Bloody but without personality

Rating: 7/10 (9 April 2013)

In the intro we meet a sweet girl about to be immolated by her parents. her mom recites lines in a foreign language from a book. The girl isn't so innocent, but possessed, and burning her alive is the solution to rid the evil.
Later we meet 5 kids at a cabin, 3 girls and 2 guys. We learn that they aren't there for fun but for an intervention. One of the girls is a hopeless junkie who ODd repeatedly and nearly lost her life. Her brother is there, his girlfriend, and a couple- he's a school teacher and she's conveniently a nurse and brought all the medication necessary to have the girl stop drugs cold turkey.
The next day the girl, Mia, is starting to show withdrawal symptoms, she smells something. Sure enough, the kids eventually go the basement and find countless dead cats hanging from the ceiling as well as the burned post and the book from the intro. The book is covered in black plastic and bound with barbed wire.
Mia starts losing it more and more and the teacher guy decides to browse through the book and pronounce some of strange words which awakes some evil force in the woods. When Mia escapes, drives into a ditch and stumbles through the woods she encounters some girl/ghost that spits out some branches that make it to Mia's nether regions. Back at the cabin, Mia flips out and attacks everyone till they lock her in the basement. The nurse decides to cut her mandible off with a piece of glass and the other girl cuts her arm off with an electric carving knife. At some point finally the teacher guy realizes what he has done. And that they're not dealing with some disease or just madness. The ways to eliminate the evil are rather brutal and gory, and Mia's brother doesn't have the guts to go through with any of those until he has no choice.
The original Evil Dead is one of the few great horror movies that could deserve a remake given how long ago it was made on a small budget. This Evil Dead is more of a new vision of the original. It's true to the motifs- the book, the clock, the basement, the chainsaw, etc. but it doesn't make much of a cohesive whole. Lacking also is some humor. And as with most movies these days, character development is near zero, we can't care about any of these people, and this movie is also somewhat unclear about who the main character is. It tries to get us to think that it's the brother, but it wouldn't be a 2000s movie without a female heroine so out of no good reason we get just that. Completely unnecessary is also the usual creepy J-horror evil girl who comes out of nowhere. The book talks of the evil force as a "he" not some girl. Also weak are the sounds and voices. The original Evil Dead used voices and sounds very effectively to create a scary atmosphere. This version doesn't at all. What this one does offer though is a lot of blood, violence, and some gore. It's nice to see a movie for theatrical release that is so enthusiastic about it, but that doesn't really make up for all its shortcomings.
The surprise is that this movie wasn't as terrible as it could have been given that the director/writers are foreigners with barely any experience making movies. You can tell they are fans of horror, but you need a bit more than just that to make a stand out horror movie, especially one that carries the mighty name "Evil Dead." IMDb shows that Diablo Cody was involved in the writing of the movie, but the movie itself doesn't credit her. And that is exactly what this movie needed, additional writers to make the story more than just a bunch of bloody gags, and to inject some personality and humor, because to a large extent, that made the original so unforgettable. This new version is somewhat generic, efficient, bloody, but soulless as most of these reboots/re-envisions are. It's a good horror movie but not a good "Evil Dead" movie.