Humanized evil and lost touch with the original

Rating: 3/10 (25 May 2013)

I had such high hopes for this movie, having read some of the reviews. It was a pity then to see it, disgusted at how low-end it was.
The original was a work of art, succeeded only by part two. The madness that the Ancient Ones were portrayed having - to utterly inhuman perspective - was interesting and poignant. The absurdity was the alien nature of the Old Ones, and how it was handled by the magnificent Bruce Campbell.
This version is cold, to say the least. The Ancient Ones have been given human values of evil, and the human characters are all imbeciles. The director seems to have no feeling for the Lovecraftian evil, that is both bizarre and ridiculous. We are talking about praeter-natural beings that move between the spaces, completely oblivious to the workings of the human mind, but this movie makes them into your common psychopath killer, with human motives.
The fear that entices in the original is not the life of the characters, but their mortal sanity and very soul. Here it is all about staying alive; the risk for your soul scattered about more like an after-thought. Tons of blood and seemingly almost immortal humans are kept alive until the last parts of the movie, where they die in pointless manners, so that you just go , "So what?!" or even "Finally!" instead of "WOW that was!".
The final scenes are the biggest yawn in history, without giving spoilers.
It is a testament to Sam Raimi - who created the first Evil Dead - that with the limited budget he managed to create a classic. This becomes even more apparent seeing how an AAA budget could miss the mark so greatly.
The funniest part is that it isn't even entertaining in a bad way. The production value is great, the effects are stellar, the cast of actors know their job; what is missing is the soul and the mystery.
Something the movie DID accomplish was to make me want to go and see the original trilogy again. Cthulhu Calls!