Originally written 3/8/16
Like so many other remakes before it, Evil Dead
fails to escape the shadow of its source material, and is doomed to a life as a
"Oh yeah, I forgot they remade that" movie. The appeal of the first
Evil Dead movie is its low-budget grittiness and comically over-the-top levels
of gore. The remake is pumped full of cash, giving us a slick and glossy studio
picture with nauseating levels of gore. No matter how much money they threw at
this thing, it was not going to work. The forest photography looks like
something out of Twilight. The creative team was missing the point. They were
missing the down-and-dirty indie appeal and Bruce Campbell.
The story is essentially a retread of the original,
but with a few details changes. This time, instead of going to woods to party
the cast of doomed twentysomethings are there to help their friend kick her
heroin habit. This could have been an interesting angle for the film to pursue,
but this plot point is dropped once the characters discover the Necronomicon.
Once the creepy old book is opened and read, it becomes standard procedure. In
fact, the movie seems to embrace every single horror cliché possible. The
characters are painfully dumb, even for a horror movie. Evil Dead almost feels
like a parody with how many "Don't go in there!" moments there are.
The film is also marred by how many callbacks there are to the original film.
They should have spent more time trying to do something original, rather than
trying to remind the audience that they should be watching the original
instead.
Evil Dead also suffers from being on the tail end of
the torture porn craze of the 2000's. I appreciate the film's dedication to
using practical effects, but it is difficult to appreciate them when they are
being used in an unsavory context. There is nothing fun or entertaining about
watching prolonged suffering. I am uncertain of where I draw the line in terms
of violence in horror movies, but Evil Dead certainly goes too far. It is
mean-spirited and miserable to watch at times. The creative team even felt it
was necessary to keep the infamous tree-rape scene from the original film. The
scene was unnecessary and a blight on the original, and it is just as awful and
unneeded in the remake.
Evil Dead is obnoxiously stupid at best and
nauseatingly unpleasant at worst. It does nothing to differentiate itself from
the original, even copying the original shot-for-shot at times. The filmmakers
obviously appreciate the original film, as evidenced by their continual aping
of the source material, but they fail to do anything other than make a chintzy
imitation of the original. They tried to make a sleazy, grimy exploitation
movie, but wound up with an overproduced boneheaded barrage of gore and suffering.
No comments:
Post a Comment