"Evil Dead" (2013)

Rating: 7/10 (25 October 2014)

For this horror film fan, the original 1982 Sam Raimi-directed "The Evil Dead" remains one of the most purely terrifying motion pictures experiences of my lifetime. Its superior 1987 sequel/remake "Evil Dead II" (also directed by Raimi) was the series high point - and my personal favorite of the original "Evil Dead" trilogy - and was also a perfect marriage of horror and slapstick comedy. 1992's "Army of Darkness" was more fantasy than horror, but it was nonetheless a worthy closer to the original series.
Now it's 2013, and it appears that reboots/remakes of classic horror films are everywhere. It was inevitable that "The Evil Dead" would get the remake/reboot treatment at some point. I was firmly against the idea of a remake/reboot of "The Evil Dead" since the beginning. I could not imagine Sam Raimi - who ascended to the ranks of Hollywood blockbuster-dom with his work on the "Spider-Man" trilogy from 2002-2007 - wanting to hop on the Hollywood bandwagon to remake his first hit movie.
Alas, 2013's "Evil Dead," which marks the debut of Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez, was not the disaster it could have so easily been. Raimi, Rob Tapert, and the almighty Bruce Campbell himself all return as producers on this latest outing Into The Woods. And believe you me, it's not that bad. While the movie starts and stops early on and has an irritating tendency in the earliest proceedings to sometimes elicit unintended snickers out of the audience, "Evil Dead" almost always plays it straight - much like the 1982 original, even though there may be one or two moments of gallows humor to liven the otherwise relentlessly grim mood.
Things begin with an adventure to an isolated cabin in the woods: Mia (Jane Levy) is a recovering junkie who has been hauled out here by her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), and their mutual friends Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), nurse Olivia (Jessica Lucas), and David's girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) as part of her treatment after all other attempts to get clean & sober have failed - so now Mia has to go the detox route cold turkey. While exploring the cabin, they somehow or another wind up in the cellar, where someone slaughtered a bunch of poor felines as part of some kind of abandoned ritualistic sacrifice, and discover the so-called "Book of the Dead." Eric unwisely reads aloud the incantations within it, thus awakening the malevolent supernatural forces that had been lying dormant in the woods outside the cabin. One by one, the friends are slowly possessed by these demonic forces, leaving only one lone survivor to fend them off until morning.
"Evil Dead" does not play around. Much of what made "The Evil Dead" so purely horrifying has remained intact here: gore, self-mutilation, power tools, demonic possession, bodily dismemberment, and more gore. In fact, there's so much going on here in terms of gory special effects that at one point it's literally raining down blood. (Where's Slayer when you need them to provide some background noise for the slaughter?) Believe me, once the terror starts, "Evil Dead" becomes an almost relentless shock- and gore-fest - though obviously because we've seen it all before it lacks the intensity of Raimi's original classic.
Alvarez and his co-scriptwriter Rodo Sayagues pay plenty of homage to "The Evil Dead" (it should be noted that this reboot combines elements of both "The Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead II" - which was done, I would guess, to please die-hard fans of the original film series). Alvarez is also good in keeping up the tension throughout the picture, again in remaining in touch with the spirit of the original film and its sequels (even though it ultimately lacks the ferocious intensity of those films).
It should again be noted that "Evil Dead" is drenched in blood. This is perhaps the most relentlessly blood-soaked "R"-rated horror picture to be released by a major American film studio (TriStar Pictures) so far this millennium - unless you maybe count Neil Marshall's "The Descent" (2005), despite the fact that film was originally a British production released by Lionsgate Films here in the United States. How this movie managed to secure an "R" rating with so much blood is beyond me.
"Evil Dead" - It'll swallow your soul, maybe, if you let it.
7/10
P.S.: Watch after the credits - "Groovy."