On the same night that I watched the pathetic and pointless prequel/remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing, I watched another horror remake. I had first seen the original The Evil Dead after having already seen its two superior sequels. Nonetheless, the original movie was still an effective and fun horror movie with some great effects and memorable moments for something that was made on a shoestring budget. The Evil Dead trilogy is one of the best horror trilogies out there and arguably still the best work that director Sam Raimi has done in his lengthy career. The 2013 remake had a lot to live up to and, considering how terrible most other remakes to horror franchises were around the time this was released, the cards were stacked against it.

Pros

• Great makeup and practical effects make everything convincing and horrifying

• Solid acting from a relatively unknown cast

• Good camera angles and direction that mimic the Raimi style

• Premise of why the group is there works well with the plot and is properly utilized

Cons

• Some characters are pretty dumb/cliché and relatively one-dimensional despite being in a post-Cabin in the Woods world

• The human body’s resilience and ability to stay in one piece is fantastically reduced

Plot & Thoughts

A group of friends have gone to an isolated cabin in the woods for an unspecified period of time. The purpose of the visit is not for a vacation, however. It’s to help their friend Mia (Jane Levy) go cold turkey on her drug addiction and deal with the drama of her withdrawals. Mia’s brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) and his girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) also tag along to show support, but there’s clearly some history of David not being present at important moments in Mia’s life, as the dialogue overtly hints at his flakiness with a lot of passive-aggressive comments. Mia’s friends Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Olivia (Jessica Lucas) are the biggest arrogant jerks of the bunch who are always quick to point out their displeasure with David and make sure everyone knows how smart they are.

Of course, they’re not very smart because when the group inevitably discovers the cabin’s basement due to the foul stench emanating from it, Eric decides it’s a good idea to read the Necronomicon that had been left there undisturbed. Never mind it being wrapped in barbed wire and having warning text written on the pages telling him not to read the Latin, which would be enough for anyone with more than five brain cells to understand reading the book was a bad idea. The movie needs to happen! Considering Cabin in the Woods came out well before and made fun of this very situation with lines like “Do not read the Latin,” it’s a shame that there wasn’t a better reason why Eric would be so bold and dumb to read from a book that is so overtly advertising the fact that you shouldn’t read from it. I also don’t recall any point in the film where Eric’s scholastic background is disclosed in a way that would suggest why he would be the smarty smart person with an insatiable curiosity.

Nitpicks aside, once the horror gets going, Evil Dead delivers. This is probably the best horror remake I’ve watched in the past couple months. The makeup and gory practical effects are extremely convincing to the point of being really unsettling and uncomfortable to watch. There’s no stop-motion fun-fest that closed out the final moments of the original film, but it more than makes up for it with some great shocking moments. Some of those moments involve razor blades, electric turkey carvers, chainsaws, and the various ways they can interact with the human body. It’s a gruesome time, but it works for the movie in a way that I appreciated, as opposed to something like an Eli Roth film where the gore and violence feel overly gratuitous, serving no other purpose than to shock and disgust. Evil Dead doesn’t come across as torture porn. It’s an extremely violent film about supernatural demons possessing people and making them do terrible things, but the violence does not feel as out of place as it would in another movie.

If you’re not one for the gory, violent horror though, this is definitely a movie for you to skip. As good as I think this remake is, it’s not a film I can recommend to someone with a weak stomach. Because the makeup and special effects are so good, the violence is very real-looking and will likely turn the stomachs of the squeamish. There are a few moments where the real durability of the human body is brought into question and someone’s limb is pulled apart like a stick of mozzarella, but it’s a minor flaw in the presentation.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Despite horror movie remakes having an abysmal batting average, Evil Dead knocks it out of the park. This is a rare instance in which the remake emulates and imitates the source material without just copying it or straying too far away from it. It’s still not necessary, as most remakes aren’t, but it’s a welcome addition to a franchise that has been both evil and dead for quite some time.