Evil Dead (2013)

1981 isn’t that long ago, but The Evil Dead is certainly dated. The remake may feel a little redundant, but it’s going to bring horror fans in and put bums on seats, that’s for sure. A bit of a cult classic, the original is perhaps better-remembered than it deserves, but I understood the motivation and the financing behind the reboot.

Unfortunately, with the quirky humour replaced by a po-faced refusal to acknowledge how the plot (ancient evil unleashed by affable young people in a secluded cabin thanks to vague evil magic in artefacts) has become cliché enough that it underpinned Cabin in the Woods, and the attempts to scare replaced by post-saw attempts to make you cringe with the visceral depictions of extremely painful acts, it mostly just felt dull. I’ve always found torture porn on the lame side, and if there’s no underlying psychological element, which here was at a bare minimum, it’s just not very interesting.

And the character types were not very likeable. I’m not going to like a drug addict, a jock, a geeky stoner guy, a firm female doctor-type and a token girlfriend unless they’re more than those archetypes, and none of them are. There was more of interest in the 2-minute prologue than in the entire remainder of the film, and the fact that when ancient evil is truly unleashed it gets only to the car park is truly anticlimactic. The only smile that the film raised was also the grim shaking-my-head sardonic one that came from realising deaths were coming in the least politically correct order possible.

Really, I couldn’t have expected much more than this. They couldn’t exactly throw out the entire plot. But I certainly expected to be much more entertained than I was.