A genuinely pretty okay labor of love

Rating: 6/10 (13 September 2013)

Evil Dead is the heartwarming story of a young woman struggling to overcome her substance abuse problems with the help of family, close friends, good old fashioned willpower, and a mystical book bound in human skin. She stumbles and relapses, but she eventually finds the inner strength to tear her own hand off and literally saw addiction in half.
I'm just kidding. But only kind of. Of course, most of you know that this is, in fact, a remake of the ultra-low budget 1980 horror classic and icon of geek culture The Evil Dead, which launched the careers of director Sam Raimi and star/coolest person ever Bruce Campbell. One of these people has been slightly more successful than the other, but to be fair, the other got to replace their hand with a chainsaw, so it's a trade off. If you think that the idea of remaking The Evil Dead sounds sacrilegious, then there are a few things you should know: first, Evil Dead is produced by Raimi and Campbell, and it was supposedly their idea to remake it. Evidently, they wanted this remake to be the movie to be the darker, more serious movie that they originally tried to make back in 1979. Secondly- and this may seem controversial to you- The Evil Dead is not a great movie. Think about everything that defines an Evil Dead movie in popular culture: the cool one-liners of Ash Williams, the sawed-off shotgun, the iconic chainsaw hand, Bruce Campbell's speech about shopping at S-Mart, the juxtaposition of insane, off-the-rails horror imagery with slapstick humor. The thing that all these things have in common is that none of them are in the first movie. Everything that we associate with The Evil Dead is actually in either Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness. Those are great movies. In fact, Evil Dead 2 is the greatest horror-comedy ever made, and if you disagree with that statement, then you are wrong.
The point is, that if there were ever a well intentioned horror remake with a genuine reason to exist, it would be Evil Dead. And for the most part, this remake does work. Sure, it has flaws, and it copies a little too much from Sam Raimi's bag o' film making tricks, but this was clearly a labor of love by the people involved. Specifically, it's the kind of labor of love that involves a metric ton of fake blood. It's this point that I would normally remind people that Evil Dead is not for the faint of heart or stomach, but c'mon- it's a remake of The Evil Dead. While this movie constantly skirts the line between an R-rating and an NC-17, most recent DVD releases of The Evil Dead actually carry an NC-17 rating, so you really ought to see that coming. If you couldn't figure out that this movie is gruesome, I don't know what to tell you- maybe movies just aren't your thing. Of course, the gore in this new version is far more realistic- long gone are the days of spaghetti intestines and red tempera paint blood- though the violence is still cartoonish in nature, even if it's more real in execution. No pun intended, I swear.
Like any remake that has ever worked, Evil Dead does not completely copy the story of its predecessor. It keeps the basic concept, but it is a different film with different characters and different motivations. Most notably, these five people actually have a reason to go out to a cabin in the middle of nowhere that kind of makes sense. As mentioned earlier, one of the characters is trying to quit drugs cold turkey, so she, her friends, and her brother travel to the middle of nowhere so she'll have a harder time relapsing. It's not a good idea, but it's certainly better than going to a cabin in the woods to drink and screw. However, that isn't to say that it doesn't resemble the original in very obvious ways: it keeps the demon-vision zooming camera stuff, and it has numerous sequences that are very clearly re-workings of events from the original and its sequel. Moreover, if you're familiar with the original trilogy, nothing in Evil Dead is going to surprise you; the plot may differ from the original, but all the beats are in the same place. It's a pretty okay horror flick; yes, the gore is the textbook definition of excessive, but it builds up nicely, and it is often genuinely scary, even to someone as hard to scare as I. It succeeds mostly as a modern companion piece to the original films, but it's not without its flaws.
Evil Dead takes more risks than most films, but it never goes off the rails in the way the originals did. While this is a better movie than the original on a purely technical level, that's not what made the originals so good. The Evil Dead ultimately succeeded because it made up for its lack of budget in sheer ballsiness. It wasn't great, but it sure was memorable, and it was truly scary in a way that really sticks with you. Nobody's going to accuse it of being forgettable, but it never reaches the highs that it should.
But still, Evil Dead is a good movie. It's worth checking out if you're a fan of horror movies, and fans of the original will get a kick out of it. If you want to see it, you should see it. But it's not a great film, and it's not really worth more than one viewing. But hey- it's still worth one more viewing than 95% of horror movies made in the last fifteen years, so there's that.