Review of Evil Dead (2013) by Brendan C — 17 Dec 2013

Every time a film is remade it is remade for a reason, and that is to make it better. If you ask me they remade this one, because the old one is dated. When you watch the original it is more of a comedy if you ask me. I laughed throughout the whole experience of seeing that film. It is dated, because it literally has no plot or character background, all that happens is that people get possessed by spirits and become demonic zombies. Also the effects look pretty atrocious now. The gore in it looks so cheesy, and even the makeup on the people who are possessed looks pretty bad too. So I can see why you would want to remake that. With todays technology you could make things look much more realistic, and plus today we tend to be more critical of films that don't have plots so it only makes sense that a remake could potentially improve the original.

So they added more realistic looking gore, effects, and most importantly this one had a bit of a story behind it that gave some background to the main characters. In the original they just go up to the cabin, but in this one they were there for a reason. A girl named Mia (Jane Levy), who is recovering from a heroin addiction goes out to the cabin with her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) to start her recovery. David left home after their mother was committed to an asylum, which left Mia alone to take care of her, likely causing her addiction. He estranged from her now. That is the background they added to this. It isn't a lot, but the premise of this movie isn't one that you can really do that much with. So really what they added a lot more to the film was gore. It was way gorier and way more gruesome.

To tell you the truth I hated the film for that reason, and I don't think they improved the original at all. It was rarely ever scary at all, but it was always gross and disturbing. I am really tired of how Hollywood feels like they have to be gross and disturbing all the time to be scary. To make a film scary you don't have to be disgusting. This film is literally a bloodbath. There are things like people having blood squirt or pour out of them, from either losing an arm, cutting of their cheek with a piece of glass, and at one point Mia throws up a waterfall of blood on her friend when she gets possessed. When I see stuff like that I lose interest, and I feel more disgusted then scared.

I think I would have rationalized it a little bit if the film scared me, but it really didn't. I found it all predictable due to many horror film clichés like people being stupid, and they even do the stupid thing during the chase thing at the end that they do in every Halloween or Friday the 13th movie where the girl is being chased and things keep getting in her way or she trips on something delaying her. They always have to make the girl being chased in the end really stupid, slow, or unlucky to keep so she can't get away easily, so the scene can be scary. At the end of it the film felt more like a slasher film from the 80's. The whole thing felt kind of cliché, or overly gross. Even that whole background that they gave Mia and David felt really cliché. I can't really explain why I felt that way, but for some reason I felt like I had seen stories like that before. Overall it was just not interesting or scary for me.

I feel like you have to be careful with what films you remake, because you can ruin the original. I wouldn't say that this ruined the original, because a good amount of people seemed to like it, I just hated it, but still I would say the original is better. The original although it is a really stupid, cheesy, and pointless movie it still pretty fun. It is fun because the gore and stuff that is meant to be scary is just really cheesy and funny to look at now. I feel like the idea of remaking old horror films is almost a mistake, because they are pretty much always bad. Some of the worst movies I have seen have been remakes of classic horror films. This was just a classic remake of a horror film if you ask me.

A typical horror remake to me is just a much more over the top version of the original, with some changes to the story to make it seem more original. They add more gore, and make it more gruesome to try to make it seem scarier. However the changes never really add anything to the original. They ruin the originals by changing what made them classics. That is my overall review on horror film remakes. I feel like for the most part they are a waste of time and money to make, and a waste of time to watch. That is true for remakes of a lot of films, but horror especially though. That is just my opinion though. Overall I just thought that this was a really bad movie that added nothing good to the original.