Five friends head to a remote cabin, where the discovery of a Book of the Dead leads them to unwittingly summon up demons living in the nearby woods. The evil presence possesses them until only one is left to fight for survival.
Fede Alvarez's horror remake doesn't better the original, but is still satisfyingly gory.
There are some nice nods to the original (the demon-cam, a tooling-up sequence, the presence of a chain saw, a blue-shirted hero), but fans will bemoan the lack of black humour. Still, given that Raimi essentially remade The Evil Dead with Evil Dead II, we’ve always got that.
Fede Alvarez makes some plot and character changes, but is chiefly interested in gross-out gruesomeness. Lacking Raimi’s transgressive invention and wit, there really are some things that man should not meddle with.
Prepare yourself for a shock: a horror remake that, at its best, manages to recapture the original’s hardcore nastiness. It could certainly do with laughing at itself a bit more, though.
The characters are forgettable but the horror they suffer lingers in the memory, for good or ill.
The reality is, of course, that anyone who did turn up at such an unprepossessing, not to say uncomfortable, retreat would immediately turn around and find somewhere (anywhere) else to stay. And that's even before you smell the dead cats.
Like most remakes, Evil Dead makes a miserably weak argument for its own existence – especially when stacked against a superior original.
The film attempts to provide grounded motivations that don’t quite square up with the fact that idiotic horror movie behaviour (of the sort expertly skewered by The Cabin in the Woods) is still required to unleash hell.
Anonymous, forgettable and doesn't hold a candle to the brilliant original.
Despite its title, it’s very much alive – and really quite good.
It is nowhere near as creepy as the recent indie horror V/H/S, but it is a full-bloodedly grisly and macabre film that zaps over a few scares.
There's more slickness than imagination on display.
Fede Alvarez: How to remake a horror classic
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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