The Evil Dead - Reboot

Quick!  Everyone split up!

I tried.

I really did.

I wanted to like the new version of The Evil Dead, but alas, I’ve seen Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods, and that seems to have ruined 99.44% of horror movies for me.  Not that I’m a fan of horror movies in general.  They’re generally made up of the worst clichés and tropes.  When Raimi, Campbell and friends set out to make a film on a shoe-string budget, they even owned up to the fact that a horror movie was the easiest with the best profit margin.

Of all the horror series that I’ve watched (or made a passing attempt at) The Evil Dead is the one I’ve enjoyed the most.  It incorporates humor, snappy one-liners, and a lot of blood and gore.  It went a bit off the rails with the near farcical, but excellent, Ash v. The Army of Darkness, and I understand this reboot is supposed to link up the two worlds, but for all that, I just couldn’t get into it very much.

Watch smart, watch SMart!

Now that Raimi and friends are Raimi and friends, the production values and cinematography is much better, much less jarring.  The acting is decent, the story is fine.  It’s a worthy successor to the series.

Yet, even with a veneer of depth to the characters, the plot still revolves around a lot of folk doing really stupid things when what they should be doing is this:

Exactly.  Only a few people find a creepy, dirty, decrepit, blood-soaked cabin in the woods “romantic” or “erotic”.  The rest of us consider a hotel without room service to be “roughing it”.

I can still recommend the originals—The Evil Dead, The Evil Dead II, and Ash vs. The Army of the Darkness.  Maybe aficionados of horror will like this reboot as well.  I'm going back to my scifi/fantasy/adventure/action/humor movies.  You know, Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension.