Movie Review: Going to Hell again with the 'Evil Dead'

There is, I find, truth in wounds and grievous injury.   At least that’s what I learned through all the gore and hilarious fun of director Sam Raimi’s original infernal trifecta: “Evil Dead” (1981), “Evil Dead 2” (1987), and “Army of Darkness” (1992). Which just means that, as the suffering of the characters rose, so did their heroism and will to fight the creatures from hell. It’s the same on this reboot, the feature debut of director Fede Alvarez, whom Raimi himself selected to pass on the auteur torch to. Raimi also put his money where his mouth is, taking co-executive producer credits along with Bruce Campbell and Robert G. Tapert: the lead actor, and producer of the original trilogy, respectively. What this means is that “Evil Dead” (2013) is the fourth instalment of the franchise, but that, aside from being a reboot, it’s also a loose continuation of the series. Stephen King has a famous sound bite declaring how he tries for a three pronged approach to eliciting a primal reaction: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.” Demons and drugs don’t mix Neither is this reboot. Not too proud at all seeing how Alvarez gives nods to all the requisite unholy compass points (hardcore Deadites – meaning, Evil Dead fans – will have a field day with the references and especially with the surprise that’s in store after the credits) but he also polishes off the mythos’s leather-wrapped covers and makes it ready to stand up, shake hands with new, younger fans of the genre, before proceeding to eat their brains out. While you can always count on teen stupidity to open the door to evil, the great thing here is that they avoid the whole teen debauchery excuse. That these people just went to the darn woods to screw, drink, and get high. This time we do have a valid premise: drug rehab done DIY style. Recovering heroin addict Mia (Jane Levy) is on the mend. The teen’s life has been marred by the recent loss of her mother (who died in an insane asylum), so she turned to drugs to cope and that didn’t turn out so well. She went to rehab but methadone wasn’t her thing. It hasn’t helped that her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), all but abandoned their mother’s care to her, returning too late to find the woman alive. No wonder the teen cracked without her Kuya around. So they’ve come to the family’s old, rustic cabin in the woods for an intervention. They’ve also enlisted the help of their childhood friends, the nurse Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), to join her at the family’s rustic cabin to help her overcome her doping demons, to wean the teen off them surrounded by the comfort of friends and, with the arrival of David and his girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), family.   After a flamboyant, stash-destroying ceremony and a speech worthy of group therapy where she swears off drugs for good, Mia quickly descends into every junkie’s personal hell of withdrawal. And then, after investigating some funny, rotting smell, and the finding of a profane book, the demons swiftly come. Your body is a grisly wonderland What I loved about the original “Evil Dead” trilogy was the lack of philosophizing about the ecology of devils or trying to discern their intent on humans. Evil exists. You set it loose, you got to kill it. Same here: nothing but a fight for survival and family. Raimi’s classics were built on both the absurd and the horrific. A natural side effect of blurring the two was comedy. It’s like death metal gained a sense of humor and learned to laugh at itself. Neither of the two themes on a very low-fi aesthetic back then could have conceivably stood on its own. But Raimi had a vision – one held together by the thinnest of plot and premise – AND he had a secret weapon: the charismatic Bruce Campbell. Without The Chin, those movies would have crumbled like a rotten zombie. His presence has so suffused the films that he carried it through two sequels. The soup of all that of course was what made that trilogy awesome. Its pop culture street cred has since grown so much that it’s infected other movies, a metaphor for 80s excess (See Jack Black as Barry in “High-Fidelity” pronounce it “a brilliant film. It's so funny, and violent, and the soundtrack kicks ass.”) amid the already gruesome excesses of other lurid B-horrors of the canon found in “Phantasm”, “Hellraiser”, or any of the early “Friday the 13th” instalments. Alvarez carries on this proud tradition. This is body horror done right. This is horror filmmaking chewing on the gristle of our nerves, marinated in the bloody history of Raimi’s trilogy, boiled in the kettle of an Age that has known the shadow of global terrorism. The demons themselves, you see, are masters of spiritual terrorism.   Raining blood, ectoplasm There is very little CGI here since the producers opted for more of an old-school analog approach. And it’s a perfect choice. With prosthetics, make-up, and performance artists, there is no cartoony blood speckling in balletic, Pollockian fashion, none of the perfect sheen or bull that digital FX often brings. When the blood does come it comes hard, in buckets. When a demon vomits ectoplasm it’s like a fire hydrant, a torrential burst of orange bile, full of sticky crumbs and bits.   Sure, I’ve got plot nitpicks. Like the disturbingly little amount of skin and sex in a young and virile cast (ignore me, I’ve got a crush on Jessica Lucas), plus a few of the scenarios that are supposed to be homages just come off like vintage throwbacks, worth nothing but nostalgia, without place in an intelligent, supernatural thriller of the post-noughties. I mean, c’mon, if people really didn’t want certain dangerous relics of summoning to be found you’d think they’d find the time to bury the darn things after wrapping it them in barbed wire? Still, for 98 percent of it, you can believe the hype. “This isn’t a jokey little horror movie,” Raimi warned. “It’s the ultimate experience in gruelling terror. And I dare you to see it.” Not without my chainsaw The mutilations are a pitch perfect wolf whistle that will have you writhing in your seat and moaning in discomfort. Even the instruments are complete. At one time or another you will see the following used on flesh: an electric steak knife, a Jeep, broken mirror glass, a shotgun, a nail gun, and the almighty chainsaw. It’s noteworthy that the actors playing Mia and David have real chemistry and, really, being the emotional core of the narrative they show how demons rely on deceit, duplicity, emotional blackmail, and all forms of spiritual terror to get what they want. Olivia, the nurse, also provides a moral compass, albeit an overbearing one, that leads them to actually stay in the cabin despite the weird stuff going down, but for sheer character the amateur occult enthusiast Eric is hands down my fave for physical hardiness and for playing the clueless stoner side of this infernal fiasco with such adorable stupidity that you can’t bring yourself to hate him even after everything.    Relentless and tactical, Alvarez’s style is part-homage and part-mindjack. There’s genius in pacing and misdirection here. You never actually know when the possessions will take place or be strong enough to drive one of the hapless victims to carve off an arm or gouge out an eye.   Add a couple of well-placed twists (which, okay, I won’t spoil) make this a must-see for any horror fan. But if you’re a Deadite like me, then this is a worthy addition to the canon that you will, I guarantee it, cherish along with all three movies that starred The Chin. It’s settled: you’re going to hell, you’re going to love it. — BM, GMA News "Evil Dead" has been rated R-18 With No Cuts by the MTRCB and opens on May 8 exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas. All photos courtesy of TriStar Pictures.