Review

A group of five friends head into the woods to stay at a cabin. Mia is dependent on drugs and the stay is meant as a detox to try and avoid her overdosing yet again. Her brother, David, has been away and brings a deal of guilt to the cabin with him, alone with surprisingly the family dog. Mia is of course heavily into withdrawal pretty quickly and keeps complaining about a smell that none of the other's are sensing. Well except for Grandpa the Dog who is scratching manically at a rug. David pulls back the rug to found a trail of blood leading to a trap door. At about this stage I would have been remembering an urgent appointment back in the city.

Down in the cellar David and Eric find a slaughterhouse full of hanging critters, and what appears to be a witch's altar. Eric naturally purloins a book from the alter and proceeds to cut the bard wire it's wrapped in and read an incantation from the book even though someone has quite helpfully scribbled all over the book not to. Guess Eric is going to feel like a bit of a goose as the incantation unleashes a demon who needs five souls in order to do something or other. How many friends at the cabin? With folk getting possessed and going homicidal left, right, and freaking centre, who ya gonna call ... Bruce Campbell! Another remake of a horror classic let's check under the floorboards to see what might be lurking in the dark corners of the cellar.

The Evil Dead is one of the more iconic horror movies out there. In fact it's so iconic certain people will praise whatever poo stain creator Sam Raimi creates in the horror genre regardless of how inept and facial it might be, exhibit A the inane Drag Me To Hell (2009). If you are going to remake this movie then you had better get it right else you are going to be kicked from pillar to post. Or you should be, Sam Raimi and Bruce "the Chin" Campbell" get production credits, ergo a lot of people are gushing like tween chicks meeting One Direction. I just caught a screening in downtown Auckland and came away enjoying the movie but noting it didn't match the splatter stick ferocity of the original films. Director Fede Alvarez threw on a schizophrenic movie that didn't know if it was Martha or Arthur, the flick purely did lack some clear focus. There are things to like with this movie, but there are also things that will have you head butting your Ash plush figurines.

Up front I got to say they have the gore and violence happening in pretty convincing style. Anyone going into a movie with "Evil Dead" in the title gets what they deserve if they don't realise the halls will be awash with blood and viscera. Director Alvarez pretty much dispenses with post production CGI and goes with some very solid visual effects, and does this ever work for the movie! We have people being sliced and diced, more limbs being lobbed in Evil Dead than at a lumber jack convention, and it looks real. Alvarez is playing for keeps and I have to say it's a breath of slaughter house air to have blood flying that looks like blood flying, rather than say the blood flying you would get if your ginger haired nephew created it in his parents' basement on his Commodore C64. Once again see Drag Me To Hell. So hell yeah the gore is hitting high octane but is more in the splatter Monty Python realm than in the half arsed approach Directors like Eli Roth employ to brow beat their audiences into submission.

Also hitting all the right notes were the additions made to our understanding of demonic lore as portrayed in the Evil Dead universe. Previously we knew Ash had to pretty much dismember demonically possessed corpses in order to rid himself of unwanted tenants, now we can add burying alive and burning to the list of remedies. I was less impress with the reasoning behind the paranormal activity, it was convoluted and pretty much glazed over in order to explain the script to a new generation who simply can't get with the Evil Dead groove. Waste of time for mine as Eric continually references the "book of the dead", considering he pretty much was warned repeatedly not to recite the words hidden within its pages. The dude goes to some length to unearth those words and naturally speaks them, yes I was wondering if he wasn't dropped on his head as baby as well! The incantation summons Kandarian demons, that's all we need to know, keep the pop psychology for Oprah and get the frack on with things.

It would appear modern horror Directors simply don't get what made classics in the genre work, I'm blaming low attention spans

Where Alvarez and team completely go off the rails however is the referencing of the original movies, considering they went to some lengths before this movie's release to distance it from its ancestors. We get the chainsaw, the boomstick, the car, the swing on the porch, do I need to go on. We even get the river cutting off escape to the outside world. Unfortunately Evil Dead (2013) doesn't have the same go for broke charm of the original movies. I was being reminded consistently how much better they were. Alvarez should have put his hand in the air, said it was a remake, and then went in new directions. Constantly harking back to the original movies does nothing for veterans of the franchise and no doubt confuses newbies who must be wondering why some of the weirder props keep getting focused on, the deer head in the living room for example. Alverez completely fails to match the splatter stick comedy elements of the original, he's on a hiding to nothing referencing constantly.

The atmosphere and tension is definitely on, great set design and location from the New Zealand crew to really bring the dread to proceedings, but it is to a certain degree marred by one too many jump scenes. Once you know this is Alvarez's chief weapon to frighten the audience you can pick where the jumps are going to be inserted. The gore, sliced tongues and other self mutilations, certainly had audience members at my screening squirming, but no one got up and walked out due to the scare factor being unbearable. Alvarez has worked out how to wring tension from people with their backs turned, and other characters walking into darkened rooms, but he lacks the ability to follow through on the delivery of those moments. Someone like Brad Anderson would have nailed this aspect of the movie and really made a waking nightmare.

I guess everyone is hanging to find out how the new Ash stacked up against the quintessential portrayal by Bruce Campbell. Let's put it this way, the guy sitting next to me voiced the thought that if they changed the character just for the sack of changing the character he was walking out. Dude walked out with maybe 10 minutes of the movie left. Not saying anything else, but it's a face palming moment in the change for change's sake book. There are kind of three candidates for Ash, the one who should get the gig misses out, I was left shaking my head over where Alvarez took this. Frack you dude, no way should that character have got the billing, totally unlikable and self obsessed at best. I was so very disappointed, though there is a cameo by Bruce Campbell after the ending credits, all hail the King baby, which once again reminds us how lack lustre in comparison the remake is.

In the wash up I got bored with all the gore, they were trying a little too hard to enter hard core horror territory, didn't like any of the characters, and thought they completely underplayed the Necronomicon aspects that worked for the original movie. The characters are annoying at best, the original had average folks this one clearly had Hollywood casting stamped all over them, and I got to say Eric deserved a chainsaw through his guts sooner rather than later. The movie took itself way too seriously, while trying to insert some humour - someone shoot Roque Banos for that score - the movie falls flat on this aspect. I enjoyed the movie, but not as much as the quote whores all over the posters would lead you to believe I should have, there's a whole bunch of personality from the original that Alvarez seems to have not noticed. Just another Boredwood remake that fails to understand why the original movie has stood the test of time, but still better than the vast majority of horror being shovelled out of Boredwood currently. There's a whole bunch of opportunities missed, Mia's drug withdrawal symptoms, the prelude that actually goes nowhere, and numerous other chances. A script written quite frankly by people with attention span issues, don't introduce something into your plot and then leave it hanging, this flick is a bit of a mess as the sun comes out the next morning.

Evil Dead is currently playing in limited release Downunder, and scoring solid figures. I wouldn't waste time catching this one on the big screen to be honest, but it is worth catching a viewing of. Not recommended to non horror movie fans or tweens, a return to 1980s horror that almost works.