Evil Dead
(2013) 91 Min.
Rated: R (Excessive gore and violence, sexual abuse)
Country: USA
Director: Fede Alvarez
Starring: Jane Levy, Shiloh Fernandez, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas, Elizabeth Blackmore
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
A re-make based on The Evil Dead 1981 film.
Friends decide to meet up at a cabin in the woods and unwittingly unleash evil upon themselves.
Synopsis:
The film opens with a girl being caught in the woods. She is tied up and brought into a room with dozens of dead cats tied to the ceiling. Her father douses her with oil and tells her that she killed his wife/her mother. Her demeanor changes from frightened to that of a malicious demonic face. Her father lights her on fire and then shoots her dead.
A group of friends, Mia (Levy), Mia’s brother David (Fernandez), Eric (Pucci), Olivia (Lucas) and David’s girlfriend, Natalie (Blackmore), decide to stay at a remote cabin in the woods. Mia and David spent their childhood in the cabin and when they arrive they find the cabin disheveled. Mia also vows to stay off drugs cold turkey and dumps her drugs down a well.
Eric and Olivia tell David that Mia tried to quit cold turkey last summer but didn’t make it past eight hours. They also tell him that his sister OD’d and that she was clinically dead during her overdose. They vow to keep her at the house.
Later that night Mia starts crying about a dead smell in the cabin. After their dog scratches at the rug on the floor, they remove it to reveal a trap door with a trail of dried blood.
David and Eric go down into the basement behind the trap door and follow the smell. They open a door and find a room with dozens of dead cats hanging from the ceiling and a charred black post.
It’s the same room where the girl in the earlier sequence was burnt to death.
They bring an object wrapped in a black garbage bag and wires back upstairs. Mia is nervous and growing increasingly frantic. Meanwhile, Eric unwraps the object and discovers that it’s a book with a cover made of human skin stitched together. He opens the book and begins to recite words embedded in the pages.
After the words are recited, Mia collapses outside and vomits. She sees a figure standing outside in the rain. Alarmed she tries to leave the cabin by stealing one of the cars. The car falls into a large puddle and she swims to the shore of it. Mia tumbles into some thick branches where she begins to get tangled as the branches start to wrap around her arm and neck.
A demonic form of Mia appears before her and vomits out a long black snake-like root. These black branches climb up Mia’s leg, under her skirt and into her.
David and Olivia find Mia curled up by a tree and bring her back to the cabin. Olivia, being a nurse, treats Mia’s wounds but is reluctant to take her to a hospital. Mia still sees the Demonic Mia in the house.
Eric continues his work on the book and tries to study it and make sense of it.
David begins the task of taking out the dead cats from the basement. When he calls for the dog, it does not respond. He finds the dog has been beaten and is bloody. David imagines Mia beating the dog with a hammer, so he goes to see her. Mia, meanwhile, is in the shower fully clothed and ignoring David’s knocking. David eventually breaks down the door to find Mia sitting under boiling-hot shower water. Her skin is peeling and she is in a trance.
He attempts to drive her to the nearest town, but it seems like the only road out is blocked by river that is so swollen from the rains it has flooded. David and Mia return to the cabin.
Olivia informs them that she put sedatives in Mia so that she’ll be out for a few hours. Mia, however, appears with a gun and shoots David in the arm. Mia announces, in a possessed voice, that each one of them will die. She collapses momentarily and Olivia tries to reach for the gun, however Mia grabs her and begins to vomit red fluid on Olivia’s face. Mia falls down into the basement and Eric closes the trapdoor and locks it.
Olivia washes her face and sees a Demonic Olivia with an open Glasgow smile. Olivia backs away from the mirror and walks to another room where she’s stopped cold in her tracks. She can’t control her muscles and urinates on herself.
Eric begins to look for Olivia and he finds her the darkened bathroom. She is possessed and has cut out a chunk of her cheek into what looks like a Glasgow smile.
Eric falls back in shock and hits back on the toilet. As he’s writhing in pain on the floor, the door to the bathroom closes. Olivia rises from the shower and stabs Eric in the shoulder with her broken piece of mirror. She then takes a needle and tries to stab him a few more times. He manages to push her away. He pulls a broken needle out of his eye socket as she begins to crawl towards him. He takes a piece of broken toilet and bashes her head in until she no longer moves.
At this point, David and Natalie come in to see the chaos. Eric mutters “she tried to kill me” repeatedly.
David tries to help Eric and removes the broken mirror from his chest. The wound is oozing blood and he’s in a state of shock. Eric mutters that he did something terrible. He tells David that he read a passage from the book that was seemingly a prayer and released something evil.
