Gore is its only calling card.

Rating: 5/10 (5 April 2013)

You've already seen this movie. It was the remake of Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's every horror remake you've seen in the past ten years, only separated from the pack by lots of blood and pulp. Because the only thing this new version of Evil Dead has to offer is copious amounts of the red stuff.
The film starts out with a prologue in which one man says "Baby" to his daughter, whom is he about to sacrifice, one too many times. This is just the beginning of the awful dialogue to come in the next twenty minutes as we move to the present day and get introduced to a group of friends through awfully stilted dialogue that only exists in movie world. I'm sure there are better ways to introduce your characters and their relationship to one another than having them openly remind the others of their relationship to them, their profession, and their back story. This is conversation that only exists in movie land, because real people don't need to be told you're their big brother or their best friend or that they're a high school teacher.
After the clunky exposition, the film moves to the "scares" once a strange book is found in the basement of a cabin the friends are staying at to help one of them go through a cold turkey drug withdrawal. The quotes around "scares" was intentional, as there is not one genuine moment of suspense in this lifeless thing. The movie's sole calling card is the over-the-top gore, which, as an entertainment device, quickly loses steam the moment you realize that none of these effects are going to be preceded by any kind of suspense whatsoever. I saw the film with a theater that was 3/4 full and not a single person jumped, screamed, or showed any outward sign of emotion throughout.
Once the unleashed demon begins taking over human bodies, the dialogue again takes another turn for the worse, with the possessed humans spouting dialogue that's straight out of more disturbing films like The Exorcist and come off like a kid trying too hard to impress his friends by saying the most extreme things he can think of without realizing how ridiculous he sounds.
The last half of the film plays out like an effects workshop class, moving from one gross-out effect to another with slight pauses in between. Once the filmmakers intentions are made clear, the boredom quickly sets in. There is nothing remotely entertaining or suspenseful to fill the time. You can only sit there and wait for the next "genius" gross-out effect which is meant to carry the film in the absence of any good characterization or scares. For a horror movie to be slow is one thing, but when something is happening every five minutes and you're STILL bored, something is clearly wrong. And that's precisely what Evil Dead is--a boring film.
The mood of the audience leaving the theater with me was underwhelming. For a movie that touted itself as "The most terrifying film you will ever experience", something obviously got lost along the way. This is every Platinum Dunes effort you've seen, only touched up with some more gore to make up for the complete lack of anything else. Unfortunately this is 2013 and this trick is played out.