Movie Review: Evil Dead

The poster for Evil Dead hails it as the most terrifying film you will ever experience. The only thing terrifying about Evil Dead is that someone at Columbia Pictures gave the filmmakers millions of dollars to produce this abomination of a movie.

Evil Dead is essentially a 90-minute master thesis on everything that's wrong with the horror genre. The characters are idiotic and unlikable (I know this is a horror movie and the characters are bound to make some stupid choices, but the choices the characters make in this movie are just ridiculous) the acting and script are abysmal and it's not even close to scary, creepy, suspenseful or most importantly, entertaining. The filmmakers mistake jump scares and cheap gore as "terrifying" and leave everything else criminally underdeveloped. The beginning of the film tries to establish some type of feeble emotional backstory with the heroin-addicted heroine Mia (Jane Levy) and her brother David (Shiloh Hernandez), who wasn't there for when their mom died in a psych ward, but these "emotional" scenes are so poorly acted and conceived that its just laughable. After this relatively weak opening,  the film just spirals further and further down the tubes once it delves into the main storyline. Basically these 5 kids vacationing in a cabin summon a demon (who looks like the possessed girl in The Exorcist spoof in Scary Movie 2)  from a satanic book (which is bound in human flesh and filled with random evil images and warnings to not read, write or say any of the passages in it, but these meddling kids do it anyways!) they find in the basement of the cabin (which is riddled with an astronomical amount of dead cats hanging from the ceiling mind you) and it starts picking them off one by one. Despite all the stupidity that is present, there is not even a second that this film doesn't take itself extremely seriously. The filmmakers think if they shower blood at the screen (ironically during the finale it is literally raining blood,) it will excuse the moronic plot and unfathomable series of choices all of the characters make. If this film went in a more intentionally comedic a la The Cabin in the Woods or Drag Me to Hell, we could've been looking at a fucking great B-movie that was a whole lot of fun to watch. But instead of loading the film with a sense of self-aware badness and dark humor, we get a witless, stone-serious film that strives to be horrifying and just falls flat on its face. The only moment of the entire film that is effective is when at one point one of the main characters screams  "It was horrible, It was so horrible". That line of dialogue accurately sums up what I felt during the entire duration of the film so bravo to the screenwriters for at least getting about five seconds of this otherwise painful movie right. Evil Dead is amongst the worst movies I've ever had the misfortune of seeing in my life and it makes other recent horror remakes like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Thing look like genre-defining masterpieces. It's nothing more than a cheap attempt to shock the audience by displaying as much spraying blood and severed limbs on screen as humanly possible without establishing any type of legitimate story, entertainment value or characters that you actually give two shits about.  Garbage like this all but ensures that the horror genre is going from being on life support to completely flatlining.

1/5 Stars