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'Dead' On Arrival: Jane Levy is wasted in a dreary, uninspired remake. |
Of the several horror franchises being updated lately,
perhaps none is more offensive and egregious than “Evil Dead,” an unnecessary
and execrable remake that disgraces writer-director Sam Raimi's memorable,
vastly superior low-budget splatter film of 1981. The new movie, the feature
debut of Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez, retains a number of the plot details
of the original but has none of the spirit or essence.
Once again, we meet five college students whose sojourn
to a remote, decaying cabin deep in the woods turns nightmarish when they come
across an ancient book full of menacing illustrations and dark secrets. Soon,
one by one, they turn on each other—and turn into malevolent, bodily fluid-oozing
demons—as they are overwhelmed by sinister forces.
A fundamental pursuit of both films is to push the
limits of Grand Guignol-like mayhem, but the secret to Raimi’s success lied in
his fusion of Three Stooges-inspired
slapstick and cartoonish violence to take the edge off the gore. This, along
with Raimi’s other stylistic techniques—bizarre, tilted camera angles;
deliriously exaggerated camera movements; creature and dismemberment effects
using stop-motion animation evocative of Ray Harryhausen—helped form the
foundation of what is now known as a paragon of horror-comedy.
Unfortunately, Alvarez plays it straight for the remake,
and the result is a depressing mess of shock gore and bloody violence that has
more in common with the tedious, forgettable die-by-numbers formula of slasher
and torture films. At times, Alvarez seems to be aiming for the grisly, solemn
style of Lucio Fulci (“The Beyond,” “The House by the Cemetery”), but it rings
hollow without the Italian midnight movie master’s sense of atmospheric dread
or a genuinely eerie soundtrack.
But perhaps the biggest absence in the new “Evil Dead”
is someone like Bruce Campbell in the cast. With his combination of everyman
good looks and deadpan irreverence, Campbell was Raimi’s wild card, an
infectiously charismatic presence so integral to the series that it spawned two
successful—sometimes brilliant—sequels and rose to cult movie-hero status. Conversely,
the only recognizable face of the new “Evil Dead” is Jane Levy (of TV's
“Suburgatory” and “Shameless”), but the promising young star is largely wasted
in a role that requires her to spend half the time as a snarling, yellow-eyed fiend
buried behind a mask of zombie makeup and locked up in the cellar.
Notably, Alvarez was tapped for the project after his short
film, “Panic Attack,” gained buzz online. Incidentally, the 4-minute movie—a breezy
slice of science fiction in which an army of giant alien robots invade and
destroy the capital city in Alvarez's home country—is more fun and exciting
than anything in the otherwise dismal and uninspired “Evil Dead.”
“Promise me you’ll stay with me until the end,” one
character says to another early on in the film. Watching the new “Evil Dead”
slog along in a dreary, humorless bloodbath of derivative excess, it’s not long
before one might reason that some promises just aren't worth keeping.
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