Evil Dead Review

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy (with Evil Dead II being my absolute favorite.) So, you can imagine how I felt when I heard they were doing a remake (reboot?) of The Evil Dead. I was a little standoffish, but had hope that it would be faithful to the original, and keep it scary as all fuck. Thankfully, with the input of Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, Fede Alvarez came through.

Evil Dead is virtually the exact same plot as the original film, but with slightly more substance. The main characters this time around aren't going on a vacation, they are at this cabin for a reason. Our characters are there to help the lead, Mia (Jane Levy), to go cold turkey. They are all her oldest friends and want to keep her at the cabin until she is clean. Then hijinks ensue, as you can imagine.

The first twenty minutes of this film seem a little forced and contrived. It isn't the best dialogue in the world, and at times, it seems like the worst. But overall, it isn't bad. It tries to set up relationships and show us why we should care about certain characters, but it doesn't quite succeed. We don't really learn much about any characters besides some back story on Mia and her brother, so it really becomes hard to care about who lives and who dies. After the initial introductions and such, that's when the movie starts to get good, and I think it's because it doesn't rely so much on dialogue as it does on what you are seeing.

Going into this movie, I expected to see a crazy amount of gore, just like The Evil Dead had, back in 1981. I was not disappointed. Once the shit hit the fan, Alvarez knew exactly what to give the audience and how to do it. While there weren't a lot of jump scares in the film, there was a lot of "holy shit what is happening" scares. I don't want to give anything away, so I will just leave it at this: the amount of gore in this film puts the original The Evil Dead to shame. In the last half hour alone, they much have used several hundred gallons of blood. It was awesome.

I really enjoyed all of the homages to the original The Evil Dead that were thrown into this film, and didn't find any of them to be over doing it. Like, the fact that the car from the original was sitting in the yard all rusty and shitty was a really subtle (and awesome) reference. There are a lot of things like that scattered through this film that will make fans of the original just smile, while it won't effect the quality of the film for newcomers.

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This was a solid remake of an already great movie. I felt like it really differentiated itself from the original film enough to make it a quality film, but it didn't forget to give a few nods to the originators of the cult classic. I suggest this film to anyone who enjoys a good scare, and can handle an ungodly amount of gore.

Writing: 5/10

Directing: 7/10

Acting: 7/10

Pacing: 9/10

Rewatchability: 9/10

Score: 7.4/10