(Planet Me)
Friday, April 26, 2013
 
THE EVIL DEAD (2013)

Oh. Let me count the ways. Groovy. Hail To The King Baby. Yep. After Cabin In The Woods blew the haunted house movie to pieces once and for all, the only way you could make a haunted house movie, is to faithfully resurrect the original and best. “The Evil Dead” is not a reboot. That word is a shit insult to the intelligence of writers, and the hard work of the original film. Some sequel/remakes are faithful in spirit and tone. Others are a crazed, graverobbing attempt to exploit your memories of better things by promising you something and giving you nothing worth wasting your time on : “halloween”, “texas chainsaw massacre”, “night mare on elm street”.

What is it about horrors? A film has to wait long enough to stew to be worth being re-made. If you remake a film, please don't fall into the trap many people make : a sanitised, boring, piece of gutless crap where the characters talk like a screenwriter, never say anything worth hearing, and there's the usual By-Committee rubbish. Tick off every demographic as you go. No.

“The Evil Dead” is merciless, brutal, and revels in its practical-in-front-of-the-camera effects. It pulls no punches, kills everyone brutally and without any hesitation, and adds a genuinely interesting take on the protoagonist. Hopefully there's no spoilers there, it's a film called “The Evil Dead”, it's not meant to be happy and not everyone comes out of most films alive anyway. “The Evil Dead” revels in its viciousness : the evil is genuinely evil, cunning, sly, and unrelenting, and the slight reinterpretation of the original plot is a genuine act of intelligence, that adds an extra layer of ambiguity and doubt to the film – could everything that is actually happening be an invention, or a misinterpretation? Could everything that is actually happening be real? Few films have made this ambiguity effective, barring Kubrick's “The Shining” which is intrinsically clever in its interpretation of events. This angle is quickly dispensed with when no longer applicable, as the reality becomes unavoidable. And then, when it starts, the roller coaster of blood, gore, terror, peeking-through-fingers blood & guts begins, and does not let up, ever, until everyone is dead and the credits roll. Well, not everyone. With original alumni Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell on board, “The Evil Dead” is exactly that ; true to the spirit of the original, blood-choked, grim 1982 film, with lashings of relentless, adult action, not sanitised, not cut, not made boring and spineless by boring marketing assholes chasing the PG-13 market. There are enough horror films for the virgin market, and they are horrific enough in their gutless content. This film, though, is not a happy, market-tested, dull and boring piece of rubbish, but a film of vision and (to be frank) uncompromising cruelty that is a refreshing change from a sea of inconsequential nonsense, brainless 'reboots', and tired franchises. Groovy.


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