The newly released “Evil Dead” has earned itself quite a reputation with its movie poster claiming to be “the most terrifying film you will ever experience,” setting the bar pretty high and making it one of the most anticipated movies of the year. The actual outcome, however, was sub par and less than satisfactory, making it entirely undeserving of such high praise.
To begin, the characters were flat and boring, lacking any sort of dynamic personalities. Take Mia, for example, the angsty main character with a heroin addiction. Or David, the archetypal “absent older brother” who was never there for her. The characters’ relationships with one another are predictable and somewhat one-dimensional, which certainly doesn’t add to the overall quality of the movie.
Of course the film begins with a creepy cabin in the woods – why not? Enter five young adults, prepared to spend the weekend in said cabin in order to stage an intervention to help Mia overcome her heroin addiction. To briefly summarize, they stumble across an ancient book of evil and accidentally summon nearby demons from the woods surrounding them. Mia, suffering from withdrawal, angrily storms away from the cabin and attempts to leave, but ends up getting “raped” by sinister trees that appear to be alive.
As if this scene wasn’t ridiculous enough already, Mia’s body now harbors a bloodthirsty demon that has possessed her soul. But wait! The demonic spirit is contagious. The movie continues with each of her friends being picked off one by one, until only a single person is left standing to fight for survival.
While it may seem like a decent plot, looks can be deceiving. This movie was painfully predictable, but its saving grace was the abundance of blood and gore. There were scenes of characters vomiting blood and fluid, arms being severed and knives and nail guns being used as weapons. There was blood squirting everywhere, unseen forces attacking people, souls being possessed, and injured victims crawling around on the dirty cabin floor. And of course, there was the traditional creepy cellar filled with the gruesome evidence of witchcraft.
Just when the scenes started to pick up in intensity, they were humbled yet again by mediocrity. In this case, the mediocrity was brought on by the cheesy out-of-place lines dropped casually into threats made by the demon-possessed teens. For example, as David’s girlfriend is shutting the cellar door to trap demon-Mia so she will stop wreaking havoc, demon-Mia looks up at her with crooked eyes and rasps, “I can smell your filthy soul.” Needless to say, I laughed out loud in the theater. Maybe the director’s intention was to provoke laughter – I mean, most of the film had been pretty off-kilter thus far – but it was just such an awkward line for a so-called horror movie.
In its defense, “Evil Dead” was a remake of the 1981 original, so the main storyline was essentially already there, leaving little room for improvement and originality. But there are just some movies that should never be recreated because the originals were painful enough in all their shameless glory.
