Like most old school horror film geeks, I went to see the new Evil Dead remake fully prepared to love it, despise it, or both. It ended up doing both, but mostly I enjoyed it. Was it better than the original? No. Did it look really fucking cool? Yes. Much like the re-makes of Dawn of the Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween, I'm willing to file this one under "acceptable blasphemy." It had a lot of things going for it and it could have been much, much worse.
I'll break it down for you.
PROS:
- Gory as fuck
- Creepy as hell
- Visually stunning, excellent cinematography
- Not overloaded with cheap CGI
- Not plagued by nu-metal goth pop soundtrack
CONS:
- Every un-possessed human character kind of sucked (Seventies Beard Guy was alright in an annoying pseudo-comic relief sort of way, but otherwise, eh)
- Throwaway dramatic back story that nobody cares about
- Main character is an emo pretty boy
- At no point does the main character ever "go Bruce Campbell" (if you don't instantly know what I mean by that then you know nothing about the Evil Dead movies)
- Did I mention that I hated the main character?
SPOILER:
He dies. Thankfully. Someone else goes Bruce Campbell at the last minute, thereby making me hate this movie much less than I would've had they crapped out the ending like I thought they were going to. When it reaches that "are you fucking shitting me?" point in the film, just know that it gets better.
If you're not quite sure what to expect, the first thing you should know about the remake is that this is not a comedy. At all. Most casual fans of the franchise tend to forget that in the first movie Sam Raimi was honestly trying to make a serious horror film. By the time he got around to Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, he just said fuck it and made them comedies because Bruce Campbell is goddamn hilarious.
The second thing you should know is that THIS MOVIE IS NOT FOR GODDAMN LITTLE TINY CHILDREN, WHAT THE FUCK, YOU SHITTY, SHITTY PARENTS. I mention this only because the Saturday matinee I went to was full of kids. As in more than five. What. The. Fuck.
The loudest and stupidest ones kept saying "ooh scary!" in little mocking voices during the trailers. We, the non-parent grown-ups of the audience, wanted to kill them. Fortunately, it never came to that. After the first scene of the actual movie they shut the fuck up and promptly exited the theater with their mother, hopefully to go home and have soul crushing nightmares for the rest of the school year.
So parents, if you're just looking for a fun scary movie and you're bringing the kids along because you're too cheap or lazy for a babysitter, then maybe you need to understand that this movie is like Saw and Hostel being chainsaw-raped by The Exorcist while screaming fuckity fuckity fuck at the top of its demonic lungs. Again, probably not so appropriate for the 6-10 age bracket.
This movie is rated R. Believe me when I tell you that it's a hard R. It's a "somebody had to blow half the MPAA to keep this from being NC-17 in the theaters" R. This isn't "adult situations." This isn't "cover your eyes during the bad parts." IT'S ALL BAD PARTS. IT'S SATANIC TORTURE PORN, YOU FUCKING IDIOT. At almost any given moment, you can be pretty sure that something completely horrible is either occurring or about to occur onscreen.
Oh yeah, and there's a scene where a girl gets full-on penetrated by a very phallic looking vine. Covered in thorns. That came out of a possessed girl's mouth. Have fun explaining that one at dinner. Oh what am I saying, I'm sure your kids see demonic lesbian tentacle rape on Pokémon all the time. Don't they? No? Huh.
Damn, now I want Sam Raimi to produce a live action R-rated Pokémon horror movie. Somebody should start up a petition. We need a Satanic soul-eating Pikachu reboot right now.