I mean, how do you even dare to do an Evil Dead remake? The original movies are iconic and yet, here we are.
Five friends gather in a super-creepy cabin in the woods (and now I want to watch that movie again) in a somber reunion to help Mia (Jane Levy, excellently bug-eyed and twitchy) kick her dope habit. Others in attendance are healthcare worker Olivia, bookish Eric, Mia's older, absentee brother David, and David's girlfriend, "Natalie," who is such a non-entity that I didn't even know her name until the nail-gun started going off.
It hits all the horror tropes - which, back in the early 80s still was new but now opens no uncharted territory: people doing extremely stupid things like crawling into dark holes, going down into the fetid basement which is full of cat corpses strung from the ceiling, reading aloud from the Necromicon. Seriously, who does that? The cabin is much, much bigger on the inside that it would appear from exterior shots. Brief, early appearances of a shotgun, electric knife and nail-gun, being used appropriately, clearly signal that we'll be seeing them all again later, in a much more gruesome manner.
Fans of the originals will recognize plenty of callbacks, including but not limited to evil hands, self-amputations and putting THE CHAINSAW into play. I may have cheered a little at that one. At the very end, there's a flash of humor as the last remaining characters are bathed in enough fake blood to make Dead Alive envious. I would like to say, however, that I wish we hadn't revisited the invasive vine sequence.
Right from the start, this Evil Dead reworking shows that it is not going to back away from the gore and over-the-top violence, although the cheeky humor of II is definitely lacking. Final verdict: not a complete waste of time for the viewer but there really wasn't any reason to remake this one. Go back and rewatch the Bruce Campbell ones instead.
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