Natalie goes to get water for David and Eric from the kitchen, but suddenly the trapdoor opens. Mia calls out for Natalie while sobbing and Natalie enters the basement to help Mia. She gets pulled down and the door is closed. Posessed Mia harrasses Natalie and tries to bite/kiss her on the mouth when David suddenly opens the door. He pulls Natalie out and starts to chain and nail the door shut with Mia inside.
Eric, now a bit better, tries to burn the book, but it doesn’t burn. David asks him to explain the book and Eric tells him of a prophecy within the book. A demonic entity that takes souls. Once the entity feasts on five souls then it will rain blood and “the abomination will rise from Hell”. Eric says the only way to save Mia is to kill her. David rejects this suggestion.
A bite from Mia that Natalie has on her hand seems to spread a demonic possession of her body. As she watches the possession spread, she takes an electric carving knife and slices through her arm above the infection.
David and Eric argue about killing Mia, when Natalie returns. She’s possessed and has a nail gun. She has shot herself in the face, but also starts to shoot nails at Eric and David. Natalie drops the gun and picks up a crowbar. She starts to hit David’s arm and back, then attacks Eric a few times. David, however, manages to get the shot gun and shoots off her one arm. Now armless, she turns to David and asks him why he’s hurting her. She collapses into his lap on the floor.
David decides to burn the house, but midway he hears Mia singing in her normal voice. He decides to deal with her in another way and goes into the basement. While there Mia attacks him with a utility knife. She pulls him under the water to drown him, but Eric beats her off him with a crowbar. Eric, however was stabbed and he finally dies.
David puts Mia into a red dress and into a hole in the ground. He starts to bury her when she wakes up and screams that she can’t breathe and pleads with him.
He finishes up the burial. Soon afterwards he digs her up and tries to revive her by shocking her body. Just as he’s given up, she is revived. They hug.
He goes into the house to retrieve the car keys, however Eric is now possessed and stabs David in the jugular vein with a pair of pliers. David tells Mia to go without him. He reaches for the shotgun and shoots a can of gasoline, sending the whole cabin up in flames.
Mia is left on the outside, trying to get into the car, when suddenly it starts to rain blood. The Abomination crawls out of the ground and starts to chase Mia into the shed. She gets a chainsaw, is able to fill it with gas, but still must be out of the Abomination’s reach. She goes outside and hides beneath the car and starts up the chainsaw. She slices off it’s legs, then tries to crawl away from the car. The Abomination tips the car over and crushes Mia’s left hand.
She manages to tear her arm away from her crushed hand. She crawls away and gets to her feet. The Abomination continues to follow her. She then raises the chainsaw and slices into it’s head, destroying it. The creature melts into the bloody ground. The bloody rain ceases and the sun begins to peek out from behind the trees. The cabin’s fire burns out.
The film ends.
Review:
I think a lot of criticism that goes towards this movie is the expectation that it follow the same formula as Sam Raimi’s version. Indeed, there are some similarities and homages to the original movie. It’s a story about people in a isolated cabin in the woods that also happens to contain a skin-bound book. A demon is summoned and possesses someone. These are all things that are in both movies, but similarities end about there.
This movie obviously had a larger budget. It has a lot more special effects. There is a lot more gore that looks more genuine than the original. This movie also has more of a serious tone. The original had a lot of tongue in cheek moments. Clearly this movie isn’t the same as the original because it doesn’t want to be.
There’s a lot more blood and gore in this version and what some would describe as torture-porn. I think the character of Eric (Pucci) was treated like a human pinata at some point. I was surprised he lived so long. So if seeing graphic bodily harm like needles in/near eyes, heads beaten in, or hands mangled and cut off isn’t your thing then this movie definitely wouldn’t please you.
I think there’s a point where there’s so much violence, too, that the audience becomes numbed to it. It loses it’s impact.
I did find the original story interesting. I thought it was clever to have Mia be an ex-junkie. Her anxiety at the beginning of the movie is not without merit and the other characters soundly brush it off trying to “help” her by keeping her in the cabin.
I saw this movie without any expectations and I think I found myself more surprised by the shift in tone from a possessed haunting to suddenly an almost slasher film at the end when Mia is chased.
There are flaws in this movie. It is a bit over the top. There is excessive blood and violence. It’s definitely NOT the original The Evil Dead. It doesn’t have the charming charisma of Bruce Campbell. This should probably be seen as a standalone film without ties to the original franchise. I think if it’s seen as a film on its own it’s a decent horror film. There really isn’t much build-up or haunting terror in this film. It relies only on the narrative and its blood and gore to entertain you.
Note: The five main characters first initials spell out the word DEMON. David, Eric, Mia, Olivia, Natalie.