June 23, 2013

Evil Dread

by Adam Sweeney

Evil Dead (2013) - dir. Fede Alvarez / The Evil Dead (1981) - dir. Sam Raimi

As with any other memory, it's relatively foggy. I remember few specifics. I don't remember what day of the week it was, nor do I remember my mother's purpose for going to Wal-Mart. What I do remember is it was around Halloween. I remember wanting to buy a horror movie. I remember there was a display with several VHS around the cosmetics section of the store.

I remember my first glimpse of The Evil Dead.

The box wasn't anything to write home about. Frankly, the picture on the front looked like someone had shot it in their backyard: a good looking man with a chiseled chin, standing on a grave with a shotgun in one hand and an axe over his shoulder. He looks off frame into the danger that's in the woods. Or at least the off screen terror of his friend's backyard. On the back of the box was a short description of the film as well as a few pictures. What struck me most was a single quote. Not from a critic or a filmmaker1, but from an esteemed horror novelist:

"…The most ferociously original horror film of the year…" - Stephen King

Yes, that Stephen King.

I needed this movie. There was no way around it now. Screw the cover art, screw the alleged adult content and especially screw the impending nightmares after I get done watching the movie. I needed this movie.

I'd have to be sly. Not necessarily dishonest, but sly. I needed to approach my mother with the movie and pay for it with my own money. I had some money from my paper routes. I could do this. I had to do this.

I found my mother and inconspicuously placed the VHS in the cart. We headed to the checkout.  I helped put the groceries onto the belt, placing a divider between her stuff and my tape. She gets finished checking out. The clerk moved the divider and scanned my purchase. It flagged, asking if I was 17. I wouldn't be for another four years. My mother looked up from her checkbook and nodded, telling the clerk it was okay. I paid for the VHS, got my change and took the bag. I ran out in front of my mother and into the parking lot. I had to get out before they became hip to my ruse.

I got home that night and ran up into my room. I took off the plastic, slid the tape out and loaded it into my VCR. What I watched for the next 85 minutes changed me. I don't mean that in the cliché way, like I became a paranoid recluse for the rest of my life because of how much fear it instilled in me. No, not that at all.

I just became a paranoid recluse for the next couple of days. I went to high school and started telling all my friends about it. How it was like nothing I had ever seen. How there was so much blood in it. How some lady got raped by a tree. In fact, anytime I relayed that last fact, I'd get the response of, "The tree…raped someone?" and I would nod emphatically. Pretty soon, all my friends wanted to see this movie.

It quickly became one of my favorite movies, as well as a perennial viewing staple among my friends. We'd watch it on Halloween. Anytime we'd go out in the woods, we'd talk about how weird it would be to find a cabin out there with the Necronomicon on the book shelf. Who we thought would get killed first in that situation. The possibilities were endless.

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All the preceding facts made me incredibly hesitant to put my support behind the idea of a remake of The Evil Dead. The movie meant too much to me for so many different reasons, I just couldn't get behind it. Remakes are a part of Hollywood. Have been for a while. It stems from a conception that people cannot come up with any original ideas, so they have to keep regurgitating old ones to see what happens.

Lately, remakes have become more prevalent. I guess you could blame Platinum Dunes for this. In 2003, the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released to decent box office. Hollywood saw this as an opportunity and seized it. This is not to say that all the remakes suck, but a good majority of them have. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Black Christmas, The Fog, When a Stranger Calls, Prom Night are just a few of them. Since this started, I figured it was only a matter of time before they got to the movies I loved.

Thankfully, this was not one of the disappointments.

Evil Dead (dropping the The for some odd reason) is energetically directed and acted, but not without flaws. The original trilogy isn't without flaws, either, but a lot of things added in the remake seem to be the product of studio influence to spell things out and justify the events of the film. One such added subplot involves one character fighting drug addiction, as opposed to simply being paranoid in the original. Another unnecessary addition is a five-minute opener. It really made no sense. They show a different family dealing with a possessed girl with a bunch of cats hanging from the ceiling (this comes back later on). Had the writers and director just been confident in what they were doing, the first five minutes could have just been cut.

Okay. Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about the good things in this film.

The plot follows a classic horror trope: five friends go into the woods and bad things happen. This was covered in last year's The Cabin in the Woods, a parody without a point. Evil Dead works better on sheer audacity. The violence in this movie is unlike anything I have seen in a mainstream horror movie. I haven't the slightest idea how the hell this got an R rating. The things that happen in this movie include, but are not limited to, hands being yanked off, people being stabbed with a hypodermic needle, and an unfortunate scene with a piece of a mirror.

It's a movie that takes a little while to start, but once it does, never stops. The acting is okay. The problem with a movie like this is that it is almost deliberately underwritten. They're all relegated to stereotypes: brother, drug addict, nerd, doctor, girlfriend. Because of this, there isn't a lot of room for acting. There's a lot of things to react to, but nothing where one of the actors has to sit around and with the weight of the world on their shoulders.

That being said, the two fleshed out, if you excuse the pun there, characters are a brother and sister. The brother sees this as an opportunity to reconnect to his sister, a person who has turned to drugs after the death of their mother. The brother wasn't around for her death. There's guilt attached to that, but the filmmakers don't really seem to be concerned about that.

I know, I know. My critique seems a little confusing. How can I complain about there not being character development and then say this isn't the type of the movie to have character development?

The filmmakers had an opportunity to go this route and done an introspective story about drug addiction set against the backdrop of a “teens in the woods” movie. But it doesn't. It goes straight to the gore and doesn't really say much else about addiction. The movie is at odds with itself: it didn't need the drug addiction subplot to succeed. If they really wanted to use drug addiction in the movie then they should have used it more, made it an allegory somehow. Have it running through the veins of the movie. Instead it’s, "Oh hey, you're a drug addict? Now you're a possessed demon, puking blood on me? Thanks for the update."

All that aside, the movie works. It's one of those things where I am being nitpicky. It's my thing.  I find something good and then expound on its faults instead of championing its strengths. Really, when it comes down to it, the movie is entertaining, well shot and paced and unbelievably gory. My concerns about it being one of those detestable remakes melted away after the first thirty minutes.

Taking all this into consideration, if you're looking for a fun time and have a strong stomach, you should see this movie. It's got about everything you could want in a horror movie.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go track down my VHS copy of The Evil Dead, hook up my VCR and feel like a freshmen in high school again.

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Another Note: Anyone willing to sit through the credits will get a nice surprise. While it's anticlimactic and can barely be considered an Easter egg, it brings up a load of questions.

1 - I understand that Stephen King directed and wrote Maximum Overdrive but, let's be serious, no one truly considers that a film. It's a movie about killer trucks. Killer trucks! With Emilio Estevez. That's not a film.

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