A remake of a remake

Rating: Null/10 (17 April 2013)

If I've learned anything from "Evil Dead," it's that if I get into a grisly car accident and lose my arm, a roll of duct tape will patch it up.
"Evil Dead" is a well-made and great looking horror movie directed by Fede Alvarez who has experience in independent movies and it is produced by the minds behind the original "Evil Dead" (1981), Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell. Although the manipulators behind the project promote greatness, the movie falls short past all the gore and carnage. This is a remake, and the remake itself uses a horror story done to death in Hollywood. Call it a remake of a remake.
The story picks up in a remote cabin in the woods, implied to be somewhere in Michigan. Five young adults dwell there for their annual vacation, and the characters are randomly assigned first names with no surnames. They are Mia, David, Eric, Olivia and Natalie. Flip through your high school yearbook and you can probably find each of them.
Mia and David are siblings, and Mia is a recovering dope addict. Last year things didn't go too well, according to Olivia, the group's self-appointed nurse. Hoping to overcome addiction, the friends try rehabilitating Mia again, this time with her estranged brother David on watch, but something tells me he came just to mingle and mesh with his girlfriend, Natalie.
A third of the way in, I couldn't identify if the irony was on purpose. The movie sets up one-dimensional people in a dark, ominous place with all odds against survival but the character's reiterate they'll be fine. The audience should be chuckling along, or they're as nearsighted as the characters.
Mia smells a foreign odor beneath the cabin. The friends discover a basement through a bloodstained trapdoor and find a cellar decorated in hanging cats which look drier than beef jerky. There is also a book, heavily bound and laced in barbed wire which indicates it mustn't be touched but one character, Eric, opens it anyways. Doing so awakens an old evil. Mia is the first to be possessed and the rest is a survival of the fittest with a horror twist.
There is an audience for this film and they will be pleased by the superfluity of old-fashioned, practical effects substituting for CGI. Someone might be inspired to open a Halloween store. But the gory visuals do not explain the shortcomings of a poor story. If anything they distract.
For instance, in the mood-setting prologue, a father lights his own possessed daughter on fire to salvage her soul. This all allegedly happens in the cabin's basement. But when was this? How recent? When the friends occupy the cabin in the spring, does another family rent it in the winter? Mia and David bring a dog along for company. It's a wonder the pooch never sniffed out the dead cats.
"Evil Dead" is a great movie for teenagers on a Friday night who crave an adrenaline high. Beyond that, I can't grasp its potential. For fans of the Raimi movies, they'll use their knowledge of those films as a commentary against this one. For average folks, like me, the movie offers nothing new.