I’ve
never been somebody to form an early opinion of a film. I’ve often
found myself watching a film with people who condemn it early on,
telling them “you don’t know it’s like yet, it’s too early to say that”.
Evil Dead
is a movie that proves the validity of that consideration. It is one
of the worst movies I have ever had the displeasure to watch- for about
30 minutes.
This
screenplay was written by three people, and it’s not too difficult to
see that. It’s clear that writer-director Fede Alvarez has some
understanding of horror. It’s also apparent that that without the
horror, it’s like the film has left its thinking cap off. We open up
with some obviously green screened shots of a woman walking through fog.
The lighting is obviously new, but I can deal with that- it looks kind
of like The Woman in Black,
minus the fact that in this scene she’s essentially just walking in
front of a blur. The woman gets attacked by what looks and acts like a
redneck family, and we next see her strapped to a wooden pole in a
cabin, with a group of people standing around her and a Necronomicon
with the word “motherfucker” written across the page.
After
a dramatic scene where the woman is doused in gasoline while pleading
for her life, she transforms into a Deadite, spewing threats and
indicating that a large portion of her vocabulary is the word “fuck”.
They really weren’t making an effort to make me like the movie at this
point, shortly after I had been subjected to some of the worst trailers I
had ever been subjected to at a movie theatre (plus Iron Man, which was good, and Carrie, which was bearable). For the record, if anybody invites me to see Scary MoVie,
they’re going to wish that they hadn’t. I don’t mind swearing in a
movie, particularly from Deadites, but there’s such a thing as too much.
After the last Rob Zombie movie I watched, I pretty much reached my
limit for fucks and rednecks being in the same scene together.
From
there, the movie proper starts. We get a group of characters who are
too busy being full of themselves to be likable, one decently likable
guy who nobody else in the film seems to be able to stand, and the
latter guy’s girlfriend, who has so little character that when she
disappears from the film for about twenty minutes, nobody notices and
you kind of forget about her until the Deadites start tormenting her.
Essentially, the semi-likable guy has a junkie sister named Mia who is
quitting cold turkey, for the second time. Their friends,
guy-who-acts-like-a-dick-to-main and nurse-who-thinks-she-is-infallible,
are intent to make sure she follows through this time, and to make sure
she stays there even after she breaks and becomes desperate for a fix.
The
two siblings own the cabin that the group is staying at, having
inherited it from their mother (there’s no mention of the father, so
this must be a Disney feature). Apparently they never knew there was a
basement there, however, as they’re shocked when the dog discovers it.
The group goes down and discover that it’s been broken into, and some
sort of ritual involving the slaughter of a dozen or so small animals
(and hanging them from the ceiling) went on here in their absence. One
of the guys takes the Necronomicon from the basement, sees notes in red
ink (blood doesn’t dry that way) saying to neither write nor read the
words listed on that page, and immediately goes about copying the text
down while reading it out loud. Because fuck you, that’s why.
Here
we reach the build-up portion of the film: Mia experiences paranormal
occurrences and everybody blames it on withdrawal. The tree rape scene,
infamous for its execution and sadism, is replaced with black goo that
crawls out of a Deadite’s mouth, up Mia’s leg, and under her skirt.
Scary things start to pop in here, starting with the “rushing from a
distance” shots in the original movie, coming to a head around the time
Mia tries to boil herself alive in the shower. From there, the Deadites
start appearing and the movie finds its footing, each new thing exemplifying an image bearded-guy had
seen in the Necronomicon. Over time, this genius comes to realize that
the newly psychotic behavior of their friends, apparently passed along
through contact with blood, is the result of demonic possession, not the
psychosis that claimed David and Mia’s mother.
I’m
not going any farther into the plot, other than to say that some things
were fairly predictable from the first two films and some things were
complete surprises. It was gruesome, especially if body modification
horror is effective on you. The jump scares are kept within reasonable
limits, and are generally genuinely scary ones. The gore is kept
pretty reasonable- Just by guessing, I would say about 1-10% of it was
CGI, and the rest practical. In any case, it looked good, if no more
realistic than the gore of an early ‘80s film.
I’d
say the makeup was this film’s real stand out feature, and with 75
times the budget of the original it would have been a shame if it wasn’t
an improvement over the lackluster makeup of the 1981 original. If one
thing makes this film awesome, though, it’s the makeup. The makeup
team for this movie needs to be in the next Hellraiser movie (unless it’s another Revelation).
By
no means is this movie realistically- medically, physically, even
religiously I’m certain. But if you can get behind this movie, you
won’t care. Any Evil Dead
or possession based movie takes some liberties in this area. It’s not
the scariest movie you ever saw, but when it comes to the body horror, I
find this to be the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time. That’s
enough for me to recommend this movie. Just start the movie a half hour
in.
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