Sometimes I truly wrestle with my own biases. I honestly sit in a dark room (sometimes a theatre) and have to ask myself, “Why don’t you like horror?” I feel like I should. I feel like I’m missing out. When I think about it there’s a lot more metaphor that one can create under the guise of horror when it comes to personal character pathos than any science fiction, dramatic, or any other genre; but for some unbeknownst reason I type here today just not a fan of horror.
I like Evil Dead. More importantly I adore Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. However, I like these movies for the main reason that I find them ridiculous. So when you attempt to sell me on the fact that someone wants to take what is ridiculous and make it serious I sit and stare.
Fede Alvarez (a horror director from Uruguay) adapted Evil Dead for modern audiences. How he manages to shift it away from the stereotypical Cabin in the Woods tale is by making it about Mia’s (Jane Levy) journey in quitting drugs. With that act in play you can understand why moments of possession can visually and thematically make sense as we watch demons go in and out of people. The demon — drug — can begin in her as we see the story from Mia’s friends and family at first, then as it shifts to Mia’s perspective and they won’t let her leave the cabin then everyone else is a demon to her.
However, the problem with all that is in order for this to work as a true fable-like tale it would have to admit it’s incredulously unrealistic elements. This movie doesn’t do that. Evil Dead asks us to accept this as reality and cheer as we see chainsaws and boomsticks — in the context of this movie I refuse to call it anything else — being used to mutilate these young people. In all of those things combined it hop, skips, jumps and basically ignores its want to be thematic and just moves to straight up bloody gore in a fetishistic manner that doesn’t allow the audience, except in a sadistic (or masochistic, depends on your perspective), to enjoy itself.
The worst part of all of it is that it almost did it. Somewhere around the final plot twist I was willing to be happy with the film. The final twist however leaves a sense of excessiveness that a movie as throw-away as this doesn’t need. With what would be an actual fable we’re left to contest with a film that wanted to add a female power dynamic that doesn’t quite fit that theme.
For a film which as a narrative is as trite as they come and begins attempting to stay thematically far away from its original Fede Alvarez keeps a lot of stylistic elements from the original film. We see a lot of those quick zooms into pieces of a scene coming together, watching the possessed Mia bang on the cabin’s hatch to pop up and scare them with a very Exorcist like feel and having those quick tracking shots in the woods giving off that feeling of ‘something coming for us’ throughout the film always has Raimi in the back of our minds. While Raimi‘s first Evil Dead wasn’t a brilliant film it was able to end with a sense of accomplishment, which is more than I can say for this film.
i really did hate the original (in almost every way), so maybe i will like this remake? at least the effects look better.