Monday, September 14, 2015

Evil Dead (2013)

'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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