It wouldn’t do good to pretend that this film can be thoroughly reviewed by someone who never caught up with the notorious 1981 film but the truth is – like most in the screening I found myself in – I’m too young to remember the original The Evil Dead and too overwhelmed with a long list of past classics to have yet seen everything made before I was born. Just know that I’m ignorant and guiltless, like every 20-something.
Apologies dealt with, I enjoyed 2013 Evil Dead. It is a very well made 5-young-adults-go-to-a-cabin-in-the-woods-and-get-hacked-to-bits-by-demons horror film. Sam Raimi obviously saw fit to trust debut feature-length director Fede Alvarez with the reboot of his franchise and Alvarez delivers a spectacularly gory effort with absurd amounts of blood and plenty of opportunities for audiences to laugh at the sight of themselves jumping out of their collective skin.
The editors have the pacing of the scares measured to a science, beginning with innocuous loud noise transitions, progressing to faux tension builds, finally reaching genuine jumps before descending into all out gore at the halfway point and not letting up until everyone’s dead and buried (or are they?). All of this wraps at 91 minutes, a very sensible length and one that you suspect could have been stretched to a pointless 2 hours by most inexperienced directors. Raimi’s original clocked in at a similar 85 minutes and it was perhaps his genre-savvy guidance that prevented the remake from yawning on too far past this marker.
If there is one problem with the film, and it is a fairly big one, it is that Evil Dead offers nothing new to the horror genre or any of its subgenres. It employs the grotesque mutilation realism of a splatter, the soft-loud dynamics of a jump scare flick, the supernatural back-story of a chiller and the faintly ridiculous demon voice of a possession film, but has no unique identity of its own.
This is probably best explained by the fact that this IS a remake, attempting to recreate and pay homage to the spirit of a 32-year-old movie. The thing is: no genre ‘moves with the times’ as fast as horror. And nothing stubbornly holds onto the fears and phobias of a particular era than a remake. Feeling particularly out of date is the sweary male/female voice of the demon as it speaks through the possessed characters. A trope such as this is rooted in the 70s/80s and has suffered too many The Exorcist parodies to be really effective in 2013 as anything other than bait for teenage sniggers.
One nostalgic trick that does hold up is the use of prosthetic special effects, which are terrific. Making notes immediately after leaving the cinema, I wrote “this is one of the few CG-heavy films that won’t alienate you with sheer unbelievability.” Well, I’m happy to report that the makers of Evil Dead painstakingly created the bloody set pieces for real, which is brilliant. I assumed that some particularly horrific moments could only have been achieved by computers. In fact, the reverse is true. Happily, the only way to achieve utterly believable special effects continues to be through the use of the ancient method of models and prosthetics.
Ultimately, Evil Dead is notable only for its high quality production values. It has all the component parts of a classic 20th century horror and is definitely worth a watch. Unfortunately for its legacy, the recipe was already perfected many years ago and many of the ingredients have far passed their sell by date.
Jon Bates Writes 