Evil Dead

The poster pretty much describes my experience with this film.  About an hour in I got up to take a breather and get a glass of water and fainted in my kitchen.  This film is RELENTLESS.  I've seen my share of horror movies, good and bad, and this film is the most punishing I've ever seen.  Some films choose to have the audience take a breather, to laugh or something before the next scare or horror comes around the bend. With Evil Dead, it is just one after the other after the other until the very end of the film.  After I came to, I stopped the film and had to come back to it the next day to finish it.

Evil Dead is a remake or "re-imagining" of Sam Raimi's classic franchise that made Bruce Campbell a cult icon.  Raimi and Campbell are producers on this film, though the iconic humor of the first two films are largely absent from this one.  If you've seen the original film or Cabin in the Woods you know the premise. 5 teenagers in a cabin, weird things happen, things go terribly wrong.  This film centers around Mia, played by Jane Levy, who is trying to kick her heroin addiction cold turkey with the help of her friends over a weekend.  They journey off to her parent's old cabin and arrive to find everything dilapidated and dead cats in the basement.  They still decide to stay the weekend and find book wrapped in a plastic bag, tied off in barb wire.  If the barb wire didn't tell you not to open the book, I don't know what will.  There are also warnings inside the book that say "Don't read it, don't write it, don't hear it" but our idiot teenagers do it anyway.  Whoops.

What follows is the most relentless horror film today. Now, I like my horror films to have some other element in them.  I liked the Saw films because they were just ridiculously implausible with the complexity of the death traps.  The Final Destination films started out as an interesting series on fate and consequence but also featured elaborate Rube Goldberg type death scenes.  Heck I even liked the recent Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films even though a lot of horror purists did not.  I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you like your horror without any humor, fun, or pacing you are sure to love Evil Dead.  If you like your horror a little less steadfast and with some humor you may not enjoy this Evil Dead as you might the original film or Raimi's latest horror film Drag Me to Hell.

2 out of 5 Stars

Trailer