Evil Dead (2013) - With Demonic Spoilers From Hell

A remake of The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi's 1981 low-budget classic, Evil Dead is competently made. It has good special effects, some well-executed scenes of graphic violence, appropriately gloomy sets, effective sound design and good cinematography. The cast is bland, but not bad; they are hampered by underdeveloped characters and the sacrifice of story for gruesome spectacle.

The film opens up promisingly enough. A young woman is being chased through a dark forest. She is clubbed over the head and tied to a post in the basement of a cabin. Dead cats hang from the ceiling on hooks. An old woman reads from a book of demonic evil in an odd tongue. Inbred hillbillies line one wall. The girl's father emerges from the shadows. She begs him to release her. He says she killed her mother and douses her with gasoline. The girl's eyes turn yellow and the demon that has possessed her begins taunting him. He lights her on fire and blows her head off with a shotgun.

That's the first three minutes. It's an impressive opening.

A new set of characters arrive at the cabin. They are there to help one of their number, heroin addict Mia (Jane Levy), go cold turkey. The characters - Mia's brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), schoolteacher friend Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), nurse friend Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and David's significant other Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) - settle in and each have a few character moments, none of which amount to much. In due course, the basement is discovered and the book of evil found. Eric reads it for no fathomable reason. Given that it is wrapped in barbed wire, bound with human flesh and has numerous dire warnings scribbled on its pages, the scenes of him thumbing through the book and reading the Latin (or whatever) incantations are unintentionally humorous.

This results in demons being set loose on the unsuspecting characters. Mia is possessed first when a slimy, black worm-vine slithers into her body. Soon, characters are slicing their faces off, getting perforated with a nail gun (whenever a movie features a nail gun, you know this is how it will be used), performing self-dismemberment with an electric carving knife and being subjected to numerous other acts of bodily harm. David, the only survivor, manages to free Mia from possession in a scene that makes little sense. He then sacrifices himself to save her. Blood rains from the sky, a last undead monster emerges from the ground, Mia kills it with a chainsaw (after having to pull her own hand off) and then the sun comes up.

The problem: when the end credits roll, you are left wondering "what's the point?" This is a common question when dealing with remakes, re-imaginings and reboots. The marketing rationale is clear - take a known, successful product (even if it only succeeded in embedding itself in the cultural consciousness), and change it to reflect the sensibilities of a new cohort of viewers. This isn't something to dismiss out-of-hand. People have been doing this to the works of Shakespeare for a long time. Think of the number of remakes and alternate takes have been made of Frankenstein and Dracula. Far from being the reflection of a lack of ideas out of Hollywood, recycling stories has a long tradition in literature, theater and cinema.

There is something, however, that a remake needs to do, in addition to the normal measures of a film's worth: it has to add something to story told by the original.

The problem is that the Evil Dead, while maintaining a high level of graphic violence and keeping the serious tone of the original (the slapstick action and darkly humorous one-liners didn't start until Evil Dead 2), doesn't really add up to anything more than a generic horror movie. The manic energy of the original is missing. Raimi's film stood out because no one had seen anything quite like it before. It featured over-the-top gore and camera work that had the energy of a Looney Toons cartoon. The cast and crew had a low budget to work with, but didn't let that hinder them.

The remake includes some of the signature scenes and techniques from the original - for the example, the camera work giving the audience a point-of-view for the "force of evil" crashing through the woods - but nothing feels particularly fresh or innovative. Key plot points from the original are included: reading an evil book in an isolated cabin leads to possession and mayhem. The remake looks better. The cinematography is more professional, the cast is no worse than that of the original and the plot is slightly more complex (although the most interesting new elements - the heroin addiction of Mia and tension between Mia and David over how the latter left the former to care for their dying mother - have little impact on the story). With a higher budget ($17 million versus $375,000) the gore effects are not as garish and cartoonish.

The problem is that movie has a very generic feel it. There is none of the personality that the original has. There is none of the feeling of shoestring creativity. It is too polished for its own good.

Each of Raimi's Evil Dead films, while following the same basic plot (someone reads from the book of evil, people are possessed and undead monsters attack), have a unique twist. The first film is gritty and gore-filled, the tone of the second shifts to horror slapstick and the third is a low-budget, period-piece epic. In terms of creativity and originality, the remake is a watered down version of The Evil Dead. There was an opportunity to do something different - perhaps using the heroin angle to make a surreal horror film. Instead, the filmmakers focused on the most obvious characteristic of the original, the gore. With the graphic violence that can now be seen in films and on TV (The Walking Dead, for example), a film needs more than a few cringe-worthy moments of bloodshed to stand out.

In part, the remake suffers from the shallowness of the original. The Evil Dead is a triumph of creativity over budget. Its story and plot are functional, nothing more. The characters are little more that one-dimensional punching bags. It is a great movie; but that stems from the on-screen energy and the context in which was released.

For a remake to be successful the source material either has to be rich enough that it lends itself to new interpretations or the remake has to improve on the original. Evil Dead can't reproduce the feel or energy of the original; that is tied into the state of cinema when it was released and how the creative team attacked the low budget. Evil Dead is a decent horror movie. However, it fails to add anything of interest to the plot, performances or tone of the original. It joins the long list of remakes that will be remembered mostly as a marketing gimmick, not as a fresh and worthwhile reinterpretation of the source material.