If you’re one of those people who rates horror films by the amount of blood on screen at any given time, then Fede Alvarez’s “Evil Dead” is probably going to be your favorite film of all time. Taking cues from its source material, the cult 1981 film “The Evil Dead,” Alvarez quickly makes it clear that he has no qualms about turning the gore up to 11 in every scene. Besides this penchant for ultra-violence, however, “Evil Dead” is a surprisingly by-the-book affair that rips its best moments directly from superior films while showing none of the satirical qualities that made the original film such a classic.
The setup is as old as the genre itself: five stock characters of various backgrounds gather together in an abandoned cabin in the middle of some creepy woods in order to accomplish a task that they could have easily carried out back in civilization. In this case, a blank slate protagonist named David (Shiloh Fernandez, “Red Riding Hood”), his girlfriend, his sister, a nurse and a bookworm have left civilization in order to get the sister to kick her heroin habit.
Shockingly, they find the cabin, owned by David’s mother, in a state of disrepair and immediately find a bunch of dead animals hanging in the basement, along with a book that is sealed shut. Naturally, instead of piling back into the Jeep and heading for the hills, the five friends decide to stay in the cabin. Naturally, the bespectacled scholar-type decides to take wire-cutters to the seals of the nasty book, and naturally, all sorts of awful events follow, most of which involve copious amounts of blood and power tools.
While the plot may be thin at best, that was never the point of horror films to begin with, so it’s easily forgivable.
Far more damaging to the movie’s quality are the characters themselves, who never rise above their designated roles as cardboard cutouts for the evil spirits to take down in increasingly gruesome ways. And of course, in classic horror movie fashion, the five characters have the combined intelligence of a raw potato.
Deep in the movie’s second act, a bloodied David suggests to his bookish friend Eric (Lou Taylor Picci, “All Together Now”) that perhaps his sister is just infected by a virus that she caught from the dead animals in the cabin’s basement. That’s right – after seeing one of his best friends rip her face off with a piece of glass and his sister give herself third-degree burns in the cabin’s shower, he still rules out the supernatural.
While that previous scene made me laugh, there were little-to-no comic moments to be found anywhere in “Evil Dead.” Even as David’s sister, Mia (Jane Levy, “Suburgatory”), twists her head 360 degrees and shouts obscenities about the next victim’s mother, it feels like a limp shout-out to the source material, not a shockingly funny moment of self-awareness.
Without the humor element of the formula, the film quickly begins to feel like an exploitative gore-fest with no aim other than to up the ante from the last bloody spectacle. On this level, the film is an unqualified success, but it made me wonder what exactly the point of it all was. Sure, each scene successfully outperforms the last in terms of viscera and filth, but after 70 minutes of watching fingers get smashed or heads chopped off, the effect begins to numb.
As such, it’s hard to recommend “Evil Dead” to anyone but the most rote horror fans – it may hit all the right notes, but it sure is a familiar tune.
– By Steven Wright
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