I hesitated to even watch this movie for any reason, let alone for my annual marathon. Being a huge fan of the original, and not a big fan of remakes, this was a tough sell. Especially with Diablo Cody being attached to the script.
Mia and her friends are at her family’s secluded cabin in the woods. Mia has a drug problem, and the best solution that her and her friends can come up with is to quit cold turkey and ride out the withdrawals in the cabin away from everything. With Mia’s brother there to lend moral support, Mia throws her last remaining stash of heroin down a well. Then then go inside the cabin, and the movie rolls.
There is something dead in the house, and Mia appears to be the only one that can smell it. Unfortunately what the group discovers is that Mia is not wrong, and there in the cellar is dozens of dead cats hanging from the ceiling. On a table in the same room is a double barrel shotgun and a book. Wrapped in plastic and bound in barbed wire, the book sits, and waits. Eric, the nerdy, snarky, and curious one of the group, takes the book to his room. After opening the book, and ignoring all the warning scrawled inside its pages, Eric reads the incantation, and unknowingly summons a demon.
An evil spirit is loose in the woods and it wants a new host. Mia, being weakened from the drug withdrawals is the best logical victim. Mia wants out of the woods and she tries to plead with her friends to let her go anywhere aside from staying in the cabin. Naturally they all think she is just coming off the drugs and don’t believe her stories of people/things in the woods. They should have.
Evil Dead (2013) is a reboot and possible continuation of the original campy masterpiece from director Sam Raimi. Sam hand picked director Fede Alvarez to direct his reboot/sequel. Alvarez and another man Rodo Sayagues worked on an original script which was then punched up (so to speak) by Diablo Cody to make it more American friendly, since English was neither of the men’s first language. This initially was what worried me about the script. Cody’s work on Juno and Jennifer’s Body ranged from barely tolerable to down right horrible respectively, in my opinion. However, this script was barely recognizable as her work.
Evil Dead and the original movie are very similar and yet wildly different at the same time. Raimi leaned heavily on campy humor and gore that was almost laughable. Alvarez’s vision of the movie was more serious (relative to the movie anyways) and the gore was, at times, hard to watch. The plot may be different but the way in which scenarios play out on screen are very similar. All the key scenes that everyone remembers from the first movie are there, they just may happen to different cast members this time.
One thing I want to point out from this movie that I feel should not be over looked, is the casting and acting of Jane Levy as Mia. You may not know who she is, but she is the main character “Tessa” in the ABC sitcom “Suburgatory”. She is a stand out in this movie, by leaps and bounds. The amount of terror/psychosis she conveys on screen with just her eyes, it downright creepy.
With Alvarez already signed on to do a sequel to his version of Evil Dead, it will be interesting to see how he treats the second film. Raimi made Evil Dead 2 almost as a spoof on the first. Also (and I didn’t know this until just now) Raimi has said he will be doing a sequel to Army of Darkness continuing the adventures of Ash Williams of the first two Evil Dead films. What’s more interesting than that is that Campbell and Alvarez said their end goal is to make a movie after that which will show how the story lines of Mia and Ash connect.
So would I recommend you see Evil Dead (2013)? Sure. It’s a good enough movie on it’s own and if you had no prior knowledge of the originals, it would stand out as a great movie on its own rights. However, as a reboot/sequel it just kinda does the same thing again, albeit in a much more gory and sadistic fashion. It stars basically no one (aside from the a fore mentioned Levy) and everyone looks like they were cast to be screen-similar to other actors and actresses. At it’s core, it’s a horror movie. No one goes into a horror movie looking for high drama and intellectual writing. Taken at face value, Evil Dead (2013) is a great film, and I am glad I didn’t let my love of the originals over-shadow it.
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