Evil Dead: a spectacular gore fest

Evil Dead Review

4 out of 5 stars

The new Evil Dead film is about as disgusting and visceral as a horror film can get away with being. In fact, seeing as the filmmakers had to cut a large amount of material to avoid an NC-17 rating, it’s fair to say this film stands right at the edge of going too far for the majority of its runtime.

It’s also one of the most fun, over-the-top horror films to come out in ages. With so many scary movies following the Paranormal Activity approach of “less is more,” it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a horror film that doesn’t hold anything back.

Evil Dead, a reboot of the 1981 original, starts off with a group of friends gathering at a cabin in the woods to help their junkie friend Mia (Jane Levy) go cold turkey.

As Mia goes through painful withdrawals, her friend Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) discovers an ancient book called the Necronomicon in the basement. After reading from the book, an evil spirit is unleashed. As a nightmarish series of events unfolds, the four friends are left to fight of the demonic force that has inhabited Mia’s soul.

A callback to the splatter flicks of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Evil Dead does everything it can to make the audience feel uncomfortable, something it succeeds more often than not. Once the film gets going, blood and gore cover every scene, with character deaths playing out as gruesome and often self-inflicted affairs.

Some may dismiss the violence in Evil Dead as nothing more than torture porn, the same found in the Saw series. However, this is a disservice to the stylized nature of the gore. Evil Dead always pushes things far enough past the realistic to keep things from becoming too disturbing. The camera work, instrumental stings and cartoonish levels of violence eventually hit a point where things simply become enjoyably ridiculous.

This isn’t to say that the film is incapable of scares, though. The film is full of suspense, and the initial discovery of how each character has been disfigured is always enough to make your stomach flip.

A large part of this comes from the production team’s dedication to using as little CGI as possible. There’s an added sense of realism to the proceedings when everything has been achieved through practical effects, and Evil Dead inspires the sense of wonder that many classic horror films could not.

If there’s a major problem with Evil Dead, it’s that the characters themselves rarely feel like fleshed-out characters. For example, Eric’s most defining quality is just how much physical abuse he can take without dying.

The one standout is Mia herself. Levy’s performance as both a strung-out junkie and the demonically-possessed Mia are stellar, making for a likable protagonist, even when she’s trying to kill the other characters.

Of course, at the end of the day, the kills are what a film like Evil Dead is built on. Fortunately, it’s full of great moments that’ll have you equally excited and nauseous. The weak of stomach need not apply, but those looking for a gore-fest need look no further.

Evil Dead is just a great horror film. Its story may be as old as the genre itself, but it makes up for it with creative kills and over-the-top gore. If nothing else, it brings some much needed color – namely buckets of blood red – back to big-screen horror.