Evil Dead: Terrible Script, Decent Film

The Evil Dead franchise holds a special place in every horror geek’s heart. The original and its remake/sequel set a new standard for surreal scares and over-the-top violence, mixed with varying amounts of intentional and unintentional humor. Bruce Campbell’s witty protagonist was the lovable line-in to a world of near experimental story-telling, buckets of blood, and possessed women with filthy tongues.

Evil Dead (2013) doesn’t need witty banter. It’s content to make you watch as those filthy tongues are severed. And that’s what makes it the best kind of re-imagining from an oddly complicated source material.

First time feature director Fede Alvarez takes us back to the original cabin in the woods for a modern slaughterfest that carves its own niche (and a few faces).

Mia (Suburgatory‘s Jane Levy) has already died once from a heroin overdose. Over the course of one weekend, her friends intend to help her kick the habit by supervising her cold turkey recovery at a family home in the woods. Joining them is her absentee brother David (Deadgirl‘s Shiloh Fernandez) who was nowhere to be found during their mother’s slow hospital death; the inciting incident which kickstarted Mia’s drug abuse. When Eric (Southland Tales‘ Lou Taylor Pucci) reads from a book bound in human skin and barbed-wire, it awakens an ancient evil that possesses Mia. The friends mistake Mia’s odd behavior for withdrawal symptoms, until she begins to murder them all. David knows that killing his sister may be the only way to save her soul, but he’s willing to try anything to keep from losing Mia a second time, even when those choices are very, very, stupid.

While the original films inhabited a world of broken cuckoo-clocks and bleeding walls, this new Evil Dead prefers a more physical approach. What gets lost is the opportunity for more exaggerated shock tactics, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Evil Dead is comfortable sacrificing horror for the sake of “gorror”, which it has in spades. The movie is almost devoid of CGI, making each practical effect exactly as stomach churning as you might imagine. Interestingly, this requires each scare to put forth some effort and preparation, making for the first major horror film I’ve seen in years that is completely devoid of cheap scares. Each fright that lands is earned, and that’s a rare praise.

The cinematography is gorgeous throughout, making the the most of a limited budget and location with awe-inspiring lighting and framing, even in the scenes where nothing is “happening.” There’s a shot from behind Eric simply sitting down and preparing to open the book that made the entire movie come to a crashing halt for me, and I can’t explain why. It was just one of many distractingly well crafted images helping to build the mood.

That build is a new feature for the series, as the originals were much quicker to dive into the meat of the action, but Alvarez gives the characters time to develop. All except poor dumb blonde Natalie, who manages to eek out her first line just in time to remind us that she should die soon, which brings us to the problem of the terrible script. While the ideas are well placed, the dialogue itself recalls some of the “naturalistic in translation” deliveries of Silent Hill. While writer/director Alvarez has done successful non-English work, it feels hard to blame him for this mess considering Diablo Cody was brought in to do punch up. While she has a line or two which feel undeniably hers, the rest of words fall so flat it makes the extra time devoted to character development feel wasted. Fan sites were afraid she was going to “Juno” this up, but she could have at least Young Adult’d this a bit. It needn’t be knee-slapping hilarious, but they should have shot for believable.

But that feels nitpicky. Who comes to a bloodbath for the witty exchanges? Well, Evil Dead fans do. And that is why the reboot’s awareness that it would be impossible to capture the quirky joy of the originals is its strongest suit. Raimi’s off-beat humor is something that even Raimi has been chasing for years, so it’s a great move for Alvarez to leave that alone entirely. Instead, the realistic re-imagining leaves no joy on the table; for the characters or for the audience. The experience isn’t as brutal as the marketing campaign would like you to believe (as this is not the scariest film of all time by a longshot) but it does offer limited moments of genuine fun, which again, isn’t the worst thing.

The blood soaked finale culminates in a few shots that seem nearly impossible to sneak into an R-rated film, and while that last act brings the sweet release of excess one expects from an Evil Dead, it also shows us what Alvarez could do, had he kept the knob turned to 11 for the whole film. This bodes well for the inevitable sequel, which I’m much more excited to see.

Evil Dead is a reboot that recaptures some memorable elements of the original and wraps them in new framing devices and a different tone, but never over-extends itself, nor collapses under the weight of expectations. If you want a true modern Raimi horror experience, treat yourself to an evening with Drag Me To Hell, a film that brilliantly mixes possession horror and dark comedy with a female protagonist. If you want to see the start of a promising horror career that delivers a more than competent, if not terribly memorable experience, then Evil Dead (2013) is for you.