The lesser of two Evils
The really scary thing about Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is its failure to shock. Are we all now completely desensitized to movie horror?
Arriving 32 years after Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead shotgunned cabin terror into indie legend, the social gulf between the two films couldn’t be wider.
The 1981 original parlayed geek savvy, improvised gross-out effects and inspired camera work (that swooping evil POV) into a splatterfest that appalled and delighted its Reagan-era audience. It was novel because it was so eager to go for broke, and its two sequels added humour to its pulpy mix.
The remake Evil Dead misfires because it’s content to play it safe, in the process losing more than just the “The” from the title.
Granted, it has all the mutilation, decap- itation, dismemberment, sawing, shooting, roasting, nailing, puking, burying, buzz-sawing and screaming you’d expect from an Evil Dead movie — and consider this fair warning for anyone not already versed in franchise lore.
This may be enough for some people, and God love them for it.
But it’s precisely because you expect all these things that Evil Dead inspires more tedium than terror, at least for anyone who actually watches a lot of these kinds of movies.
To startle a horror-savvy 2013 audience, one used to the atrocities of the Saw and Hostel series and also the genre send-ups of Cabin in the Woods and the Scream franchise, newcomer Alvarez would have had to considerably up the ante. He’d have had to push the material in ways that would have denied it the “R” rating it has stateside, such as making it more sexually explicit. That’s something the fully corporatized Raimi, producer of the remake, likely wouldn’t have countenanced.
The infamous “tree rape” scene of The Evil Dead, for example, is reproduced in Evil Dead, but it doesn’t inspire the shock, awe and loathing of the original. We know it’s coming — the trailer teases it — and when it does it just feels like a box Alvarez has checked off on a long list of homages his film pays to its forebear. He’s gone so far as to eschew the use of modern CGI for his gore, opting to stick with the messy physical effects of old.
You can understand his dilemma. He doesn’t want to earn the ire of fans or Raimi by diverting too much from the sacred text. Alvarez’s screenplay, co-written with Rodo Sayagues along with unspecified input from Diablo Cody, doesn’t stray much from the essential demonic cabin bloodbath scenario.
You can also applaud what few changes Alvarez has attempted, some of which work — including Aaron Morton’s moody lensing and a score by Roque Banos that uses sirens to nerve-rattling effect. But most simply fail.
The cabin retreat is now a coldturkey drug-detoxing session rather than a horny kids-gone-wild weekend. A prologue provides some history for the evil presence that haunts the cabin.
The evil is carelessly unleashed — will kids never learn? It starts turning the cabin occupants, one by one, into zombified mutilators, murderers and name-callers.
What’s missing in all the mud, blood and gore is stoic anti-hero Ash, played so well by Bruce Campbell in the original series. He acts the way Jughead might if he’d witnessed Archie, Veronica, Betty and Reggie being reduced to dog chow.
Alvarez opted not to have an obvious Ash character in Evil Dead because he judged it impossible to replace him. Maybe he should have tried anyway, since it’s impossible to imagine the expected Evil Dead sequels without having someone around to make an Ash of himself.
Do stick around past the credits, though, if only for the masochistic satisfaction of confirming what Evil Dead is lacking.