Evil Dead

Evie Totty: “It ruled.”

As you can see from this month's discussion, I wasn't too terribly impressed by the original movie. The premise was pretty cool, but it was SOOOO cheesy (didn't help that I didn't see it until it had been out for about 20 years) and of course by then I'd seen Bruce Campbell in all the rest of Raimi's stuff and be silly in all that mess.

Given that - THIS version was very well done. Of course I was trying to figure out who was going to end up BEING the Bruce Campbell character so that was fun in and of itself.

Will I pay to see it again? Probably not, but if I came across it on the ol' clicker, I would probably turn it on.

− April 7, 2013 • more by Evie • log in or create an account to reply

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Scott Hardie: “It sucked.”

Awful. Just terrible. The filmmakers never saw a horror-genre cliche that they weren't willing to rip off lazily. The dialogue is especially insipid, a formless stew of exposition-speak that no human being would actually utter. The movie ambitiously wants to raise the bar for gore and shock value, but it doesn't have anywhere near the imagination to pull that off, so it just wallows in failure. Every scene plays like a pathetic attempt to mimic what worked in other horror movies except with more blood and shriller music. I can say only two good things about it: The movie is better-looking than average (the creative team's only manifest talent is for visual composition and they were right to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else), and it races through the cabin-in-the-woods dead-teenager formula at such a breakneck pace, counting off the standard plot beats sometimes seconds apart, that the experience of waiting for it to be over already is a brief one.

− August 12, 2013 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply

Scott Hardie: To be fair: I do like some horror movies -- I called The Orphanage the best of its year -- but generally, horror is not a favorite genre of mine. Most "dead teenager" movies strike me as boring retreads of an overused formula. Plenty of people really like that kind of movie, so if you're one of them, then by all means, don't give my opinion of Evil Dead any weight. − August 25, 2013 • more by Scott

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Erik Bates: “It sucked.”

I had to force myself to finish this one. Took me 3 nights. I kept getting distracted by infinitely more interesting things, like this video about what's so cool about being left handed.

It should be noted -- I am not left handed.

As a lover of the campy original film, I take issue with this movie trying to make a serious attempt at a remake. This attempt took all the magic out of the original films and just replaced it with an overwhelming amount of gore, hoping nobody would notice the difference.

I do like the throwback to the original with the audio recording from the original movie. That's about it.

− November 13, 2013 • more by Erik • log in or create an account to reply

Scott Hardie: That seems to be the general consensus, that the remake went for maximum scariness (and missed) rather than taking the more comedic route of the original series, and that was its primary mistake. But wasn't the original film similarly shooting for scariness? It has become a cult classic because it's so cheesy and funny, but I thought it wasn't until Evil Dead 2 that the series began intentionally undercutting the horror with silliness -- and even then, it wasn't until Army of Darkness that this change really kicked into gear. − December 6, 2013 • more by Scott

Erik Bates: Yeah, I'm pretty sure the original was intended to be a legitimate horror and accidentally became a spoof on the genre. With that in mind, this felt less like a remake or homage to the original and more like an insulting, "Here, let me show you how it should have been done, jackass." − December 9, 2013 • more by Erik

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